‘How green are your pastures?’

Riccarton Park Function Centre,
Christchurch
NB: Delivered on Lianne Dalziel's behalf by Katie Kouloubrakis.

Thank you for inviting me to address your Conference today.

I have noted your Conference theme 'how green are your pastures’, but was disturbed to learn that I had been invited to 'offer the fertiliser for you to reach your pastoral potential’.

I hope that today has provided you with the opportunity to take time out, reflect on your own situations and share your experiences with others. Nowadays it is often only gatherings such as this which allow an opportunity for us to step outside our routine and take stock of our situation, be it personal, work or both. I’ve often found I leave such days feeling inspired, really motivated and encouraged, both from the energy of those around me, and from the speakers.

A feature of my portfolio in Women’s Affairs, and indeed those of Commerce and Small Business, is that I have the opportunity to meet so many talented women of all ages, backgrounds and interests. I never fail to be amazed by the energy and enthusiasm I come across. That enthusiasm is driving more women to set up their own businesses and to achieve senior positions in companies in what is still a fairly male sphere. At the same time though, many women, and (increasingly many men) are asking themselves about the costs of that success and how to ensure they can be successful at work while having a good balance in their lives.

This is the ‘how do we have it all and still have a life’ question that all motivated, active women struggle with – or to use the policy jargon, how do we attain and maintain work-life balance.

This is an important issue for women and I would like to spend much of this address talking about it, though I have to say at the outset, this will be a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ occasion, because I am far from having a good work-life balance in my own life. My average pile of weekly reading would put ‘War and Peace’ to shame. And finding the time for family and friends is dependent on their pro-activeness matching my good intentions.

The great American essayist and children’s writer E B White summed up this dilemma well. He said:

‘I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.’

Balancing work and the other aspects of our lives is something we all have to do on a daily basis – negotiating time and prioritising commitments – the results of the time-poor generation we seem to have become.

The State Services Commission recently defined work-life balance as being about creating a productive work culture where the potential for tensions between work and other parts of people’s lives is minimised.

This probably highlights the reality of spending more waking time with our work colleagues than with our families. However, hours worked is only one of the measures of work-life balance. The principal issue for most of us is more about the ability to match our work patterns to our lifestyles and life stages.

And women, the statistics tell us, do a great deal more juggling of responsibilities, undertake more unpaid work, and are still largely the primary carers in the home.

In commenting on the importance of the role of the Ministry of Women's Affairs, I have been highlighting the comments of one of the opposition MPs, who made this statement in support of their policy of disestablishing the Ministry:

The problem is that it doesn't do one thing for the woman who has to: get up early, get ready for work, get the children's breakfast, get them washed, dressed and their bags packed for school, drive them to school, get to work, work in her paid employment, rush home (having already arranged for the children to be collected), wash clothes, get sports clothes ready for children, oversee homework, cook dinner, do dishes, get children to bed and then spend quality time with her husband ...

It has always generated a laugh, because until we get to the end, we are being led to believe that there is no husband. This precisely defines the importance of talking about work-life balance in the context of the whole family, because the reality is that women still perform most of the childrearing and household duties, even when they too work fulltime.

In a strange way this advocate for shutting down the Ministry has explained why we need a Ministry that can ask hard questions like: why do some people only start talking about shared parenting when the relationship between the parents is over? Maybe we need to be reinforcing the message that when we asserted that 'girls can do anything', we didn't mean they had to do everything!

A Ministry of Social Development survey on Work, Family and Parenting uncovered disturbing news that, although almost everyone agreed that housework and childcare should be equally shared when both parents work, less than a third practiced what they preached on the housework and only half equally shared childcare responsibilities.

So how can a government deliver policies that encourage work-life balance, when genuine choices may not exist at home?

That same MSD survey found that many couples preferred the option they hadn't chosen or couldn't choose – so where both were in work, a third of those surveyed actually wanted one to be at home; whereas where one was at home, almost half of respondents wanted both to be at work. I think we need some more qualitative research to understand why this is – it cannot just be that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I suspect that it will depend entirely on the understanding of the parenting role in those formative years; how stay-at-home parents are seen by their family and friends; and the level of satisfaction parents derive from that, coupled with a consideration of the level of personal satisfaction and flexibility available in the workplace.

In my joint roles as Minister of Small Business and that of Women’s Affairs, I have taken an active interest in women in enterprise. Although the challenges and barriers these women face are often shared by men in business, this does not mean the impacts on men and women are necessarily the same. A recent Women in Enterprise study told us that nearly half of self-employed women work part-time, compared with only 11 percent of men; women in small businesses have significantly lower incomes than men; and are less likely to be employers. This reflects that many women in small business are reluctant to grow the business at the expense of lifestyle and family commitments. It's very much 'family first' for these women.

Likewise, a recent State Services survey on Career Progression and Development found that balancing work and personal lives has become increasingly important to the Public Service in attracting and retaining talent. In their 2005 survey, both women and men employed in this sector were more likely to cite a perceived clash between work and family as a deterrent to career progression.

The survey found that flexible working hours were highly valued by both men and women, but again it confirmed that women were still taking on most of the home responsibilities.
There’s no doubt that the pace of life has become more and more frenetic and with this comes, for many, an imbalance or distortion in priorities, with work taking up more of our time now than ever before.

Unpaid work, particularly for women, is a significant percentage of this. The 1998/99 time use survey carried out by the Department of Statistics and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs showed that almost 70 percent of women’s work time is unpaid, compared to 40 percent of men’s work time. And when simultaneous activities were included in that analysis, women’s total work time was found to be considerably higher than men’s.

The government has developed a range of policies and set up a number of taskforces, action plans and steering groups to get on top of these issues. What we have recognised through these processes is the importance of ensuring that women have real choices. I believe our role is to identify and eliminate barriers to women achieving their full potential; it is not to tell individual women what choices they should make about work or their families. Every person’s circumstances are different and each of us has to make that decision for ourselves and for our families.

The bottom line is that when the children have left home, women who have not kept their qualifications and skills up-to-date or remained connected to the paid workforce or developed their own business opportunities are going to be significantly disadvantaged and unlikely to achieve their full potential. The longer they are disconnected from the workforce the harder it is for them to re-enter anywhere near where they left off and the evidence shows that it is worse for women than men.

It is very important that women understand these realities, because (and I am paraphrasing someone else's observation here), the glass ceiling may have been broken in places, but the floor remains extremely sticky.

It's one of the downsides of the magic moment in history that has now passed where women apparently ran the country, because women held all the senior positions. But that was never more than that, because the truth is that in looking down the layers, the women are not coming through.

It is one of the reasons why we see so few women on company boards – only 7 percent of the directors of our top 100 listed companies are women. There are many reasons for that, and a lot of it has to do with shoulder-tapping people you have worked with at a governance or senior management level – it's a self-perpetuating model.

My own view is that this is a waste of talent. There are aspects of women’s style in management and leadership that this country needs. Women’s ability to network and multi-task, together with the unique perspectives they bring to decision-making are not only valuable at the boardroom table but also within the management team. Research tends to suggest that diversity in decision-making makes for stronger company performance, which makes sense if you think about it. If everyone comes from the same background and essentially shares similar perspectives, then it is hard to imagine that they would be alert to all the potential risks and opportunities that a more diverse group would identify.

This is just one area of the economy where women's participation is lower than it should be. And this is not about tokenism; I firmly believe women's participation is good for business and good for the country.

The private sector tells us that suitably qualified women aren't available, but we have proven that isn't the case. The government uses the Ministry of Women's Affairs nominations database to find appropriately qualified women for public sector boards. Through the use of this resource we've managed to get female participation on public sector boards up to 41 percent.

Although the skills sets may not be absolutely aligned with the needs of the private sector, there's a world of difference between 7 percent and 41 percent.

On that note, can I conclude by saying I hope that you have found today worthwhile; I encourage you to more often take that time out for yourself and for your own development. I feel a bit of a fraud saying this, but I’d like to hope that we’re never too busy to step back to reflect on where we are and where we’d like to be.

Thank you.