‘Equality of parenting is the greatest remaining barrier to equality between the sexes’ claimed Pru Goward in The Age (11 August 2003). Having recently read The End of Equality—Anne Summers’ lament to the deplorable level of progress made towards equality between women and men in Australia—I still see an astounding number of obstacles in the way. The list makes for depressing reading: unequal rates of pay; social policy skewed against working mothers; increasing rates of domestic violence; an inadequate child care system; the vast under-representation of women at executive and board level of almost every major company and the largely ineffective representation of women by women in federal and state parliaments.
In the face of these many issues, equality of parenting has received little media attention. It is as if there is no further progress to be made in the movement—started in the 1970s—towards the greater involvement of fathers in the care of children. Certainly huge inroads were made into the remarkably durable belief that only a mother could properly care for young children. In 1979 the Family Court cast aside the assumption in favour of the biological mother which had operated in custody cases finding, with a somewhat ill-founded optimism, that ‘there has come a radical change in the division of responsibilities between parents’ (Gronow v. Gronow). As commentators noted at the time (and many more have pointed out since) the real picture was that despite the ‘new’ paradigm of fatherhood, women maintain responsibility for the majority of household tasks including the care of children, even when employed outside the home.
Nonetheless the profile of the father had shifted—the role of fathers in the care of children had increased in importance. The reality of the situation was that while many men subscribed to the new archetype of fatherhood, most continued in their role as provider. As Goward noted in her article, the work of raising children falls heavily, and in many cases solely, upon women. Mr Mom, or even a modified part-time version of him, is most certainly the exception not the rule.
Many barriers have remained in the way of a truly shared parenting role, not the least of which is the structure of the workplace and current social policy. Frank Castles (Eureka Street, April 2004) notes that Australian social and public policy is anachronistically and unfairly geared towards a family comprised of a male breadwinner and female homemaker. Goward also