Men need to work from home

OPINION: At the weekend, the Gillard government moved on one of the greatest challenges facing Australian families. It is a revolutionary opportunity for our first female Prime Minister, but the approach lacks vision of the social transformation at stake.

In the Prime Minister's National Press Club speech, she described the single greatest challenge facing Australians as the pressurised life of modern families. She pointed to increased commuting times, the dual demands of caring for elderly parents and young children, and rising utility bills and cost of living as creating a ''pressurised'' life.

Those with long memories will notice the similarities with John Howard's ''barbecue stopper'' of 2002, where he described balancing work commitments with family responsibilities as the great challenge of the times. For more than a decade both major parties have been identifying it as the No. 1 issue, but no solutions have been forthcoming.

The problems of work/life balance are partly about lengthening work hours and longer commute times. But they are also a legacy of the changing roles of women. Once upon a time men did the paid work and women did society's unpaid work. When women entered the paid workforce our consumption expectations increased and so did our mortgages. Now, for many families, the response to increasing financial pressures is for mum to work more hours.

But the problem of unpaid work remains, and is growing as people are caught looking after both elderly parents and young children. The crunch is hitting women the hardest. It is putting them under enormous strain, and the whole family is feeling the pressure.

There are some small steps being made. The government has moved to strengthen the rights of employees with caring responsibilities to ask to work flexibly.

This is a start, but setting it up as a right that a subsection of employees can impose on employers, gets the framing of the debate all wrong. There is an opportunity here to deliver huge benefits to employers and a wide range of employees.

There is a growing body of research that finds when people are able to telecommute and work flexibly they are able to combine their paid and unpaid work commitments more efficiently. People report higher levels of happiness and wellbeing even while increasing their output.

The key to the efficiency gains is that the old eight-hour day is an anachronism of the industrial age. Biologically, people don't sit down and work vigorously between nine and five. Many are at their most productive either early in the morning or late at night. We also don't work solidly, tending to have bursts and lulls.

Telecommuters are able to harness these rhythms much more efficiently, and integrate them with their unpaid work. It is efficient to follow up intense intellectual work by mulling it over doing the dishes.

These days a lot of unpaid work is also time-critical rather than time-intensive. It is about being there at the right time for the school pick-up, the medical appointment, when the plumber is coming, or to put on the washing.

Government needs to take a much more visionary approach, and tackle the great ''barbecue stopper'' by setting targets for big employers with large deskbound workforces to have 50 per cent of their male workforce working in the office two to three days a week and telecommuting the remaining days.

The major barriers to take-up are cultural. It is only by managers having firsthand experience of the productivity gains that it will lose its reputation as the slack option. It is also only by having a critical mass of senior men doing it that it will become acceptable for everyone.

Telecommuting won't work for everyone, or for all businesses. But getting those for whom it does work off the roads would benefit us all.

Telecommuting is more than an answer to a modern stress. It is also a historic opportunity to improve the status of women. The division between paid and unpaid work has been the basis of the diminished status of women for more than 200 years.

Pre-industrialisation, men and women often worked side by side in cottage industries, while children ran around, being attended to when necessary. There was a status hierarchy between men and women, but in some places at least, it was not as intense as it would become.

Industrialisation and the emergence of wage labour created a distinction between paid and unpaid labour. Men had to leave the home to do the paid labour, while women remained in the home to do the unpaid labour. In a world where money is power this was devastating for the standing of women.

New cultural norms began to emerge that rationalised this division of roles and described women as inferior. The decline in the status of women was so marked that aristocrats stopped educating their daughters.

The new technologies overcome the need for paid and unpaid work to occur in different locations. It means we no longer need a division of labour where one person does the paid work and the other does the unpaid work. The implications are revolutionary, if we have the foresight and the courage to grasp them.

This opinion piece was first published in the The Age.

Dr Lindy Edwards is a senior lecturer in the international and political studies program at UNSW and author of 'The Passion of Politics'.