Helen Dalley-Fisher is a Convenor for the Equality Rights Alliance and says there’s still the view in workplaces that childcare is a woman’s job, leading to discrimination through unconscious bias.
"The big problem we have with situations where somebody is made redundant or experiences some other detriment when they come back from looking after a child or a baby, is that it's really hard to tell whether or not the person is experiencing discrimination or not, you can have quite genuine redundancies occurring where the person genuinely no longer has a job. But there's always a risk sitting there, that unconscious bias is affecting the decision about who is losing the job. The person who is off caring for a child isn't in the workplace proving themselves. And then you have managers making decisions about which person within a particular class of employees should be made redundant, who might be starting to experience the effects of unconscious bias, where they are thinking to themselves that the work done by a woman is not actually as good as the work done by a man. It's an unconscious process."
The President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Michele O'Neil says Australia's parental leave system needs work, and that there are examples in other countries that show that when men take as much time off as women, there's less discrimination and bias.
