Unsurprisingly, one of the things to come out of the recent Jobs and Skills Summit was a greater emphasis on women in the workforce. Given the liberal zeitgeist, the ALP’s leftist bona fides, and the summit’s feminine majority – aims to improve the female participation rate were to be expected. 

Such sentiment is nearly ubiquitous and was thus well and truly foreshadowed.

As KPMG Chief Alison Kitchen commented: a key priority was to ‘move the dial’ on gender equity issues. A stance which may include ‘better support for people with caring responsibilities’ and ensuring that ‘workplaces were safe for women’.

Happily for Kitchen et al, such pre-summit wishes were soon to become post-summit outcomes. As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese outlined, his government, working with industry, unions, and other stakeholders, has agreed to 36 immediate initiatives of which priorities for women are paramount. 

Inter alia, the Albanese government will ‘ensure full employment, productivity growth, and equal opportunities for women are central objectives’ while seeking to ‘make unpaid parental leave more flexible’ and to improve ‘access to jobs and training pathways for women’.

Yet such intent is merely the latest in a long line of efforts towards even greater liberalisation and the further tilting women away from their traditional roles and moving them en masse into the labour market – as well as the football field, the boxing ring, and the tattoo parlour…

Attempts to address ‘workplace gender equality’ and to close the ‘gender pay-gap’ are now of particular prominence. According to the left, the mere existence of such phenomena is proof enough of some form of misogynistic conspiracy; and not the more mundane fact that such things are largely a reflection of differing natural desires and proclivities acting alongside our innate physiological differences. This is also not to mention the nigh-forgotten fact that women need time off work for their role in that now unfashionable act of perpetuating the species.

There are plenty of so-called positive laws that operate with utter disregard for underlying natural reality. Our entire political situation is reminiscent of remarks made by Allan Bloom in his Closing of the American Mind where he quipped that the ‘law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk’.

An example would be Australia’s two most-populous states and their decision to expand early childcare. Under this dispensation, three and four-year-olds in NSW and Victoria will be granted an additional year of ‘pre-kinder’ paid for by the state. The rationale for this is economic. As Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews put it: boosting the number of women at work is ‘perhaps the biggest lever that we can pull, the biggest contribution that we can make to economic prosperity’.

Yet for all our economic reductionism, the last thing we need is more women in the workplace. It’s a sad indictment on a culture that this careerist movement has received such little push-back. 

The primary reason is demographic. For the uninformed, Australia, like most of the developed world, is faced with a rapidly ageing society and drastic demographic decline. Our fertility rate is below replacement for nigh on fifty years and currently situated at a record-low 1.58. A figure which, as Canadian commentator Mark Steyn notes, is close to ‘a point from which no society has ever recovered’ and which coincides with an increase in the female participation rate from less than a third in the late 60s to the 50 per cent seen today. 

With our wider anti-natalism and the catastrophising rhetoric around over-population failing to take account of any nuance and the imbalance between an ageing and depopulating developed world and a fecund and unsustainable developing one, as the demographer Paul Morland notes. 

Trends that are not unrelated to the Australian political state and that other major area of the summit: immigration. With our immigration dependency yet again confirmed by the decision to increase our permanent-migration intake to almost 200,000 per annum, largely due to our dearth of workers. 

What we have thus witnessed is a seemingly unironic spectacle whereby a coterie of left-liberal, and – as per trends – often childless, women have had to increase our immigrant intake in light of our lack of children. To evoke Mark Steyn again, our immigration dependency is now a foregone conclusion as our migrants are ‘the children we couldn’t be bothered to have for ourselves’.

With another reason we don’t need any more women at work the damage this causes to children themselves. In a stance that is emblematic of our economism, our focus on men and women as purely economic – and not biological – entities is one that is entirely oblivious to our mammalian nature.

As the American writer Mary Eberstadt observes, the removal of children from their parents, particularly their mothers, is correlated with a range of longer-term maladies: including ‘mental … and behavioural problems, sexually transmitted diseases [and] educational backwardness’.

The removal of young children, in particular, is profoundly problematic. According to Eberstadt: ‘the more time children spent in any of a variety of nonmaternal care arrangements across the first 4.5 years of life, the more externalising problems [they] manifest’ – with ‘more time in care’ highly predictive of anti-social behaviour like ‘assertiveness, disobedience, and aggression’. 

We are left with an absurdity whereby the decision to remove three and four-year-olds from their parents, send them into the arms of the State, and march their mothers off to the workplace is one which ‘stacks up’ economically yet has little regard for any of its wider effects like a scarcity of children, a continued dependence on immigration, and all the attendant issues arising from parental absence.

Yet perhaps most importantly, a greater role in the workforce isn’t wanted by women themselves. Given their prominence in all this, one may have thought that women’s wishes may have been considered. Yet whenever they’re asked, a majority of women express little desire to devote themselves to full-time work nor do they see in it any real benefit. In a 2015 Pew poll, for instance, only one in five working mothers ‘said that having a full-time working mother is ideal for young children’. 

American author Helen Andrews notes in a brutal broadside against feminism, ‘only around 5 per cent of women say they never want children’; while the number who ‘reach old age and feel satisfied with their life, being just a girl boss with no children to keep them company, is even lower’. This is not to mention other complicating factors like the tendency for women to avoid marrying men who don’t make as much money or who aren’t as educated. 

What is needed then is an avoidance of the glib sloganeering offered by the Left in events like the Jobs and Skills Summit. Akin to their other platitudes like ‘diversity is a strength’ or ‘fit at any weight’, an easy rhetoric around ‘gender equity’ is no match for a deeper understanding of such matters and improved public policy. With policies that strengthen Australian families and the nation-state, and which encourage real human flourishing – or what Aristotle called ‘Eudaimonia’ – that to which we should aspire. 

In this regard, what Helen Andrews recommends for the Americans – reducing the amount of people entering tertiary education; promoting male-dominated industries; and stopping subsidies for childcare – is the path that we too should follow. 

Which is not, to confirm, a desire for a total return to the 1950s nor to turn women into second-class citizens. It is to simply shift the dial back towards a healthy middle ground and away from the excesses of our liberalism. It’s a stance that seeks to recapture the centrality of family to personal and national health and that encourages men to ‘man up’ and make real commitments. 

If not, then the vision for our immediate future is far from salutary. It’s one of ongoing ALP-led summits in which the dwindling remains of our childless left-liberal elite are having to continually increase our immigration intake to be the children we couldn’t be bothered to have.