Success or failure #2

Yesterday I wrote about some information I had researched, regarding to the failure of people – women - over the age of 50. This morning I continued with that, and found many other websites which provided me with more information which I found relevant.

Clarissa Bye wrote for The Advertiser (Daily Telegraph) on 29 April about Ageing women in financial strife the new face of Australian homelessness. She wrote about lack of super, casual jobs and high-priced housing, and spoke about Dr Ruth Skilbeck, a “published author with a PhD in literature [who] went from a Mosman residence to being penniless and unable to find work.” She said that “government stats are showing half a million women will fall into housing stress over the next two decades”. I know about this because that happened for me – and I'm 60. She also said that “26 per cent of people living alone report feeling lonely often, compared with 16 per cent of people living with others”.

There were some stats added to this article which made me feel very vulnerable:

• women over 55 are the fastest growing group of people experiencing homelessness
• 59 per cent of Australians seeking help from homelessness services are women
• women over 50, after many years of loyal service, are made redundant and can no longer afford to pay high private rentals
• 700,000 Australian women over 45 are single, earn less than the median income and don’t own their own home, and
• 500,000 women are likely to fall into housing stress over the next two decades

These were her own stats. I didn't make them up, but they relate to so many people like me.

Nick Evershed wrote for The Guardian about Australia's divorce rates: the real statistics (28 May 2013). I already knew about these. My ex left me in January 2013 – no real reason. Evershed said “New figures from the Australian Institute of Family Studies have shown a big increase in people divorcing after 20 years or more of marriage”; for me, it was under 10 years.

Evershed's points included:

• the age that people get divorced has increased dramatically
• the median age of divorce for men is at 44.5 in 2011, and women are similarly high at 41.7 - the highest since 1970
• 12% of children were with only one parent by 2010 , and
• unmarried couples cohabiting is 27% - more than twice as likely to break up

Professor Edwards for ANZSOG Institute for Governance, 26 July 2013, wrote Not Yet 50/50: Barriers to the Progress of Senior Women in the Australian Public Service Report. Her report seemed very much similar to others which spoke of barriers to women. She spoke well, but what she said could be filed away by men who didn't really care about the women in their industry.

Her points included that:

• men were unlikely to look beyond women’s duties as mothers
• women pointed to exclusion from networks, personal style differences and male stereotyping as well as family-related barriers and a lack of confidence, and
• different leadership styles can impact on a woman's career progression

Professor Edwards' report is available as a pdf if you would like to download it.

In 2011 – before Professor Edwards' report - Mark Evans wrote that “[m]embers of the Institute were concerned that data on the representation of women in the ‘most’ senior echelons of the public service in Australia showed a decline despite the election of Australia’s first woman prime minister and governor-general.” 

He wrote this year When Meritocracy fails females: a culture shift to 50/50 (8 March 2017) for Broad Agenda. The following points were his own comments from his article from this year about how women fit in:

• Competing priorities/family responsibilities hinder women from taking up demanding leadership roles.
• Negative male perceptions of a woman’s ability to lead impede women’s progression into leadership roles
• Workplace structures and cultures hamper women’s progress by distilling processes of unconscious bias that afford comparative advantage to men with the requisite attributes.
• Workplace cultures and practices undermine the self-confidence and self-belief of women in seeking career advancement.

Extremely sad... or frustrating. Women have the right to believe they can move up in the “male management” as they fit, but too often women don't for... what reason? Meritocracy? Motherhood? Or men rule?

Has it changed now? Will it change?

Accumulating poverty? Women’s experiences of inequality over the lifecycle was a report written by principal author Somali Cerise and her group for the Australian Human Rights Commission in September 2009. This report looked primarily at superannuation, and how women get so much less than men – and why. The report said that “[i]nstead of accumulating wealth through the retirement income system as intended, due to experiences of inequality over the lifecycle, women are more likely to be accumulating poverty”, which, on reading, would make women feel pretty frustrated, yet most men feel good for how well they did. So why are men, at retirement (65+), sitting on more money than women? Is this still going on? It's now 8 years since this report!

Max Opray, in his article Govt plan for older workers falls short (29 October 2015) said “The employment situation only got worse for mature-age workers after the launch of the program – in the year to January 2015, there were 80,000 unemployed Australians aged 55 and over, an increase of 12 per cent over the year before.”

In 2013 I received my Grad Dip OHS which I had spent two and a half years studying for. I was 56 then; now I'm 60. Sometimes I feel grateful that I am on DSP because of my stroke – and I have no other income because I can't work now. Yet other times I think I am no different than many other women who are old and unable to get a job. Part of the 12% increase, maybe.

Women over 50 can work if they find decent work. 

Maybe you can help us.