By Beatrice Faust,
The Weekend Australian, March 15-16, 1997, p 23.

Talking to young women about feminism is like telling young children there's no Father Christmas. One finds in youth a dangerous excess of hope over experience. Louise Savage, a Paralympics gold medallist and one of Cosmopolitan magazine's 30 most successful Australian women under 30, is quoted as saying that she does not see gender as an issue: "There are fewer of us girls but we get equal prize money most of the time." Billie Jean King, who fought vigorously for sexual equality in tennis would say "fewer" and "most of the time" are just not good enough.

Very few young women have the life experience to interpret and respond to alarm bells in politics. Many women under 30 have no responsibility for children and few are responsible for elderly parents.

In 1994, the median age for first births within marriage was 28.5 years, the fertility rate for teenagers was half the rate it had been in 1964 and the trend for late motherhood was strengthening.

Only 17 per cent of women under 35 were principal carers for parents. In the week when feminists were getting ready to celebrate International Women's Day 1997, the Department of Finance announced plans to cut childcare funding and increase the Medicare levy, drug prices and medical costs for the elderly. Given that women are still the prime carers for children and old people and, therefore, the biggest users of the health system, these cuts are women's issues. Young women speak carelessly about business left unfinished by second-wave feminists, ignoring government action that constantly erodes their successes.

Older feminists cannot hold the line without support from the under- 30's--yet many young women are so naive that if you spit in their face they'll say it's raining.

Under-30's are mostly too young to have encountered the glass ceiling and too uninformed to appreciate the structural causes of unequal pay. Between 1984 and 1994, adult female full-time earnings rose from 79 per cent of male earlings to 82 per cent, but in 1995 only 54 per cent of female employees were permanent full-time, compared with 81 per cent of males. Part-time employment may suit women who are full-time mothers and houswives, but it does not lead to equal pay, holiday pay, sick pay or superannuation.

Also in the week before IWD, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released Professor Leonie Still's report, Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors: Barriers to the Careers of Women in the Australian Finance Industry. She found that women were being kept in marginal positions and that talented women who had hit the glass ceiling were leaving because they were frustrated at watching inferior men being promoted above them. This process began around 1970, when equal pay was clearly inevitable. The banks began restructuring to lock women into lower-level jobs so that they would be excluded from equal pay because they would not be doing equal work.

This discriminatory tradition has survived deregulation. Promoting second-rate men over first-rate women is poor management of human resources and it is happening at a time when Australia needs all the talent it can get to meet the challenges of globalisation.

Where were Cosmo's girls when the International Commission of Jurists held their recent conference, Women and the Rule of Law? When lawyers begin to address the issue of gender bias, we may be sure that the problems are significant. The judges discussed inequality in the distribution of legal aid, cuts in aid funding and male supremacism pervading the legal system.

While young women enjoy the achievements of my generation of feminists, these achievements are being dismantled by federal and State governments. The Affirmative Action Agency, never strong, is no longer allowed to publicise which companies are disobeying the law in regard to women's employment, promotion and procedures to ensure a women-friendly workplace. Funds for the Office for the Status of Women have been slashed. When Kathy Townsend left the office and Sue Walpole resigned as federal sex discrimination commissioner, they were not replaced.

I'm delighted that young women are enjoying their inheritance but if they don't learn the meaning of Realpolitik they won't enjoy it for long. Their daughters will have to rediscover feminism. because there is no Father Christmas.

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