The year we all became humans — at work

International Women’s Day (IWD) 2021

Let’s start by calling it like it is: the last year has not been a good one for women. The UNDP has just released a report reflecting on progress in gender equality, and concluded:

“Even the limited gains made in the past decades are at risk of being rolled back”

Here in Australia, we’re seeing women disproportionately affected by unemployment, health-related restrictions and other financial impacts, while there’s also a marked increase in family violence.

But this isn’t a very inspiring IWD message. So I’d like to turn to my personal experience as a feminist and a woman and a mother and an executive in the VPS, where I can see some positive changes.

The year of the pandemic

When I look back on my experience of the last year, my main takeaway is that this has been the year where our full life came to work. This is the year that our family and/or pets and/or deliveries and/or the construction work next door became fully apparent to our colleagues. Where first we tried to pretend that we were holding everything together, and then we realised that we were all pretending, and things got a lot more relaxed.

Fighting children, hungry pets and enthusiastic delivery people helped us all becoming a lot more human to each other. It’s hard to take yourself (or anyone else) too seriously when your video conference is interrupted by a full-screen live action cat’s butt, or when you’re trying to make a critical point with someone yelling “GIVE ME BACK MY LIGHTSABER!!!!” in the background.

And I think this is really important, because this year was the year that our real life — our home and personal lives — the traditional domains of carers and women — became visible and legitimised. When we were all stuck at home working remotely, women and men had to deal with the complexity — whether that was managing homeschooling or worrying about vulnerable friends and relatives or the pervasive feeling of isolation.

Working in teams became as much about keeping an eye on each other and checking in on how things were going as about ‘getting the work done’ — because we finally realised that all the home stuff was just as relevant as anything else to working together successfully. We became human to each other in the workplace — allowing better trust and reciprocity, because you can empathise, and you know everyone’s feeling the same pressure.

Remote policymaking — remember the stick insect

This was also the year that remote working helped to even the playing field, providing equal voice and access for those of us with health issues and disabilities, or living outside metropolitan areas. Working from home helped us to more easily juggle work and caring responsibilities, allowing us to reconcile our work with other commitments without feeling like we were drawing a target on our back that questioned our professional dedication.

These are all material steps forward, but in the broader context of women’s unemployment and family violence, remote working is undoubtedly the privilege of a relatively small and already privileged group of white collar workers.

However it’s critically important, because for better or for worse, this is where policy is designed and delivered.

And policy is what changes how our society deals with the vulnerable, with social and economic disadvantage, with family violence, with gender equality. More diverse voices, more acknowledgement of the challenges and opportunities of home life, more visibility of family and caring responsibilities, better understanding of how all of this impacts on everyone’s ability to work and participate in society — these are all good things for policymaking.

That’s because it’s what keeps reminding us that we’re all humans — and we need to always remember it’s other humans who are at the receiving end of our policy. A colleague has spent a lot of time dealing with correspondence around the COVID-19 restrictions, and the impact that they’ve had on people along the way. As she put it — when someone says that their stick insect died because they didn’t get home in time to feed it because they were waiting to cross the border — “Don’t write a letter that says ‘Section 3.2 of the regulations allowed us to close the border’. Say ‘I’m sorry your stick insect died because we had to close the border’”.

So I’m going to say that yes, we still have a long way to go, and yes, it’s hard work, and yes, the outlook is challenging. But if we can bring more of what makes us human into the workplace, if we can start integrating relationships and emotional intelligence into our thinking, if we can help reconcile the traditionally separated and denigrated domain of home and relationships, then our ability to deliver real change is only going to improve.

Now if I could just get the cat off my lap, I could go and get some coffee.