I was fascinated by reports on a government study of Australian women (the phrasing I mention appears to come from the study, as I saw much the same elsewhere)
The Federal Minister assisting the Prime Minister on Women’s Issues, Kay Patterson, will release the research on 19,000 Australian men and women, which compares women’s lives to 10 years ago.
And as Tanya Nolan reports, it paints a picture of women as being increasingly lonely and unhealthy.
TANYA NOLAN: She used to be in her early thirties and married with children. Now she’s pushing 37, is likely to be single, with one or two offspring.
I am most miffed about this. The average woman, it appears, has aged about four years in the last decade[1]. I, on the other hand, have aged exactly 10 years. Whatever she is taking to achieve this time dilation, I want some of it.
fn1. I won’t even ask what has happened to her spouse and some of her children.
John Quiggin 
Must be the beard.
And the large fraction of a second child that the average woman had ten years ago has become a smaller fraction of a second child. Can this be reconciled with the laws of thermodynamics?
And having offspring, of course, is much different to having children…
Or to quote (was it?) George Negus many years ago pointing viewers towards a paddock. “Last year, these cattle were sheep”.
Your average woman has eaten those other children out of frustration….
I know – let’s throw everybody over 75 off the age pension to everybody over 75. It’ll save the government money, and I’m sure all the pensioners will be reconciled to it when Mr Howard points out that “under my government, the average age pensioner has actually got younger”.
If I comment here, I demonstrate I am innumerate. Instead, I prefer to demonstrate, I am illiterate.
I liked SBS’s intro to this story last night (approx):
“.. and today a new report on the status of women in Australia has found they are fat, frigid and forty ..”
Cheeky ethnics.
This kind of thing comes up all the time in “proving” that reforms help farmers, forgetting that casualties drop out of the statistical base (“survivor bias”). Just the other day the Australian had an article suggesting that farmers with less than some low income shouldn’t be counted, since they all had part time town jobs – forgetting that these same farmers used not to, and discarding them loses historical comparability to survivor bias just as much as dropping those who have been driven off the land does.
�.. and today a new report on the status of women in Australia has found they are fat, frigid and forty ..�
How about treating this nasty piece of “government research” seriously, John, and using your admirable analytical skills to tell us how this so-called research has been spun to a gutless media in support of Howard’s vicious social engineering against single and working women.
A fair point, Grace, though most of the media reports I’ve seen so far have been too silly to support anything much. I’m hoping we can just laugh this one off the news pages.
I’ll have a go at Howard’s social agenda soon, and try to tie this into my long-promised big post on Industrial Relations and working life.
John,
Perhaps your discussion could include answering the question of why the only country in the developed world in which these numbers are going the other way is the USA, where social engineering by the government and industrial relations has been steadily wound back over the last 30 or so years.
Andrew Reynolds, there is no compelling evidence of the divergence that you claim. Whether or not, by comparison with Australia, the United States is blessedly free of the malign influence of “social engineering”, the outcomes are remarkably similar. Consider the following:
“The annual U.S. birth rate—the number of births each year– has been dropping. In 2002 it was 13.9 per 1000 women, the lowest birthrate since the national birth rate became available in 1909. The most recent peak in the annual birth rate came in 1990, with 16.7 births per 1000 women in that year. The declining the birth rate can be seen especially among teenagers and women in their 20s and early 30s. The birth rate of women between the ages of 35 and 44 is increasing and that of women over 45 has been stable.”
http://www.crosscurrents.hawaii.edu/uswork_sub_e.asp?theme=women&page=7&lan=eng
According to the ABS the crude birth rate in Australia in 2000 was 13.00, hardly a startling difference between Australia and the US.
And what differences there were may be more than explained by the high (though falling) rate of teenage, extranuptial pregnancy rates in the US.
Perhaps your admiration of the United States has tipped uncomfortably close to being a case of delusional intuition.
Andrew, I’m unclear which numbers you are referring to. Birth rates?
In late 2003 I researched ABS statistics on the work and family choices of Australian women in the 25-34 age group over the period from 1974 to 2003. The trends were rather interesting. From the mid-1970s to about 1990, there was a trend for the proportion of stay-at-home mothers in the age cohort to fall and the proportion of working mothers and workers without children to increase. Since the early 1990s (which is about when the trend to labour-market deregulation got going in earnest via the shift to enterprise bargaining) this has changed. The trend has been for the proportion of stay-at-home mothers in the cohort to continue falling, for the proportion of working mothers to decrease from the peak of 1989-90, and for workers with no children to continue increasing to be almost 50% of the cohort.
Also, this period covers the tenure of the Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard governments. The rate of increase in labour market participation in the 25-34 cohort was fastest under Hawke, slowest under Fraser and Keating, and second-fastest under Mr Family Values Howard.
What does this mean? Firstly, one thing which is right in front of our noses but is often not noticed in this kind of discussion is that the work and family decisions made by women, like those of men, are critically affected by the state of the economy and the impact of the long-run tendencies of capitalism on society and culture. Thus a government which presides over a long period of fairly rapid economic growth cannot avoid increasing women’s participation in the labour market, no matter what its ideological commitment to traditional gender roles.
As we have seen in many parts of the world, when a socially conservative government attempts to valorise women’s traditional roles as wives, mothers and carers at the same time as capitalism is drawing women into the market-commodity economy as producers and consumers in record numbers, the main effect is to increase the personal and social opportunity cost of childbearing and parenting, and to cause younger women to opt in increasing numbers for the labour market rather than the labour ward.
What is the equivalent among bilbies..Is there fertility rate on the drop or what ? Has chocolatification effected them ?
Hmm, I understood that the US birth rate had increased to replacement over the last few years – see here for example. I am not sure if this is subscriber only, so I will post an extract. Their source is Eurostat and the World Bank.
Andrew, the following link sheds more light on this issue:
http://genderstats.worldbank.org/genderRpt.asp?rpt=basic&cty=USA,United%20States&hm=home2
However, the fertility rate in the US is affected by two other factors, one of which is endemic and the other one of which is much more significant in the US than in other developed countries:
1. High rates of immigration by Latin-speaking people from Central and Southern America, who tend to continue the more conservative/traditional gender/family/reproductive behaviours of their countries of origin after they arrive in the US. One set of US government fertility statistics I have seen disaggregated fertility rates for Latinos from those of other white Americans and African-Americans. Both non-Latino whites and African Americans had below-replacement fertility rates comparable to those of Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
2. The highest rate of teenage childbirth in the OECD – 50 per 1,000 women aged 15-19, compared to around 20-30 per 1,000 in other English-speaking countries, and below 10 per 1,000 in continental Europe. This is more significant than one might expect from calculating the direct contribution of teenage births to overall fertility. Generally speaking there is a strong correlation between the age at which a woman has her first child and the total number of children she will have; the earlier the first child, the larger the family. It logically follows that all else being equal, countries with higher rates of teenage motherhood would tend to have a higher percentage of large families, which in turn contribute disproportionately to the overall fertility rate. For some reason this aspect doesn’t attract much attention in debates about fertility and demography.