A really good husband: work/life balance, gender equity and social change.

In contemporary developed countries there is still massive gender imbalance in domestic labour. Aggregate and individual change has occurred over the decades, but less than was expected, and change in men's domestic work has practically stalled (Dempsey 1997, Baxter 2002). There is a stony inevitability about women's greater load of housework and childcare, that makes a striking contrast with the public world of 'equal citizenship' and market 'choice'. Women appear to have choices, and work/life balance policies are supposed to increase their options. But some options are hardly ever taken.

'Work/life balance' is now a live theme in social policy, generating considerable public debate, research and policy innovation (Pocock 2003). In this paper I explore particularly its links with issues of gender justice. In the first section I ground the approach in a historical view of gender relations. This perspective indicates a need for situated studies of work/life balancing, which I attempt in the second part of the paper. In the third section I discuss the implications of work/life-balance research for gender equity strategies.

The notion of 'gender justice' is itself complex and contested; I don't propose to explore the definition in depth, but a preliminary comment may be useful. Any concept of social justice involves a generalized appeal to equality as the criterion of fairness. However the realization of fairness in gender relations is specific; gender is only one sphere in what Walzer (1983) called 'complex equality'. Within this sphere, equality, may be achieved by reducing difference (e.g. admitting women to higher education), but there are strong forces acting against a broad de-gendering of society. Gender justice therefore often involves a search for equivalences, i.e. equity in the context of respect for difference (Young 1990), and for balances of benefits and costs. At the same time, the search for gender justice involves a critique of false equivalences, i.e. unequal exchanges defended in the name of gender difference, and a critique of institutions and cultural forces that impersonally deliver unequal outcomes. As will be seen, these issues are particularly relevant to questions of work/life balance.

The work/home division as a historical event

Where does the gender imbalance in domestic labour come from? Gender relations, it is now accepted in all serious scholarship (with the sad exception of 'evolutionary psychology'), are historically constructed. Both definitions of gender and patterns of gender interaction change in profound ways over long periods of time (Miller 1998, Connell 2002).

The contemporary division between 'work' and 'home' is the product of quite recent changes, and its creation is well documented. Davidoff and Hall (1987: 357-369), in their classic study of the English middle class in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, show that creating the division involved both segregation of space within buildings, and the invention of specialized buildings which were either homes or workplaces. These physical changes were connected with an agenda of moral reform that created domesticity as an ideal of life. Wall (1994) traced the same process in New York City, and found that the physical separation of domestic site from work site occurred around 1810, for the city's merchant elite, and around 1840, for the city's artisans. Here too it involved a profound shift in ideology; the emerging model of 'separate spheres' for women and men.

The work/home division is therefore an event, whose consequences are still reverberating. The structure created in the metropolitan middle classes was exported, in a conflict-ridden process, in two directions. One was to the working class of metropolitan and settler-colonial societies (Rose 1992, Gilding 1991). Working-class leaderships adopted the ideology, of domesticity, and, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, accepted institutionalized wage inequality between women and men in the form of the 'family wage'. The structure was also exported to the wider world of colonialism, the process theorised by Mies (1986) as the 'housewifization' of the women of colonized societies. As the gigantic scale of the 'informal economy' in the post-colonial world indicates, this did not mean a general introduction of the Fordist economy and labour system (Harvey 1989) based on the permanently employed, full-time, wage-earning breadwinner. But this figure did become central, as an ideal, to many changes of local gender orders. The most famous example is the Japanese 'salaryman', who emerged as a social type in the early twentieth century (Roberson and Suzuki 2003).

The creation of the work/home division came with a whole train of consequences. As Holter (2005) argues, what was produced in European modernity was a fundamental split of social logics. The public world of work was a sphere governed by market relations, calculation of profit, and accumulation. The world of home and family was a sphere characterized by gift relations, affect, personal service and care. There was not only a separation, there was also an emerging relation between these spheres- the domestic was subordinated to the public. Modern capitalist society is thus marked by a structural subordination of women rather than by the direct personal power of individual men over individual women.

Of course, men enter the domestic sphere, and women enter the world of the market. Yet masculinities and femininities are constituted by women's relationship with the domestic and men's relationship with the economy. Classic studies in occupational sociology such as Pringle's (1988) study of secretaries and Williams' (1988) of 'pink collar' workers show the persisting significance of these links.

In the last few decades capitalist society has mutated again, giving rise to theories of 'postmodernity', then to agitated discussions of 'globalization'. There has been a marked decline in social democracy, in welfare state systems, in the strength of organized labour, and in state control of the economy (except in cast Asia). Neo-liberal market ideology has been installed as the framework of policy at national level (Pusey 1991). The neo-liberal direction taken in all metropolitan countries has been forced on the developing world through loan mechanisms, political pressure, and corporate bargaining strategies. Global restructuring is now a crucial context for our understanding of gender relations (Marchand and Runyan 2000).

The state itself has been re-shaped by the privatisation of public assets and the practice of outsourcing services. The market agenda has meant a long-term budget squeeze on the public sector, which creates an informal but strong pressure on public sector employees. At the same time the boundary between the family and the corporate economy--the very separation that founded the masculine and feminine spheres--is blurred. The 'disenchantment of the home' (Reiger 1985), the modernization process that saw the decline of domestic service and the rationalization of housework, is taken to a new stage as families outsource domestic work on a huge scale, including cooking, sewing, repairs, and child care (Ritzer 1993).

With the housewife's sphere in flux, the breadwinner is also challenged. Though men are more often in full-time permanent employment than women, in the developed countries the proportion of men in this privileged situation has been declining. The 'breadwinner' was not just an image, but a configuration of practices, which depended on stable employment relations in a certain configuration of state and economy. This underpinning has now been disrupted, and it is not surprising that a public discourse of 'masculinity in crisis' has appeared (Faludi 1999). At the same time a re-masculinization of the public realm is under way, with the valorization of 'the entrepreneur' and the 'tough' political leader (Kimmel Hearn and Connell 2005).

Neo-liberalism attacks the old mechanisms stabilizing the labour market, in order to free market forces in the interest of capital. The result is growing insecurity of all entitlements-those of employees most obviously, but also those of property owners, given the world-wide deregulation of finance, and the massive scale of corporate fraud. The resulting pressures contend with the effects of growing collective affluence. As Pocock (2003) shows, there are now widespread indications of stress, anxiety and social conflict focussed around the relationship between the family and the labour market.

In this environment, we cannot assume there will be a continuing trend towards gender equality and better work/life balance. We need close-focus examinations of the state of play in particular settings. Accordingly, I now turn to evidence about work/life balance in a recent study of public sector organizations--a setting where policies favouring work/life balance are firmly established and where the prognosis should be good.

A study of balancing

The Gender Equity in Public Institutions (GEPI) research program was a joint university/ government initiative intended to provide data and ideas for new thinking about gender equity (Connell, in press; Schofield, in press). The data in this paper come from one part of the multi-study program, a field study that examined the gender regimes of specific worksites.

The study examined ten sites, two in each of five agencies. Those participating included "central" and "line" agencies, covered a variety of industries and governmental functions, included both departmental and corporate constitutions, and varied markedly in size and internal organization. In each agency one site concerned with central administrative or policymaking processes was chosen, plus another more directly concerned with operations or service delivery.

Fieldwork was done from May 2001 to October 2002. We sought to interview people at all organizational levels within a site, and from all mare occupational groups. Focussed interviews covered four dimensions of gender relations in the workplace (division of labour, authority, cathexis and symbolism, for definitions see Connell 2002), and also explored gender equity programs, work/life balance and career patterns. The interviewing emphasised practices and experiences, not just attitudes. Most interviews lasted between 40 and 80 minutes. With the agreement of the respondents, interviews were tape-recorded. 107 interviews were completed and transcribed. As the gender balance in small worksites varies widely, no attempt was made to interview equal numbers of women and men in each site, but some men and some women were interviewed at each site, overall totals being 58 women and 49 men. In two sites, a researcher also spent approximately three weeks as a participant observer.

The transcripts went through a complex and careful process of analysis. Each interview was abstracted and indexed, following the conceptual framework. The same indexing plan was applied to the field notes from participant observation. For each of the ten sites, a full-scale site report was then written, attempting both to summarize and to illustrate the evidence provided by the participants. Draft site reports were discussed with representatives of the agencies concerned, to correct errors, and then workshopped by the study's steering committee. In these meetings, comparisons across sites began to emerge. A general report on the study was then written, and this too was workshopped with the agency representatives.

By agreement with the participating agencies, the very detailed site reports remain confidential, but provide the basis for published reports on the study as a whole. In this paper neither sites nor respondents are named, and identifying details are omitted. The argument nevertheless conforms to the evidence and interpretations established in the detailed site reports.

Arrangements in the household

The domestic situations described by respondents are demographically quite varied. There are couples with children, couples without children, couples formerly with children, single people with children, single people living alone, single people living with parents. There are couple households with two full-time jobs, one full-time and one part-time job, and one job. In short, we met the diversity of family forms characteristic of contemporary, Australia (Gilding 1997).

There is also diversity in the gender division of labour in housework and child care--ranging from women doing it all, to women and men sharing. Diversity does not extend to men doing it all. The evidence comes from both men and women, it is consistent, and it comes from all agencies in the study. In this respect also our findings match those of other studies of Australian families, including time-budget studies, conventional surveys, and ethnography (Bittman and Pixley 1997, Dempsey 1997, Baxter 2002).

The usual situation is that women do most, and in a good many households, women do all, or practically all, the domestic work. As a woman in Site 4 put it,

Oh, 99.999--no, that is an exaggeration, only 90 per cent.

The bedrock assumption is still that women are accountable for the state of the house and the welfare of the children. And the women regard themselves as accountable. Some gripe about the extra workload, but the general opinion is that this is indeed women's responsibility. A 'really good husband', a phrase used by a woman in Site 3, is a husband who eases the load. Another woman puts it this way:

   There's never any time really which I just have, you know, for
   myself. Every flex day it's to do something like take one of the
   kids to the doctor's, or whatever.

   Still, it's what you do, isn't it? My husband, he is very good,
   helps out a lot. [Site 9]

Men, culturally speaking, have a choice about domestic work. Some choose to help:

   Oh, I participate in housework, you know. I do washing up, I put
   the washing on in the weekend, I'll do some ironing you know, some
   cooking ... I think I am fairly--it mightn't be fifty-fifty, but I
   contribute. [Site 8]

There are some men in the study who have actually changed jobs so as to have more time with their families. But others choose not to help. Another woman in Site 3 remarks calmly that her professional career was constricted because her husband was 'uncooperative ... a husband who doesn't do anything'. Another describes her double shift:

My husband is the world's most undomesticated person. So I can't really rely on him to do anything without supervision domestically. So you get used to the fact that you get up, and before you go to work you have to decide what you are going to eat for dinner, and all these sorts of things ... I shop on a Tuesday night. I go home and cook dinner, and then go shopping because the supermarkets are open until midnight now. So that is what I do on Tuesday night.

   The husband in question is out of work; it would 'offend his pride'
   to take a low paid job--or, it seems, do the weekly shopping or
   cook the dinner.

At this almost unspoken level of assumptions about everyday life, patriarchal privilege is alive and well in Australia. Gender justice would require sharing the actual load that exists, equality of constraint, and rejection of cultural misrepresentations of the situation. As McMahon (1999) argues, the media image of the 'new father' in Australia is more an ideological construction than a grassroots reality. The picture is different from the pattern of engaged fatherhood and domestic equality that has become normative, though not universal, in Scandinavia (Gunnarsson 2003, Holter 2003).

Arrangements in the workplace

Public sector organizations are gendered institutions (Acker 1990, Newman 1995, Connell in press). They embed a gender division of labour, gendered hierarchies of power, a gendered culture, and gender patterns of personal and emotional relations among their staff. There is nothing surprising about this, as almost all organizations are gendered in this sense. One of the consequences is that state agencies are themselves arenas of gender politics. In recent years, work/life balance issues have become a key concern of gender politics in the Australian public sector.

The agencies in the study all have 'family-friendly' employment policies. Those known to the interviewees include flexible hours of work, maternity leave, the possibility of working part-time, and the possibility of working fat least part of the time) from home. The flexibility is popular, especially with parents: 'it is excellent, it is perfect for me' [Site 7].

In almost every case where a respondent made use of these provisions, or described a fellow-worker doing so, that person was a woman. Few men interviewed, or whose partners were interviewed, did anything other than regular full-time paid work. This is consistent with sector-wide statistics, which show that state employees who are part-time or casual are mainly women. Thus the 'family-friendly' policies, which are formally gender-neutral, in practice provide for the domestic responsibilities of women.

On the evidence of this study, time and time management is a first-class gender justice issue. The pressures are increasing, given the drift in developed countries towards longer hours, demands to trade hours for income and to absorb the resulting pressures into family life (Hochschild 1997, Pocock 2003). In about half of the sites, some respondents worked longer than standard hours. There is no regularity, about this. In Sites 1 and 10, for instance, interviewers were told that working longer hours was reasonably common. In Site 6 this appeared in one unit but not in another. In Site 4 the senior manager was on call even during holiday periods. In Site 2 some workers, but not most, stayed back to do extra work.

When respondents explained why people worked extra hours, two main reasons emerged. The first was shortage of resources: there were jobs needing to be done and not enough workers to do them in regular hours. A staff member might work long to meet a particular deadline, to handle a crisis, to make up for someone's absence, or to make up for a chronic staff shortage. Ironically; this was particularly likely in sites which seemed organizationally most advanced, in the style of contemporary 'knowledge-intensive' firms (Alvesson 2004)where the labour process was organized in the form of projects, where ad hoc 'teams' were common, and where deadlines seemed urgent.

The second reason for working long hours was to show that one was willing to work long hours. This was thought to be good for a staff member's security or promotion prospects because it would impress the managers. In the new public sector, with more individualized career paths, such displays of commitment may be more important. However critics of the practice (including at least one manager, who failed to be impressed) remarked that working long hours actually demonstrated poor time management.

Going from full-time to part-time work, or taking unpaid leave to care for a baby or an aged parent, was commonly seen as a bad career move- even though it is legitimate under each agency's employment politics. These do not appear as gender equity, issues when considered purely within the organization. No explicit 'sex discrimination' is involved. However they become gender equity issues when seen in terms of the relations between workplace and home--specifically, in terms of women's institutionalized load of care and domestic work. People with children to pick up, family dinners to cook, or pediatricians' appointments to keep, are simply not free to work back whenever the organization calls.

A Site 10 respondent recalled that in his previous job he worked such long hours that his children used to leave notes for him asking 'Who is our father?' He refused a promotion that would involve even more travel, and in his current job keeps his hours under better control. This means starting work at 7.30 in the morning and working back only two or three evenings a week ...

Juggling

Women are not only held accountable for the running of the household. They are also generally held responsible for managing the relationship between household and workplace. A number of them describe the process with the same word, 'juggling' (compare South Australian respondents in Pocock 2003: 204-5).

   I am pretty good at juggling my time. I am pretty good at meeting
   work deadlines, or keeping an active social life, being organized,
   having food in the fridge, and clean clothes ... I think the
   public service is pretty good, I have always worked in flexible
   environments, it is something that is very important to me. [Site 8]

The solutions differ. One respondent is Superwoman, combining full-time work, part-time study, child care, and support of her husband's study. Another gives priority to the household, cutting back on work commitments. Another calls in her mother to help with the load. Some take jobs that have foxed hours and little responsibility, so the demands of the workplace are entirely predictable and can be combined with care of children.

Sometimes, as a woman in Site 4 put it,

The juggling just gets too hard and it is not worth it, it is just not worth it.

She had tried to manage a two-career family, with children, and had to give up a job; then tried to manage as a single parent, and again had to give up a job. Others negotiate part-time work. Women respondents often talk of struggling to achieve 'balance' between work and home, especially since the domestic demands are liable to change. As Bittman and Pixley (1997) emphasise, any family is likely to change its form over time, for life-cycle reasons, economic reasons, etc. Our respondents therefore appreciate a workplace, such as Site 7, that is flexible enough to accommodate different strategies.

The 'really good husband' is rare, but the 'world's most undomesticated person' who won't even do the shopping is also exceptional. In most households, it seems, there has been negotiation. In these negotiations women have a significant asset in changing public beliefs. Rising numbers of men, especially younger men, support the principle of gender equality, and equal sharing of domestic work. As Meuser (2003) observes of middle-class men in Germany, there may be a wide gap between attitude and practice. Nevertheless, some do act. Our interviewers met a husband who does the cooking, another husband who does any domestic work except the cooking, a husband and wife who start work at different times so one can take the children to school and the other can pick them up, and other variations.

Another juggler is involved--the manager. In the 'new public management', negotiation around time demands may be a key part of the job, so far as employee morale and effectiveness are concerned. Our interviews with rank-and-file workers show that managers who are sensitive and constructive in these negotiations are particularly respected by their staff.

But solutions to the problems are not always easy to find. We learnt of situations where one officer's move to part-time work meant a heavier load on others, or meant difficulty for the unit in meeting deadlines, or worked out badly for the officer concerned. For instance:

   Another staff member who has got a [child] who has just started
   school, and is putting different time demands on her. She has
   negotiated a part-time working load, in terms of hours. But the
   pressure of the work means that her contribution is compromised
   here because of it ... It is proving very difficult for everybody,
   and it is not satisfying her and it is not satisfying the people
   who work with her.

The 'flexible' workplace, it seems, involves a flux of negotiations, never finally resolved, to patch up solutions to time-balance dilemmas--which are themselves structured by the inequality of the domestic division of labour.

Work and masculinity

These are not just 'women's issues'; they are also issues about men and masculinity. To a significant extent in modern Australia, as a result of the history sketched above, masculinities are constructed through men's relationship to work (Donaldson 1991, Tomsen and Donaldson 2003). It is not just a matter of being a 'breadwinner'; overtime and shiftwork often take priority, over family life.

Most sites in the GEPI study do not have shiftwork. But in Site 2, which does, the schedule of shiftwork is organized to suit married men whose wives can fit in around complex rotating hours.

   So my wife, she works part time. So what she is able to do, is take
   my roster and work out what she is going to work. And so that way
   there was always one of us with my two sons.

The men in Site 2 defend this shift system because it is very well paid compared with most forms of manual labour. It is so well paid that it allows husbands to support a wholly dependent wife--now a rare thing in the Australian working class- or one who needs only part-time employment. The gender arrangement becomes self-perpetuating.

Masculinity is also constructed in the middle-class workplace, especially through men's relationship to organizational authority. Men climbing the ladder of authority in the globalizing corporate economy are subject to heavy demands of time and energy (Connell and Wood 2005). As Wajcman (1999) shows, women can enter corporate management if they do it on the men's terms, and 'manage like a man'--reconstructing their domestic lives to suit. What we heard from public sector managers in this study is broadly consistent with Wajcman's picture.

Thus men too can experience the squeeze between 'greedy institutions' that Franzway (2001) describes for women in trade unions. The issue is particularly poignant in the public sector. The more completely that public sector staff try to meet their cultural commitment to the public interest, the more time pressure they put themselves under. For the men, this pressure runs directly against gender equality at home. And for those men who believe in gender equality, the conflict can be emotionally painful. This is the downside of 'choice' about gender arrangements that mostly favour men.

Realizing gender equity, then, involves changing the situations of men as well as women. How do we get more of the Really Good Husbands? Some respondents have thought about the problem. One, a mother of boys, considers this is women's responsibility too, and tried to teach her sons to do housework,

   because I thought I don't want to inflict someone who is a domestic
   idiot onto-And I think mothers are to blame, that is the other
   thing, we have this discussion. I see it as a mother's role to
   train their sons as much as the girls. Otherwise you are just
   perpetuating a nation of male chauvinist whatevers. [Site 4]

But it is not just a matter of better attitudes taught to boys. Current practices of masculinity will only change when there is re-structuring of the network of relationships that link men to families, employment and organizational life.

The politics of work/life balance

What is balance?

Pocock (2002) has proposed the idea of a 'work/care regime' to characterize the enduring pattern of links and conflicts between employment and domestic life. This is a useful starting-point for analysis, but we need to recognize the contradictory, elements making up such a regime, and the considerable variations between social situations within it. Jamieson (1998) demonstrates the continuing importance of gender relations in structuring the sphere of intimacy, and the point applies here. There is a men's work/life problem and a women's work/life problem. Dropping dead from career-driven stress, or shrivelling emotionally from never seeing one's children, is a different issue from exhaustion because of the double shift, or not getting promotion because of career interruptions.

In fact there are more than two balance problems, because those are only the middle-class First World versions. The issue is differently shaped in a community where low-paid casual work is the best that practically anyone has done. Gutmann's (2002) splendid book The Romance of Democracy describes life in Colonia Santo Domingo, a squatter settlement on the outskirts of Mexico City. This is a dormitory, suburb, those who have jobs usually travel to work. But here the street is an arena, and political discussion flows freely from street into household and out again. A strongly marked patriarchal gender order exists, yet women have forms of activism, especially in informal and community-based politics. Poverty and the shortage of work, rather than the overwhelming demands of work, constrain domestic life. Some of the same dynamics appear in the 'Australian Newtown' re-study by Bryson and Winter (1999). De-industrialization since the 1960s produced a working-class suburb marked by unemployment and increased poverty, and part-time employment predominated, especially among women.

These examples might make us wonder whether the concept of 'balance' is the best way to capture issues about relations between the economy, the household, and personal life. it is not hard to think of cases where a heroic imbalance was regarded as a moral ideal. Think of the nun dedicating a lifetime's housework to God, or the bohemian artist creating masterpieces in a litter of dirty linen and cockroaches. Not accidentally, these are strongly gendered images, ideals constructed within a gender-divided culture.

In that light, the idea of 'work/life balance' is a conservative expression of a radical impulse. The impulse is for justice, specifically gender equality, and for the fuller life made possible for everyone by just human relations. This impulse is expressed as a demand for 'balance' because of the impossibility of realizing equality, within an institutional system that subordinates home to economy.

Maternity and masculinity

As we have seen, 'family-friendly', flexible employment policies are focussed on women. They translate women's demands for fair treatment into the language of the new managerialism, and so can be accepted by the cadres of the entrepreneurial state as rational strategy for organizations--specifically, best-practice personnel policy. On the other hand they carry forward, into the era of the hypertrophied market, the connection of women to domestic work and responsibility for children that was established in the original work/home split.

The gender coding of employment flexibility becomes explicit in the promotion of 'maternity leave' provisions by right-wing governments. Here, employment policies become part of the re-inscription of maternity on women's bodies as the defining feature of womanhood. This is central to the current gender politics of the Right. At the same time teenage mothers, single mothers, 'welfare mothers', drug-addict mothers, etc. are vigorously stigmatized (Luttrell 2003). It is maternity within a renovated patriarchal family that is the neo-conservative ideal. Yet this constantly grates against the neo-liberal tendency to cast all policies in a market form, and to see men and women alike as rational market agents. At the moment the neo-liberal tendency is dominant in Australian federal policy, which mostly prefers to treat work/life balance issues as a matter for direct negotiation between workers and employers.

'Working mothers' are therefore a problem for conservative politics. The result is a complex oscillation between pro-natalism, market fundamentalism, the desire to expand the labour pool, and the idea that 'working mothers' are bad for children.

Pro-natalism a hundred years ago was closely connected to eugenic purposes--population growth and purity, especially the growth of the white population. The new maternity politics is disconnected from those purposes. The re-inscription of maternity shows gender as pure ideology, a functionless division that conspicuously lacks legitimacy. Hence the contemporary scramble to find warrants for gender division, which has thrown up an astonishing and self-contradictory mixture in the gender discourse of the right--the Bible, the 'interests of the child', cultural 'tradition', hormonal determination of behaviour, Jung's theory of the unconscious, and so on.

Concerns about the position of men also lead to paradoxes. As Buchbinder (1998) observes, there are widespread anxieties about what it is to be a man, and about the adequacy of masculine performance. Influential stories of a 'crisis of masculinity' claim that the separation between home and workplace was a psychological disaster, because it severed the tie between fathers and sons.

This diagnosis leads to another re-inscription, of a conventional masculinity on male bodies, through initiation rituals and role modelling. The masculinity-crisis discourse is now producing political proposals that directly violate anti-discrimination rules in order to get more male 'role models' into schools. (In March 2004 the neo-conservative Australian government introduced legislation to this effect.)

Yet the simplest way to help fathers reconnect with boys (and girls) would be quite in accord with principles of justice: strong paternity, leave provisions, and policies to equalize domestic labour. Why is this line not taken? Again, I think, because of gender ideology- this would undermine the residue of patriarchal masculinity. Yet old-style masculinities are under challenge world-wide. In Japan, to give only one example, the figure of the 'salaryman escaping' has entered mass media (Dasgupta 2000). There is now a global debate on changing masculinities, even a United Nations agreement about the role of men and boys in achieving gender equality. (Connell 2005). Conflict and change on this front will continue.

The common good

Lyotard (1979) early diagnosed a key feature of neo-liberal culture, the collapse of the 'grand narratives' of emancipation and enlightenment that once provided frameworks for the public realm. Lyotard didn't notice the gender dimension of his idea. The collapse of grand narratives happened in the masculinized public realm and did not necessarily affect the domestic. But this shift has certainly weakened state action for gender equality. The women's movement made claims on the state not only as an interest group, but under a principle of justice. As noted in the introduction to this paper, an appeal to justice involves a generalized criterion of equality.'. Exactly that kind of claim is most repugnant to neo-liberalism.

Within market ideology, gender equity cannot exist as a universal ethical obligation. It can only exist as one of the goals 'chosen' by an organization, group or individual. Within market ideology, the costs of gender equity are not a tragic necessity; they are items in a cost-benefit calculation which, depending on how the figures come out, might lead a family or organization to abandon this goal. Indeed in the interviews we have seen families which decided not to pursue the idea of equal participation in housework and child care, finding the costs (economic or inter-personal) too high. Bittman and Pixley (1997, ch. 6) point to a widespread pattern of 'pseudomutuality' in Australian families in which the clash between belief in equal sharing, and an unequal reality, is resolved not by reforming the practice but by adjusting the definition of the situation.

The only escape from this dead end is to revive a concept of the common good. The powerful appeal of the concept of 'work/life balance', with its hidden dimension of gender justice, suggests that we do still need a concept of the common good and the public interest, and that many people still support it. The valuing of personal life, and especially time spent with children, that is widespread in Australian society, emphasises the kind of relationships that are most resistant to commodification. The demand for security that allows these relationships to flourish is inherently in contradiction with the systematic production of insecurity, in neo-liberal society. Yet an unequal gender division of labour strongly invests such relationships, undermines cooperation and intimacy, and generates unequal constraints and freedoms across the society.

Generating a concept of the common good which respects difference, supports intimate relationships and promotes freedom seems a very. important task. It is, clearly, an intricate and difficult task, but we have useful starting-points. The concepts of work/life balance and gender justice will have a significant place in this discussion, especially in ensuring that 'freedom' is not confined to men, children are not short-changed, and 'respect for difference' is not a disguised way of sending women back to a postmodern kitchen.

Acknowledgments

This paper originated as an address to the conference on Work-Life Balance across the Life Course, Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, University of Edinburgh, 30 June-2 July 2004. I am grateful to Lynn Jamieson, Sarah Morton, and conference participants for very stimulating discussions; and to AJSI's reviewers and editor for helpful suggestions on the text. The empirical part of this paper is based on research done in the "Gender Equity in Public Institutions" project. I am grateful to the respondents from five public sector agencies for their gifts of time, information, and trust; and to the many colleagues who have worked on this project. Those most involved are co-investigators Toni Schofield and Sue Goodwin, project staff Kathy Edwards, Celia Roberts, Virginia Watson and Julian Wood, industry partners Philippa Hall and Jennifer Perry, and agency representatives who regrettably cannot be named because of confidentiality undertakings. The GEPI project was principally funded by the Australian Research Council, with Industry Partner funding from two NSW government agencies, and in-kind contributions by seven NSW government agencies and the University of Sydney. Opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the view of any participating agency. The GEPI project has no responsibility for the non-empirical sections of this paper.

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R.W. Connell is University Professor at the University of Sydney. Author of Ruling Class Ruling Culture, Schools and Social Justice, Masculinities, Gender and other books. Current research concerns changing masculinities, neo-liberalism, and globalization.