Clare Burton Memorial Lecture 1999
In February 2000 ATN WEXDEV launched a new publication, The Beauty Therapist, the Mechanic, the Geoscientist and the Librarian: Addressing Undervaluation of Women's Work. The book by Professor Rosemary Hunter is based on the 1999 Clare Burton Memorial Lecture Series.
In the publication, Rosemary Hunter makes an appeal to all Australian governments to take action on 'unfinished business' to fully implement the principle of equal remuneration for women workers.
According to Hunter, the NSW Pay Equity Inquiry made significant conceptual advances in considering how pay inequities for women workers may be identified and remedied.
A paradoxical situation existed in Australia with regard to pay equity, she said, with the institution with the greatest potential to give effect to the principle of equal remuneration for work of equal value, a relatively centralised industrial relations system, quite resistant to prioritising pay equity among its concerns.
Hunter said the NSW Pay Equity Inquiry represented an advance resulting in the Industrial Relations Commission identifying the barriers in its own traditional procedures to the full airing of equal remuneration claims and making recommendations for change.
But Hunter also said that while the inquiry made certain recommendation, they had not yet been implemented and that nine months after the inquiry reported women were still waiting for the legislative amendments and the new equal remuneration principle.
The lecture series on which the book is based honors the life and work of a leading Australian gender equity activist, the late Dr Clare Burton. It highlighted the role Burton played as one of the leading feminist experts on and critics of job evaluation in Australia. It focused on recent developments in the pay equity area, particularly the NSW Pay Equity Inquiry to which Burton gave expert evidence. Hunter paid tribute to the key role Burton played as an administrator, research and strategiser around equal employment opportunity and pay equity.
"In explaining the findings of the inquiry and in urging that those findings be carried forward into concrete results, I hope I can, in a small way, carry on Clare Burton's work," said Hunter.
Professor Rosemary Hunter
Hunter said Burton had pointed out with reference to a range of case studies that far from being a panacea for women workers, job evaluation could be gender biased, both structurally and in the process of implementation. "The factors used to measure jobs could ignore or under-rate the skills found in typical women's work," she said.
"The ranking of jobs and assignment of pay rates could be biased by subjective views on worth based on the sex of the incumbents.
"Thus, the result of a job evaluation exercise would be to perpetuate rather than overcome the undervaluation of women's work. This was the core of Clare Burton's expert evidence to the NSW Pay Equity Inquiry, and she proved to be a persuasive witness," said Hunter.
"The women workers involved in the case studies and many of their sisters may be conceptually better off, but they are not yet materially better off." In addition to her analysis of NSW, Professor Hunter also rigorously assesses the situation in other States and in the Commonwealth in a separate section.
Calling on the NSW Government to fully implement the principle of equal remuneration, Hunter said this would represent a most fitting tribute to the life and work of Clare Burton.
The publication also includes a response by Professor Belinda Probert and a summary of tributes to the late Clare Burton, as well as a bibliography of her work.