Do Your Homework: New media, old problems more

Do your homework: New media, old problems Melissa Gregg, University of Sydney In the height of Australia's employment boom in the past decade, Federal Treasurer Peter Costello (2006) urged the nation's women to take advantage of new communications technology to combine work in the paid market and in the home. In a formulation that combined economic optimism with an appetite for demographic growth, middle-class women in particular were urged to improve the fertility rate by having “one for mum, one for dad and one for the country”.1 Such patriotic thinking would ensure the right kind of forward momentum for a country that appeared acutely conscious of the decline in the procreating preferences of its Anglo-Australian majority.2 The Treasurer’s visions, which found resonance in a range of advertisements for new media devices over a similar period, turned an internet connection into a post-feminist tool, empowering female users to exercise new opportunities for “work-life balance.” Mobile media were feted as putting an end to women's alienation from career success in the public sphere and the culture of long hours necessary to achieve it (Gregg 2007). Four years later, these high hopes appeared to reach a pinnacle as a female politician took the role of Prime Minister for the first time. Australian Labor Party leader Julia Gillard assumed the nation’s top job through a party-room coup rather than a democratic vote, but her rise to high office provided momentary optimism for feminists looking for evidence of change. Gillard’s time as Prime Minister looked set to be brief. To overcome negative perceptions of the factional deal behind her leadership ascension, she quickly called an election to secure a public mandate for her agenda. A series of damaging press leaks early in the campaign indicated her tenuous position as head of the party. From the outside, a chorus of more personal attacks grew in volume. Gillard’s suitability for office was questioned primarily on the grounds of her childless and unwed state. Previously serving female politicians asked whether Gillard had the “perspective” leadership demanded without the experience of having and raising children. Meanwhile it was female journalists leading inquiries over Gillard's appearance, clothing and accent,3 and whether she planned to marry her partner upon moving in to the official Prime Ministerial residence (Leslie 2010). While the political context described here is local in emphasis, the quality and tenor of Gillard’s reign raises a number of issues for feminist media studies heading in to the next decade. For a start, the level of scrutiny surrounding Gillard’s personal life – from her de facto status to the state of her kitchen – indicates the difficulties faced by career-focused women in “post-feminist” cultures (McRobbie 2004).4 Gillard defies the standard narratives of pleasure and achievement that are endorsed for women in countries like Australia, where a “laid-back” attitude combines with Equal Opportunity legislation to obscure a limited set of options for women in the workplace. Gillard’s fate highlights the hypocrisies of a culture that claims to value women’s greater participation in the workforce but fails to address the structural conditions contributing to their ongoing inequality on standard measures of pay, prestige and influence.5 During my own research of information workers over the past several years, a multitude of images appeared in mainstream media outlets encouraging female professionals to take advantage of mobile devices to ascend the career ladder. By contrast, interviews conducted to gain details of women’s actual use of communications technology revealed such devices to be directly complicit in perpetuating increased workplace expectations and pressures.6 Across a range of industries, whether in public or private sector work, women expressed an obligation and, it must be said, a willingness to use new communications technologies to make up for the shortcomings of the workplace and the inadequacies of fully-costed leave arrangements. If the level of aggression directed at Julia Gillard in her efforts to break through the glass ceiling seemed surprising, the following stories give a flavour of the battles ordinary working women faced in the same period. ‘Why should I not be paid for it?’ When Susan, a 37-year-old university lecturer, became pregnant with twins, this was the tipping point that led her to subscribe to broadband internet. As the head of a small university department, Susan carried a lot of responsibility and anticipated that her absence on maternity leave would pose a problem for colleagues. As it turned out, after she installed the wireless modem her workplace did contact her every day of her maternity leave with queries of one kind or another. By the time the twins were born, Susan had developed a reliance on her home connection to stay in touch with work: “I’m a bit obsessive about it,” she said, estimating that she would check her email roughly every half hour. “Even if I’m cooking I’ll go and check if I’ve got another email come through. Is that bad? That is bad”. Her regular morning routine was to get up early to check her email before the rest of the house woke: I start at about half past six in the morning and do an hour or so before I leave to go to work and that’s mainly just clearing emails and things like that so I can start the day ready to do “work.” Susan was like many workers in the study who didn’t consider email to be “real” work – meaning that a significant component of her job didn’t register on conventional time measures. Returning from work at the end of the day, she would take her laptop out on the deck with a glass of wine to answer her email, which was “kind of unwinding while still doing something.” Susan was a talented multitasker – as I realised one night when she instantly replied to my email and told me she was also sitting on a conference call. Like a number of other women interviewed for the project, she regularly answered email while watching TV, caring for kids and even when she was in bed. Once the twins were born, Susan stayed home one day a week to spend time with her boys and cut down on the number of days they were in childcare. Susan lived away from her extended family and had to work out caring arrangements with her partner, a schoolteacher. “Someone said, why don’t I cut down my work to four days week? I said, well I do more than five days a week work anyway, so why should I not be paid for it?” Susan didn’t feel guilty about spending the day at home since she knew she would make up the time later. She used the time the boys were sleeping to do essential work on her home day: “They’re only little for so long and I don’t want to have them in care all the time, and I know I miss out seeing all these little milestones being achieved.” Susan’s arrangement was working as a temporary measure, even though it was harder than she’d expected to work at home with children present. On our second meeting she was realizing that: Even in the first half of the year it was easier. They were doing two two hour sleeps a day, whereas now we’ve moved to one sleep and it’s not always two hours. It’s become more problematic, and they are wanting more and more of my attention at the moment. Susan explained how she tried to get the boys playing together: I get down on the floor with them and get the Duplo blocks out and get them going with that. But as soon as I walk away they want to come. I can’t do anything. I find that is starting to become more and more apparent. It’s like their awareness when I walk away is increasing. Susan’s story highlights the difficulties of working from home with young children and the serious conflict this posed to her established measures of professional performance. Other mothers in the study faced similar problems. Lucky mummies Claire was a 33-year-old marketing professional who worked for a telco provider three days a week. Thursdays and Fridays she stayed home with her son, and she described these as the days “when I’m not properly at work” and “I just want to do a bit.” Thursday and Friday are my days off, but at the moment we have, I’ll be setting up a meeting for Thursday, and typically Thursday morning is a bit of a catch-up morning for me anyway to send out a lot of emails and get a lot of things moving so that I don’t have to wait until Monday before I can get momentum happening on things. Without this extra work, Claire thought that her return to the office on a Monday would be “really stressful. Yeah, and that’s why I do it, it’s not because there’s pressure from the management team to do it at all, but it’s more just for my own sanity.” Claire explained her arrangement as “about me being in control,” even though by the time of our second meeting the amount of work she was doing outside the office had increased. Whereas initially it was just a case of keeping an eye on things during her day off, only “occasionally doing that extra bit, in the space of twelve months it had become “pretty regular.” She emphasised that: Management would never expect me to be online, you know. But it’s more just if I don’t, like if I’ve had a really crazy day of meetings, like yesterday, and there were so many back to back meetings, and I just knew my email was out of control and I had things that I needed to get done, I will sleep better if I spend an hour or an hour and a half at night just getting on top of that, otherwise I will wake up at 4am in the morning and I’ll be just spinning around my head. Got to do this, got to do that. So yeah, for my own sanity. Claire’s husband Scott was a mortgage broker, and quite often they would spend evenings “sitting on our couch with our laptops on our laps doing work.” While in our first interview she was joking that this was a bit unfortunate, by the second year she’d decided: it’s just sort of something that we’ve realised for both of us, that just keeps us sane. So it’s not that that’s all the time we spend together, but I suppose we’re lucky with our son… he’ll be in bed at 7.30pm, so then you’re right for the night if you do want to catch up on a bit of work as well as relax. Claire finds it relaxing to be able to catch up on work together – a way of being at peace and at ease with the family. Home is a site for various kinds of work, care and leisure, often in close proximity. The potential for paid work is seized opportunistically in the free moments of her day. During her days off, wireless internet allowed Claire to work anywhere in the house, so that: “if we are out the front playing cars with my two-year-old on the driveway I can still be doing a bit of work as well.” Claire sought strategies to limit being on the computer “when I should be giving my son attention,” but she figured: “if I can sort of juggle the two and still be rolling cars down the driveway or playing fire engines, then that’s OK.” Claire expressed the feelings of several working mothers in the study who felt grateful for part-time hours: I do feel very thankful to be able to work part-time with my sort of job. It is not really typical that you can do a project-based job and only be there half of the week… So I feel very thankful and that’s why I want to make it work and I don’t mind working extra on those other days, particularly just keeping an eye on things so that it works. A sense of reassurance was shared by working mothers who relied on a home internet connection to keep track of work or finish things they didn’t have time to do during office hours. A third participant in the study working part-time from home was Jenny, a policy officer with a public library. On Mondays and Tuesdays, when Jenny was looking after her son, it was normal for her to “log onto work and just leave the email open and the laptop on just there and just walk past and check things and deal with things on the fly.” A number of Jenny’s colleagues, including her boss, would email on her days off. That way she could stay abreast of developments and have time to think things over before getting to work on Wednesdays. Jenny maintained that it was her “own style” to keep up with her email outside work; it was her personal preference that made her “happy to take 10 minutes out of my day at home and check.” Like other employees who demonstrated anxiety about work’s potential, she said checking email was justified because it “gives me peace of mind that I don’t have something really big waiting for me.” Taking care of business What’s notable in all three women’s schedules is the inevitability of working from home. None of their employers had formal policies for managing online obligations or guidelines for appropriate response times. Instead, the women operated on vague and self-imposed ideas about what management would or wouldn’t expect. For part-time workers, there was simply no framework for discussing how flexible hours were positioned in light of the widespread reliance on online technologies in team-based office cultures. Decisions about having and raising children were inextricably related to concerns about meeting performance expectations and a sense of responsibility to remain productive for their colleagues. While new media technologies doubtlessly provide convenience and enjoyment for these women, then, as feminists we should be cautious of their capacity to solve old problems. Their stories show how the seductive phrase “working from home” masks what has always been a selective recognition of women's contribution to the market economy through a mixture of paid and unpaid labour. Indeed it now sells this partial acknowledgement as a new kind of freedom, even though women continue to do the majority of care work in households.7 As instances of the double income families typical in Australia today, these women move between various phases of a never ending working day, with only a fraction of this time being recognised financially. Paid work is maintained alongside other home-based responsibilities, or pushed into distant and antisocial hours – before children wake up, or after partners have gone to bed. It is in this way that the term “flexible work” takes on its truest manifestation, as women fit their professional aspirations around others’ needs. It is this mainstream experience of women’s technologically-mediated work that may warrant further attention in the immediate future. That is, in addition to the current trend within feminist media studies to analyze labour practices emerging in the new economy, we would do well to retain a scholarly connection to the ordinary and mundane office cultures that are an ongoing feature of the contemporary workplace.8 This is particularly so given that these are also the workplaces most familiar to academics. Previous encounters between feminism, technology studies and work set important benchmarks that are worth revisiting in the changed professional contexts of the present (e.g. Game and Pringle 1983, Probert and Wilson 1993, Wajcman 1991; 2004). These publications crossed the spectrum of trade union politics, government bureaucracy, academia and the media. But in the neoliberal university, heightened performance measures – combined with the professionalization of feminism itself – seem poised to prevent the likelihood of similar alliances. As such, many professional women lack the opportunity to relate the pressures of their day-to-day working lives to those of others, and find themselves negotiating complex issues of personal and professional aspiration largely on their own. In a further effort to raise the profile of gender equity discussions in the workplace, feminist scholars could do little better than to start with the foundational premise: politics begins at home. To return to Susan, the academic I quoted earlier, she is hardly unique among women in concluding that: having children is detrimental to your career. But it’s a choice you make because you want to make it. I look at my capacity to work now compared to my capacity to work two years ago, it’s remarkably different. Susan is remarkably adept at expressing the incompatability of care work and the market-values of careerism. Incitements to reproduce for the benefit of the nation come at a very personal price. Of course, it was Julia Gillard’s decision not to have children that put her in the running for her country’s highest office, just as it offered the basis to deny her the capacity to govern. Gillard’s false choice reflects the fate of all women workers forced to negotiate career paths that are male by default. In the drawn out aftermath of the 2010 Federal Election, the prospect of a female Prime Minister faded in the memory. The result – a hung parliament – increased the chances of the nation being led by a religious conservative, Tony Abbott, whose views on women’s rights were so retrograde that they were subject to multiple viral media campaigns during the election build-up.9 As this article has argued, however, it will take more than a YouTube link on Facebook to overcome the structural disadvantages women continue to face in the public sphere. To advance the ambitions of working women we need networks of support that reach beyond the limited address of the academy. The title of this essay is therefore intended to underscore the legacy of mothers who laid the foundations for all kinds of professional women through a range of affective labour in the home: reminders to do our homework, clean up after ourselves and get to bed on time. Whether or not they worked in paid jobs too, it was these lessons that helped to establish the discipline and strength we now need to fight for workplaces that will finally recognize the extent of our labours. References ABC Television (2010) ‘The Authentic Mr Abbott,’ Four Corners, 19 March. http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2010/s2846485.htm (Accessed August 31, 2010). Peter Costello (2006) ‘Launch of the 2006 Census of Population and Housing,’ National Press Club Address, Barton, Canberra, 24 July. Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency http://www.eowa.gov.au/ Rosalind Gill (2002) ‘Cool, Creative and egalitarian? Exploring gender in projectbased new media work in Europe’, Information, Communication and Society, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 70-89. Pru Goward (2005) ‘Coming of Age: the Sex Discrimination Act, Women, Men, Work and Family,’ National Press Club Address, Barton, Canberra, 9 February. Melissa Gregg (2011) Work’s Intimacy, Polity Press, Cambridge. Melissa Gregg (2007) ‘The Normalization of Flexible Female Labour in the Information Economy,’ Feminist Media Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 285-297 Anne Game and Rosemary Pringle (1983) Gender at Work, Allen and Unwin, Sydney. GetUp! Australia (2010) ‘Get This Ad On Air,’ https://www.getup.org.au/campaign/Australia_GetsUp_2010&id=1251 (Accessed August 31, 2010). Dan Harrison (2007) ‘I’m sorry, Heffernan tells Gillard,’ Sydney Morning Herald, May 2. Available at: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/im-sorry-heffernantells-gillard/2007/05/02/1177788206008.html (Accessed August 31, 2010). Alison Hearn (2010) ‘Reality Television, The Hills and the Limits of the Immaterial Labour Thesis’ tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-operation, Vol 8, No 1. Herald-Sun (2010) ‘Pay gap between sexes still widening, study finds,’ Money Matters, August 30. Available at: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/money/moneymatters/pay-gap-between-sexes-still-widening-study-finds/story-fn312ws81225911700671 (Accessed August 31, 2010). David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker (2010) Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries, Routledge, London. Phillip Hudson (2010) ‘Women’s virginity “a precious gift”, says Tony Abbott’, Herald-Sun, January 26. Available at: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/womens-virginity-a-precious-giftsays-opposition-leader-tony-abbott/story-e6frf7l6-1225823535955 (Accessed August 31, 2010). Tim Leslie (2010) ‘Focus on Gillard’s personal life “disgusting”’ ABC News, 27 July. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/27/2965878.htm (Accessed August 31, 2010). Angela McRobbie (2004) ‘Post-Feminism and Popular Culture,’ Feminist Media Studies, vol. 4, no. 3. pp. 255-264. Angela McRobbie (2002) ‘From Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds’, Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 516-531 Vicky Mayer (2011) Below the Line: Television Producers and Production Studies in the New Economy. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Vicky Mayer, Miranda Banks, John Caldwell, eds. (2009) Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. Routledge, New York Laurie Ouellette (forthcoming) “Women’s Work: Affective Labor & Convergence Culture” Cultural Studies Special Issue on Rethinking Convergence/Culture. Stephanie Peatling (2006) ‘Abortion will lead to Muslim nation: MP,’ Sydney Morning Herald, February 14, Available at: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/abortion-will-lead-to-muslimnation/2006/02/13/1139679540920.html (Accessed August 31, 2010). Belinda Probert and Bruce W. Wilson (1993) Pink Collar Blues: Work, Gender and Technology, Melbourne University Press, Carlton. Tiziana Terranova (2000) ‘Free Labor: Producing culture for the digital economy’, Social Text, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 33-58. Judy Wajcman (2004) Technofeminism, Polity Press, Cambridge. Judy Wajcman (1991) Feminism Confronts Technology, Polity Press, Cambridge. 1 Notes The Government’s push for population growth was accelerated by a new “Baby Bonus” cash handout to new parents, and increases to family payments. 2 Evident in comments from a number of politicians, including the Right wing One Nation party matriarch Pauline Hanson, who used her 1996 maiden speech in parliament to express fears that Australia was at risk of being “swamped by Asians.” More recently, the Liberal Party’s Danna Vale made headlines by suggesting that Australians were “aborting ourselves almost out of existence” – comments which were important background to the strong anti-abortion views held by the Liberal Party’s 2010 Prime Ministerial contender, Tony Abbot (see Peatling 2006). 3 With a broad Australian accent, anxieties about Gillard were also related to class. Previous Labor leaders from working-class backgrounds used this pedigree to political advantage – developing career prospects through the union movement or associating their image with cultural stereotypes about larrikinism (each epitomized in the popularity of Bob Hawke). By contrast, the limited range of popular female working-class identities contributed to problems surrounding Gillard’s “image”. 4 One of the first public controversies over Gillard’s professional ambitions was sparked by a newspaper story in which she posed for photos in her kitchen. An empty fruit bowl was the basis for condemnations of Gillard’s careerism which left her too busy for the ordinary comforts of home. Publicists explained that she had only just returned from overseas and had yet to unpack her suitcase at the time of the photo. Nonetheless, the story was part of the media landscape that led one opposition party MP to describe Gillard as “deliberately barren” – a statement for which Senator Bill Heffernan later apologized (Harrison 2007). 5 In Australia ongoing evidence of a gender pay gap are compounded by figures showing female representation on major company boards is still hovering at 10 per cent (Herald-Sun, 2010; see also http://www.eowa.gov.au). 6 Australian Research Council Discovery Fellowship DP0770241, Working From Home: New Media Technology, Workplace Culture and the Changing Nature of Domesticity, interviewed 27 office workers in four organizations over the period 2007-9. Jobs ranged from journalism to marketing, web design to project management, as well as a number of university employees. The study aimed to test the lived reality of the freedoms being trumpeted by technology advertisers and governments alike in the shift to a knowledge economy. More details are published in Work’s Intimacy (Gregg 2011). 7 Beyond statistical measures – and here Goward (2006) is a good introduction to the Australian context – this fact was obvious in interviews for my study when women showed me where in the house they would set up their laptop to do work. Compared to their male colleagues and partners, who spent their time in separate home offices, women more often chose to place themselves at the dining room table, so as to move easily between paid work, supervising children, and cooking dinner. Indeed the decision to get wireless broadband was usually to improve the amount of time spent in the presence of children. 8 A sample of the excellent work in new media studies I refer to includes Mayer (2011), Ouellette (forthcoming) Hesmondhalgh & Baker (2010), Hearn (2010), Mayer, Banks & Caldwell (2009), McRobbie (2006), Gill (2002) and Terranova (2000). 9 One campaign on the eve of the election made fun of Abbott’s comments to the media that female virginity was “a precious gift” that should not be given away lightly (see Hudson 2010). The .jpg image which circulated through social media platforms urged women to use their “precious gift” – in this case their vote – to punish Abbott for patriarchal views. Another campaign, orchestrated by the online lobby group GetUp! Australia, produced a video which featured a range of ordinary women speaking lines that Abbott had voiced in previous public statements. In one of the comments, attributed to his student days, Abbott claimed: “I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons” (GetUp! 2010; see also ABC Television, 2010).