Courtesy of Piers Akerman/Daily Telegraph:

For more articles by Piers go to; http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/

By Piers Akerman –, Tuesday, December, 18, 2012,

Thank you Henry Ergas for helping me understand what sort of women still support Julia Gillard’s prime ministership.

It’s the dumb ones.

In an insightful essay in The Australian “The PM cannot count on women’s votes because she has done nothing for them,” Ergas yesterday outlined how Gillard has failed her female fans.

“Since Labor came to power”, he wrote, “the female unemployment rate has risen from 4.4 to 5.2 per cent. And surveys show women feel more at risk of losing their job now than at any point in the Howard years.”

What a betrayal of women by the woman who the rabid feministas claim as their heroine.

But, as the man in the advertisements used to say, there is more and Ergas has done his homework.

Female labour force participation rate has stagnated, he found. Between April 1996 and November 2007, it increased from 53.8 per cent to 58.5 per cent. But Labor’s election basically stopped that rise, and five years on it still sits at 58.7 per cent.

Things actually have worsened for women under Gillard.

The gap between annual female and male full-time earnings has increased by $3848 as the cost of living for families has taken off, with utilities bills rising at an unprecedented 12.5 per cent a year, childcare charges increasing at over 8 per cent a year and health and education fees rising to a rate of 5.5 per cent.

Further, he warned, the real risks for women go beyond those immediate concerns. For few changes have made a greater contribution to women’s wellbeing than the labour market deregulation Gillard and her union backers are determined to reverse.

“Until the 1990s, employment conditions for more than 80 per cent of workers were determined by awards,” he wrote. “At unions’ insistence, those awards routinely set limits on part-time jobs, including by prohibiting the recruitment of part-timers if any unemployed union members were seeking full-time jobs. With few flexible opportunities, women faced a stark choice: work full-time or not at all, entrenching low participation.

“Freeing up the labour market helped dramatically change that picture. In 1966, 8 per cent of working age women worked part-time; by 2007 it had increased to 25 per cent.

“And the increase was even greater for younger generations: of the women born in 1936, fewer than 10 per cent were in part-time work at age 34; in contrast, more than 40 per cent of women born in 1976 worked part-time at that age.

“As the share of women in full-time employment has increased only 3 percentage points since the 1960s, that growth of part-time work accounts for rising female labour force participation.

“Far from disliking part-time work, only 5 per cent of the overall workforce would prefer to move from part-time to full-time jobs: that is less than half the number who would like to move the other way. Moreover, measures of job satisfaction, subjective wellbeing and work-life balance are all significantly above average for women in part-time work, and especially for those with partners who work full-time.

“It is unsurprising part-time work scores so highly, for its increased availability opened new scope to earn an income while having a family. After all, study after study finds today’s young women don’t simply decide to have children: they choose to be a mother, because of the satisfactions that brings. A flexible labour market allows women both their own income and continuity of work experience.

“Mothers have chosen that option in droves. Of women aged 25 to 44 who work part-time, 60 per cent do so to care for children; and 70 per cent of working mothers with children under the age of five work part-time.”

Shrieking at Opposition leader Tony Abbott may excite extremist feminists but Gillard’s legacy has been disastrous for women, as Ergas has demonstrated.

The election will show whether the rusted-on feminists, mummy bloggers and luvvies are there for Labor and Gillard or whether they are there for progress and a sound future.