The rise of working from home after COVID risks undermining gender equality in workplaces if employers favour staff spending more time in offices with promotions, former prime minister Julia Gillard has said.
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Ms Gillard warned female employees taking on the bulk of family caring responsibilities and working from home could be left behind if employers rewarded "visible" staff present in office buildings with opportunities.
The former prime minister, speaking on a workplace gender equality panel at the Australian National University on Wednesday, also warned mass working from home over prolonged periods could lead to "fracturing" in organisations that risked stifling sweeping reforms aiming to improve gender equality.
Ms Gillard, who chairs the ANU Global Institute for Women's Leadership, identified working from home as posing risks for workplace gender equality as employers allow more remote working after adopting it at mass scale in the pandemic.
While it has been hailed for allowing greater flexibility for employees to manage professional and family responsibilities, Ms Gillard warned of a potential longer-term downside of the emergence of larger-scale working from home.
Domestic and caring labour was not equitably distributed, and women who worked from home to manage their family responsibilities risked missing out on promotions, she said.
"There's a risk that if nothing else changes, in five years' time, what we'll see is a pattern where women have chosen - particularly women in the family formation stage - have chosen disproportionately to work at home, men have been much more regular attenders at the office, and that very visibility, if nothing else changes, will show again who's being considered for promotion, who's being considered for sponsorship, mentorship, who is being put on the best of the training opportunities, because the women will be kind of invisible behind the screen," Ms Gillard said.
She also said "virtual working" in her experience had kept workplaces going through COVID, but that over time they led to fragmentation.
This could create barriers to reforms promoting greater gender equality in workplaces, the former prime minister said.
"The longer it's gone, the more your organisation does fracture along siloed lines," Ms Gillard said.
"So you might have a very productive working relationship with your immediate team, but the further you get from that, the less cultural strategic organisation and cohesion you've got across the organisation, and when the project of equality is to make such a big difference across structures and cultures, I think that fragmentation is a bit concerning."
However Ms Gillard said improvements to technology could also counter the negative effects of physical absence for people working from home, including by improving their views into meetings.
Working from home has grown inside major Canberra employers as more federal public service agencies adopt hybrid working - a combination of work based at home and offices.
The Productivity Commission has also urged governments not to fight against the changes brought by working from home, saying both employers and staff stood to benefit from them.
Workplace Gender Equality Agency director Mary Wooldridge said it was critical for workplaces to measure and monitor the effects of flexible working, and that "flexibility" wasn't only about the location of work.
She also said gender equality laws had allowed her agency to make companies accountable on the issue, and created consequences for those that don't report their progress on equality.
However a decade after the legislation was passed, there was an opportunity to create more transparency on gender pay gaps within individual companies.
Similar reforms in the UK had helped reduce the gender pay gap, Ms Wooldridge said.
