The on-line registration form wanted to know what area of business I was in.
The options were:
Accountancy & tax advice; aerospace and defence; automobiles; banking; basic resources/mining; chemicals/comms/publishing/media; consulting/business services; education/academia; energy/utilities; engineering/construction; financial services/food and beverages; fund/asset management; government/ public service/NGO; health and pharmaceuticals/IT/computing; industrial goods and services; insurance; personal & household goods; property; retail; telecommunications; transport/logistics; travel & leisure.
Obviously this organisation thinks agriculture and other areas of primary production count for nothing.
A few days later another form gave a more comprehensive list which included agriculture and some unpaid work:
Professional or senior government official; business manager or executive; business proprietor or self-employed; teacher, nurse police or other trained service worker; clerical or sales employee; farm owner or manager; technical or skilled worker; semi skilled worker; domestic worker, labourer or agricultural worker; home duties (not otherwise employed) student tertiary; student secondary; secondary primary/intermediate; retired/ superannuitent; unemployed/beneficiary; other not listed above.
Home duties (not otherwise employed)? Ah well I suppose it’s better than housewife/husband/person.
But it doesn’t take into account the unpaid work which people, usually but not only women, do outside the home, apropos of which Sandra thinks we need to ask some new questions.
We’ve made a lot of progress in accepting that women can have careers, but there has been little if any progress in recognising the importance of unpaid work which is so important in extended families and the wider community.
Homepaddock 
Home duties (not otherwise employed)? I yhought the moronic PCism for the perfectly good and utilitarian Housewife was Homemaker. Well there you go.
It’s a con you know – I’ve worked in the third world you know and I’ve seen with my own eyes heavily pregnant women laboring of the friggin roads and babies lying beside the road because their nursing mothers are working away.
And because I’m not dumb I know it was like that in Europe 150 years ago – pregnant women pushing wagons of coal in dark, dank and dangerous mines.
And people thought that was wrong, they thought. obviously because they were antediluvian neanderthals, that it would be better for all if women were freed from this toil and could concentrate on their children. Today of course this would be considered exclusion of women from the workplace and an example of gender bias. Anyway acts of Parliament were passed forbidding the employment of women and children in dangerous environments.
It was considered quite progressive in its day
Anyway I read with morbid fascination a Document Entitled ” National Conversation about Work” and one of the issues highlighted is of course the number of women whose employment barely covers the cost of child care.
And having functioning grey matter I ponder, why are these women working in their exciting roles, maybe sticking labels on jars of jam , if the actual return for their labour, after tax of course, is absorbed in childcare.
Might it not be better for all concerned if they could be
housewiveshomemakershome duty executives and spend their time with their kids, they’d probably be happier and their kids probably would be to.LikeLike