Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Tanya began her undergraduate studies when in her early 30s.As the mother of two young boys, she travelled across Sydney to the University of New South Wales (UNSW), from a distant but close-knit South-West Sydney community, whose character changed over her lifetime from one housing young families growing up in subdivisions of former farmland to a manufacturing hub, and then to one whose dominant occupation today is health and social care work.During her final years, Tanya herself worked in the latter sector, combining part-time work as a coordinator in the National Disability Support Scheme with her ELRR work, and fitting both around frequent rounds of intensive chemotherapy.From conversations with her office colleagues in disability support who attended her large funeral on 1 October 2024, it was clear that they had huge respect for Tanya and placed heavy trust in her, just as we at ELRR relied on her calm problem-solving and coordinating skills.We all remembered her oft-repeated catchphrase, 'no worries': nothing was too much trouble, and she could always find a solution.Tanya had a wideranging and long-standing social network, based on her many interests and skills outside academia.For example, as a prize-winning lacemaker, she displayed the capabilities that made her such a good researcher and research administrator: the capacity to visualise intricate patterns and to build and document them methodically.Tanya used these skills to explore the research subject dearest to her heart: patterns of mothers' labour market participation.In her undergraduate studies, she quickly progressed to a first-class Honours degree in Industrial Relations, Social Science and Social Policy, winning a PhD scholarship.Her 2005 Honours thesis, supervised by Emeritus Professor Ralph Hall and me, was titled 'The career transitions of mothers with young children'.In this study, Tanya used the early waves of the then-new large-scale Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) panel survey to establish an important new concept: that of care security, as opposed to job security.Tanya showed how the Australian labour market was structured in such a way that the mothers of young children were forced to choose between secure jobs providing little flexibility for family care (care insecurity) on the one hand, and more flexible jobs that accommodated care but were insecure in terms of tenure (job insecurity).Beginning her PhD studies, again at UNSW, and again supervised by Emeritus Professor Hall and myself, Tanya finessed this important concept of care insecurity.She tested her
DOI: 10.1017/elr.2024.56
Author: Anne Junor
Institution: UNSW Canberra
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404826828