Of course John Howard is right. Women do bear the brunt of care-giving.

I had dinner with four girlfriends last night and everyone except me was fired up about John Howard’s comments that 50/50 gender representation in parliament is unlikely because women do the majority of care-giving for children and the elderly.

My friends were all appalled by his statements. But I suspect most Australian women, like me, simply shrugged and said, “Well, that’s screamingly obvious. And what’s your point, John?”

There is a huge disconnect between the way things are and the way they should be. The former PM perhaps made the mistake of not making that distinction and pointing out that we need to find ways to address the burden women carry but the truth of his observation – that women bear the brunt of care-giving and that this dramatically impairs our ability to advance our careers – remains solid.

Women do bear the brunt of care-giving. I know this because I run a company that employs more than 100 women and only a couple of men. And when the gender balance of your workforce is so skewed, you get an intense insight into the different pressures women face.

Watch the Q&A Panel discuss why we need more women in politics. (Post continues after video.) 

Care-giving is right at the top of this list of pressures. As Howard noted, women are routinely forced to curtail their careers because they must take care of young children or elderly parents. We know this. The unluckiest women are the ones who are sandwiched between the two, pulled in opposing but equally demanding directions by the emotional, physical and logistical needs of parents and kids at the same time.

It happens. It happens often.

And to pretend it doesn’t is unhelpful to society and to those individual women struggling to distribute their time and energy between competing work and family interests. Just because we want it to be different (and work towards change) that doesn’t mean it currently is.

John Howard is not the Lone Ranger in noticing that women do more care-giving and that it negatively impacts their careers.

One of my biggest frustrations with him when he was Prime Minister (I had a list) was that his lived experience gave him absolutely zero understanding of working mothers. His own wife had never worked. Neither had his mother. At the time Howard was PM, his daughter Melanie, now a lawyer, was not yet in the work force. Or married. Or a mother.

So he literally had no women in his life – and certainly none in his cabinet – who modelled the very particular challenges faced by women in their careers.

Me? I've seen it. I've lived it. I live it most days here at Mamamia both personally and professionally. The women I work with, of all ages and levels of seniority, are forever dashing out of meetings prematurely or rescheduling them, taking annual leave days, leaving early and arriving late so they can take children or parents to doctors appointments or attend concerts or deal with emergencies when the school rings or a parent has a fall.

These women have husbands. These women have brothers. And yet they are the ones who have to shape their working lives around the care-giving needs of their families. For almost two decades, I have been one of them.

At the moment, my husband is the lead parent. I have been leaning in to work due to the demands of the business and his schedule has been more flexible, allowing him to do more drop-offs and pick-ups and taking the kids to get their haircut (OK, he's always done that) and last-minute doctors' appointments. Generally, we share this stuff. But I know we are rare.

One of our team here at Mamamia, her partner is the lead parent and while she's grateful that he is (can you imagine a man being 'grateful' that his wife does the bulk of the parenting?), it also causes her angst from time to time. Guilt. Because that's a big gender difference I've noticed in others and lived in my own life.

Men - bless them - don't ever seem to feel guilty about the amount of care-giving they do (or don't do). This is because society places the parenting bar embarrassingly low for men. Like, stumble-over-it low.

The expectations of what constitutes a 'good' father are pitifully modest. Turn up to collect your kid from school a couple of times a year and don't take home the wrong kid by mistake and you're a hero.

This used to shit me - I know it shits so many women - until I heard Anne Marie Slaughter explain that it's an important part of the shift towards a more equal distribution of care-giving. And make no mistake - that is what we do need to work towards if women are going to have any chance of 50/50 representation in parliament or anywhere else other than the park and the schoolgate where we punch so far above our representational weight it's not even a contest.

Slaughter says this lionising of men who show up and lean into care-giving, this hero-worshipping them for doing what women are just expected to do and shamed when we don't, it's important because it increases the value of care-giving in men's eyes. Women's work at home has been under valued (or not valued at all) for so long.....why would men want a part of that? If we praise them for something, Slaughter argues, it makes it seem more attractive so they - and other men - will want to do it more.

A bit like rewarding a dog with treats for doing something it doesn't really want to do.

Hopefully, we're seeing a new generation of fathers (and sons) who do actually want to do it, to lean into their families and step up to their care-giving responsibilities.

Because let's be clear - spending time with your children shouldn't be something that's reviled. And for most women, it's not. At dinner last night, after talking about John Howard, we got on to the subject of Hillary Clinton's right hand woman, Huma Abedin who has just announced she will finally divorce her husband Anthony Weiner after he was caught sexting yet another photo of his junk to yet another woman he didn't know, this time while their 4yo son slept in bed beside him. Gross.

With Abedin so consumed with helping Hillary become President - often, she'll visit two states per day with her boss - Weiner has been the primary carer for their young son for the past year or two. "I could never do that," one of my girlfriends said last night and it sparked a conversation about how none of us would WANT to be away from our small child for weeks at a time, year in, year out. Not just for their sake but for the own pleasure we derive from parenting; we were insistent that we wouldn't want to miss out but also, the chance to be the second most powerful woman in the world and work so closely with the US President?

What would you do? And yet.

Do male politicians have those conversations? That double FOMO at work and at home? Those anxieties? The guilt?

If they do, it's rarely spoken about. And I think that's what John Howard was trying to articulate. Just because it sucks that women do the vast majority of care-giving, doesn't mean it's not true. It also doesn't mean we shouldn't work to try and change that - we must! -  but we can't do it by ourselves.

Perhaps Howard has read Annabel Crabb's book, The Wife Doubt which is sub-titled, Why Women Needs Wives and Men Need Lives.

Her point is that what it means to be a woman in 2016 has changed significantly in the past few generations. But while we have taken on more - choices, opportunities, roles, responsibilities -  what it means to be a man hasn't changed much at all. At all.

Men are still predominantly expected to be breadwinners and to work full time to support their families. For all the optimistic trend pieces written about more men becoming stay-at-home-dads, society still looks sideways at any man who is the lead parent let alone the bloke who decides to leave work or go part-time so he can care for his children or his parents.

So. What John Howard did yesterday with his comments at the press club is express a view that's completely typical of his age, his gender and his life experience.

It's a view that makes us roll our eyes because we want - we need - it to change. For the benefit of women and the benefit of men. We don't want to believe - and why should we - that this is just the way things are genetically and we must accept it. Because the lack of representation of women in parliament in boardrooms and in positions of power is unacceptable in a society that's meant to reflect the population.

It's time to recast the roles of men in the same way we've recast the roles of women. This starts with our sons, our brothers, our partners and our husbands. John Howard may not see this change in his life-time, but I'm confident that we will.

PS: as for JH's assertion that he doesn't believe in quotas and he wishes to see more women represennted  in a 'natural' way, I'm calling bollocks on that. The Coalition have cabinet quotas for all sorts of things, the number of Nationals to Liberals, the number of people (men mostly) from various states and factions. The only quota they don't believe in is a gender-based one.