Woman’s work is never done
And yet, despite decades of advancement for women, we have an unusually strong attachment to the traditional role of woman as full-time homemaker.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in a recent study calculated that 55% of Irish mothers work outside the home - a figure that puts us 30th lowest out of the organisation’s 34 member countries with only Greece, Chile, Italy and Turkey below.
Our nearest neighbours, Britain and France, stand at 67% and 66% respectively, while Iceland tops the list with 87% of mums working outside the home, followed by Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Mexico, Luxembourg, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and New Zealand who all come in at 75% or above.
So is Iceland a nation of supermums, effortlessly juggling kids and career while side-stepping volcanic eruptions? Or is it that the rewards and supports for staying on the workforce post-pregnancy are greater in Iceland?
Are Irish women traditionalists at heart or have they adopted a revisionist take on recent history which tells them they should strive to be and do everything regardless of how exhausting and stressful the effort?
Certainly there are practical barriers like the cost of professional childcare - averaging €191 per week for babies and €181 per week for toddlers according to a National Consumer Agency study earlier this year.
But another recent body of research pointed highlighted obstacles to work in the last place women expected to find them - the workplace itself.
The Crisis Pregnancy Agency’s “Pregnancy at Work” survey found 30% of women felt unfairly treated at work during their pregnancy - having to endure everything from negative comments by bosses or colleagues to unreasonable workloads to being excluded from training and promotional opportunities.
Five percent were directly dismissed, made redundant or treated so poorly they had no choice but to leave.
Those are shocking statistics given the raft of legislation we have in Ireland to protect female employees against such discrimination during the pregnancy, maternity leave and return to work period.
But anecdotally the evidence has long existed that good law does not necessarily make good employers. Online chatrooms geared towards mums regularly feature mothers reduced to tearful wrecks by the attitudes of bosses who seem to take it as a personal slight when they announce their pregnancy or else, as one woman put it, put them in the “mummy box” and dismiss their potential to ever advance in the company.
Some of the more serious cases end up before the Labour Court, Employment Appeals Tribunal and Equality Tribunal,.
Some recent examples from the Employment Appeals Tribunal include a woman awarded €28,700 after she was demoted from a managerial role to an entry-level role in her company when she returned from maternity leave and a €148,000 award to a woman sacked from her role as a human resources manager with a computer software company for becoming pregnant.
The company claimed her dismissal was for disclosing sensitive information but all she had done was chat with other staff who were talking about pending redundancies. The tribunal found the complainant’s explanation far more credible.
In another case a young receptionist verbally abused by a senior manager at an office party she attended while on maternity leave was awarded €25,000.
The manager had branded her a “floozy” and “stay at home mother” (not an insult in itself but intended as one in this case) and accused her of knowing she was pregnant when she was taken on (she didn’t and even if she did, there are laws to protect women’s rights not to disclose pregnancy at interview and not to be left out of consideration for a job because of pregnancy).
These are only a few examples of what can go on in workplaces because it is a minority of women who will take on a legal battle.
Several women with even more disturbing experiences who were contacted by the Irish Examiner pleaded for their cases not to be resurrected even though they are a matter of public record.
THEY feared renewed publicity would damage their chances of being employed again. Ironically, by using the laws meant to strengthen their position in the workplace, they felt they had weakened their employment prospects.
It is hard to know how representative these cases are of the workplace in general but statistics produced by the Equality Authority reveal a very high level of concern about pregnancy related issues.
More than half (57.9%) of the requests for help and information received by the authority in 2009, the last year for which figures are available, were about maternity rights and parental leave - 3,632 relating to the former and 1092 to the latter.
Mark Fielding, chief executive of ISME, the body representing small and medium firms, says discrimination against mothers is not widespread and that the vast majority of employers in his sector take their workers’ pregnancies in their stride.
“This famous ‘work-life balance’ that suddenly appeared during the Celtic Tiger and became such a big part of the partnership agreements with the trade unions - they grasped it to their collective bosoms like they had given birth to it.
“But it was always there in small businesses. It was never called work-life balance - it was just the norm. It was ‘Mary needs time off because she’s pregnant’ or ‘Mary is taking time off because something’s come up with the family’. You just worked around it.”
But he admits employers do have some complaints. “The biggest problem that we come across on the helpline from employers is the female employee who goes off on maternity leave, takes the extended leave and then at the last moment, doesn’t come back to work.
“Employers are supposed to get four weeks notice but very often, at the very last minute, the lady sees the little face of the baby looking up at her and decides she can’t go back to work.
“There’s nothing you can do. There’s no point bringing someone back for four weeks to see them go again when they don’t want to be there. The employer is left hanging.
“That drives them insane. They go incandescent with rage. It creates all sorts of hassle.
“When you think in terms of a small business as compared to a large business, if somebody doesn’t come back in Intel or Hewlett Packard, it’s not a big deal, but if you have ten employees and suddenly one is gone, that’s 10% of your workforce.”
Patricia Callan, director of the Small Firms Association, says cost is another factor that weighs heavily on businesses.
“There has been a huge increase over the past ten years from 12 weeks maternity leave ten years ago to six months now plus four months unpaid leave plus 14 weeks parental leave in addition to which you accrue annual leave so that’s another four weeks and then there’s nine days public holidays on top of that.
“Altogether people can be gone well over a year and there is no-one can tell you that is not disruptive to an employer. But the big thing is cost - most employers would not be able to pay top-up (the difference between the statutory Maternity Benefit payment and the employee’s salary), especially if they’re paying for a temporary replacement.”
How “temporary” a replacement is raises another issue. Mark Fielding points out: “A lady can now be off over well over a year but if you take on somebody to replace her and they are there longer than a year, they gain employment rights.
“But if you take on a succession of temporary workers, there are issues with continuity and consistency in the work being done.”
Workplace pregnancy affects more than the employee and her boss, however. The employers body, IBEC, in a 75-page “Maternity and Parenting Toolkit” produced for its members recently, stresses the woman’s coworkers have to be handled carefully too.
“It is important that the manager sets the tone for the organisation by welcoming this news as a positive event and that pertinent issues like cover etc will be planned and successfully managed for a seamless outcome,” it says.
“Failure to backfill a position and possibly overworking colleagues can cause resentment and dissatisfaction across the team if they are already working to full capacity so care needs to be taken.”
“On return to work, anecdotal feedback suggests that team members can find it dissatisfying that their counterparts with children may have to leave on time or early to collect children from a crèche.”
RHONDA Donaghey of SIPTU agrees coworkers can be less than appreciative when they are forced to carry the workload of an employee on maternity leave or when she starts leaving work on time where there’s been a culture of ignoring the clock.
“That’s indicative of a societal attitude that needs to change.” But she says attitudes in the workplace are the responsibility of employers and she has no sympathy for those who feel burdened by that duty.
“Nobody questions why a safety guard goes on a rail. Nobody questions why there’s an automatic cut-off on a shredding machine. There’s a reason worker protective legislation is there.
“People fought very hard for worker protective legislation and that includes maternity protections. We might as well knock ourselves back to the Stone Ages if we’re not going to comply with it.”
Even where workers’ rights around the issue of pregnancy are well respected in a workplace, a lack of long-term prospects for career advancement can be a discouragement to a woman wavering between staying on and working full-time in the home.
The Equality Authority says that across all employment sectors, men are twice as likely as women to occupy senior and middle management positions.
A 2008 report, “Women and Ambition”, from the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Trinity College, reported equally stark findings in relation to the career progression of women in the civil service.
It found senior male managers outnumbered their female colleagues by 56%. In that same group, 86% of the men had children but just 53% of the women had children.
The researchers concluded: “It would appear that women may be prepared to make sacrifices in their personal life in order to reach senior management grades. It seems that these sacrifices are not made nearly as frequently by their male colleagues.”
Mark Fielding of ISME says motherhood is a definite barrier to career progression. “It does affect women’s careers, especially in larger businesses where you are expected to put in the time.
“In many businesses, the organisations have become flattened - they have fewer layers of management because they have been stripped out - but that means there are far steeper steps to climb and if you’ve been out of work for a while, the climb is all the harder.
“But we still have issues generally with regard to females and the workplace. I think they are excluded in some cases from the informal network — the jocktalk, the late night having a few jars.
“Then there is the stereotype that an assertive woman is a harridan whereas an assertive man is a go-getter. Also there is a lack of role models of female entrepreneurs and women in senior positions although that’s slowly changing.”
Aileen Morrissey is National Coordinator of Training with the Mandate trade union which has a 70% female membership, mainly in retail, bar work and administration.
“The workforce is predominantly female but the senior roles are predominantly male so you have to ask why is that happening?
“We’ve seen the 24-hour retail outlet become commonplace - is that impacting on women’s ability to progress to the top?
“If she works part-time, is she in a career cul-de-sac? Is she going to be trying to prove herself all the time or do five days work in two and a half days?
“If you are a woman working full-time standard hours, you get more opportunities to attend meetings and get involved in different projects, but if you are on flexible working hours, term-time working or job-sharing, it is that you may not have been seen by whoever calls the shots on promotions so you just get overlooked?
“It’s a pity that 35-40 years on [from employment equality legislation] we are still asking these questions.”
THE Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland (ASTI), which has a 69% female membership, is asking similar questions. Seven appointments to the position of principal were made in community and comprehensive schools last year - six of them going to men.
In single sex schools, the balance was better - eight male appointees to seven females - except when you consider that there are more female teachers than male.
Máire Mulcahy, assistant general secretary, said: “We are often told women don’t apply for positions but sometimes the image of a principal is put out that it’s a 24-7 job - that’s a terrible deterrent to somebody who has a life when really, you might have to be on call 24-7 but how often do you get a call?
The ASTI is asking boards of management from the start of the new school term to begin recording the gender breakdown of all applicants for promotional posts, the interviewees, the shortlist and eventual outcome to try and track what is happening.
In the meantime, its concern is the reduction of flexible working arrangements which often made teaching appear the ideal job for women combining children and career.
“The opportunities for family-friendly working arrangements are shrinking. The pupil teacher ratio was increased last year [she was speaking before the latest announcement of a further increase in recent days] so it’s very difficult for schools to get sanction for a replacement if a teacher goes on a career break or parental leave or looks to job-share.
“It’s put a nail in the coffin of family friendly working arrangements for teachers and seeing as it’s women who mostly avail of them and mainly for family reasons, it’s basically a blow to working mothers.”
There are other reasons women may be put off remaining in the workplace once they have children. The gender pay gap is well documented and although calculated in different ways with different results, the trend is always the same - men earn more than women for doing the same work.
But then Iceland’s pay gap is more pronounced than Ireland’s - women have taken to the streets on numerous occasions in protest over it - but it doesn’t keep them at home. Other supports (see panel) seem be of greater importance.
It’s too early to say what the full effect of the economic downturn will be on the statistics although female employment like all other types has fallen and the percentage of working mothers has dropped from about 57% in 2007, but Rhonda Donaghey of SIPTU has concerns.
“There will always be employers who have the attitude that they don’t want to waste a good recession. They may see it as an opportunity to offload women.”
Despite everything, however, the proportion of working mothers has increased over the last decade and a half - it was 48% in 1997 - and Patricia Callan of the Small Firms Association says women should not get dispirited. She returned from 11 months maternity leave herself earlier this year and is happy to say neither her organisation nor her career has fallen apart.
“We created a good structure here - our assistant director (also female) was able to act for me and I came in for key meetings. I have to be more disciplined with my time now but that’s not a bad thing. Things have improved for women and we should keep building on that.
MY BABIES slept, nursed, played when they liked. They lived on my hip. Night and day they were there because I was there. I read the Continuum Concept. Today’s mom reads the Baby Whisperer and gently but firmly schedules baby from the beginning, because she is on the ticking clock of maternity leave.
In 2000, as the new millennium began, the EU launched its 10- year plan to make Europe “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world”.
In the tradition of grand masterplans like China’s Great Leap Forward and Russia’s Five Year Plan, the EU plan dictated the part that women would play — and 60% of all women were to be in employment by 2010.
To achieve this high rate, planners set about clearing away the main obstacle, children.
In 2002, the Barcelona Targets required that by 2010, 33% of 0-3 -year-olds and 90% of three-year -olds be in childcare.
The Lisbon Strategy was based on people as economic units and motherhood as social construct.
What women want for themselves and their families was not part of the thinking.
When in some countries, female employment remained low, one socialist prime minister even called for the EU plans to be compulsory.
Although the Lisbon Strategy was a dismal failure in making the EU the global economic leader, it did increase the number of women in the workplace in Ireland. We reached the 60% target by 2007, only dropping slightly to 56.4% in 2010.
As a woman who is a mother and grandmother, I have to ask the awkward questions that the EU economic strategists didn’t bother asking. What do mothers want? What do children want?
When a woman becomes a mother, nature asserts itself in earnest. The woman’s focus on career, partner, friends, etc shifts once pregnancy starts.
Refocusing may have been socially reinforced decades ago, but in a society where women work up to birth and are expected to return six months later, it is an inconvenience.
Yet women find it impossible to act as if nothing is happening during pregnancy and to snap out of motherhood when they arrive back to the job because the reality is that motherhood is not a social construct but a reality that transforms every aspect of the woman she was before.
From the moment a woman conceives, waves of hormones and neuro-chemicals change her body and restructure her brain, a lifelong restructuring that affects her behaviour in ways that focus her on her child and make her better able to care for him or her through life.
Once born, the baby is designed to further stimulate the mother’s devotion — big eyes, intent stare and a cry that is on a pitch that she can’t ignore.
So what do mothers want? They want to mother. They may also want and/or need a paid job but they should never be forced to choose between being a mother and a worker. If we as a society are to have a future, we need mothers to mother well. For this, mothers need flexibility in the workplace.
Fortunately some businesses have come to appreciate motherhood. My sister, mother of a large family, went back to work when her husband became ill. She brought the skills of motherhood, juggling, problem-solving and crisis management to the office and within a short time she was running it. She laughs at the idea that she has a successful career — rather she just became mom to a lot more people.
What do children want? I’ve raised enough kids to have an inkling. Children want their moms. When they are very young, all the time; when they are older, they want mom when they need her and that could be at any time.
From the perspective of child development, six months’ maternity leave is not enough. The Swedes now give mothers a year.
Montessori, Bowlby, etc note that the need for constant maternal presence seems to extend to 33 months. With MRI, neuroscience has identified a fundamental change in brain activity at about that age that allows the child to begin internalising mom so they can take mom with them wherever they go, dispensing with the need for her constant physical presence. Thirty-three months puts nature at odds with employment policy.
Interestingly Article 41.2.2 of the Irish Constitution accommodates the child’s need for mothering. “The state shall endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.” The key to understanding this article is that it is not primarily about mothers but about children. Maternity is necessary to the development of the child. What is a necessity of the human person is by definition an inalienable right which is what our Constitution exists to protect.
What do mothers need? Instead of dictating set childcare targets, and inadequate maternity provisions, mothers need to be trusted with the flexibility and support to do what they need to do for their families, their jobs and for themselves. When this happens we will all benefit and the EU might become an economic powerhouse.
* Kathy Sinnott is a disability rights campaigner and former MEP.
LEGAL entitlements for workers with children vary significantly around the world with some surprising offenders when it comes to lack of supports.
In the US there is no statutory paid maternity leave — only a 12-week period of unpaid leave which does not apply to companies with fewer than 50 employees. Only two of the 50 states have introduced their own paid leave.
Australia only introduced paid leave for the first time this year — it’s parental leave rather than maternity leave so it can be used by either parent and it amounts to 18 weeks’ leave at minimum wage pay.
Iceland provides nine months’ leave at 80% of salary — three months for mum, three for dad and the other three to be split as they like. It’s regarded as a huge factor in workplace equality because employers know that hiring a man over a woman will not lessen the likelihood of that worker taking time off to care for a baby.
In Ireland, women have 26 weeks’ leave with maternity benefit payment — between €217.80 and €262 per week depending on previous salary. They can also take 16 extra unpaid weeks immediately after maternity leave.
There is no paternity leave so it’s up to individual companies if they wish to allow fathers to take some time off.
There is 14 weeks’ unpaid parental leave for each parent but it’s up to the employer to agree when and how it can be taken — eg, all in one go or as one day a week for 70 weeks.
In common with other EU countries, the law states that a worker returning from maternity leave must be offered her previous job or an equivalent position without loss of pay or status.
Maternity leave here is longer than most EU countries, apart from Britain, which offers 26 paid weeks plus an additional 26, a mix of paid and unpaid depending on employment record, plus two weeks’ paternity leave (at reduced pay) and 13 weeks’ unpaid parental leave.
In France, mothers get 16 weeks at full salary while fathers get 11 days at full salary, plus the option of a year’s parental leave on reduced pay, which can be repeated two more times for two subsequent children.
Norway, the first country in the world to introduce paternity leave, also offers a year’s parental leave at 80% of salary to be split between the parents, with nine weeks reserved exclusively for mothers and 10 weeks exclusively for fathers.
Formal state-provided childcare is universally accessible and subsi-dised, and women who don’t work outside the home get a lump sum of €4,500 when the child is born.
IT is official, women are still facing discrimination related to pregnancy after nearly 40 years of equality legislation. Unfair treatment at work is causing an increasing number of crisis pregnancies in Ireland, with 51% of women who experience unfair treatment reporting that their pregnancy had been emotionally traumatic or a personal crisis.
The publication of Pregnancy at Work: A National Survey by the HSE Crisis Pregnancy Programme and the Equality Authority, provides clear evidence of the discrimination against women. The survey also shows how workplace systems and culture in Ireland combine to make the lives of mothers in paid work difficult, stressful and in the long term contribute to women’s unequal position in Irish society.
The National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) continually receives many calls from women enquiring about their rights and entitlements in pregnancy and when they return to work. The NWCI also receives queries from fathers regarding their entitlement to paternity leave. For many women and men, it is only when they come to have children that they realise how scant our support systems are for parents.
The NWCI successfully campaigned for the extension of maternity leave and benefit to 26 weeks and this was a significant positive step forward. However the good news stopped there. There has been no progress to introduce leave for fathers nor has there been any progress to introduce paid parental leave.
By not introducing statutory paternity leave, the state is clearly sending a message as to who should be caring for the children. Women in Ireland continue to have majority responsibility of the caring work. Over the course of a week, women do 86% of supervision and 69% of playing and reading with children. For men, having children has almost no impact on their employment participation, in contrast to women; approximately 6 in every 10 women with children are employed, compared to 9 in 10 women without children. This urgently needs to be addressed so as to give fathers their entitlements and to start to address the redistribution of care work between men and women.
The need for paid parental leave is also critical; the survey clearly showed the take up of parental leave in Ireland is dependent on the parent’s ability to afford it. There have been numerous reports advising Government on the positive outcomes of introducing paid parental leave from children’s and women’s rights perspective and from an economic perspective. In reality, parental leave is only available to those on higher incomes, despite all international evidence showing the importance of parental leave to reconcile work and family life and the importance of leave in the first year of a child’s life for child development. UNICEF recommends a benchmark of one year parental leave at 50% of earnings.
The survey also showed how the position of women in the paid workforce is being undermined on returning to work. Some 21% of women who returned to work felt that their opportunities for training had decreased and 24% of women who returned to work felt that their opportunities for promotion had decreased. From discussions and consultations with members of the NWCI, women describe the subtle undercurrent in the workplace, where they are wrongly perceived as being less loyal and committed to their work, because they are the ones who must leave at 5pm to go to the crèche or child minder, they are the ones who cannot go to the breakfast meeting. Since we have entered the recession, we believe, the situation has got more difficult for women. Many employers cannot provide cover for maternity leave so there is a huge burden of work when the woman returns and there is unstated resentment from colleagues who have had to shoulder the burden of the work during the leave period. Not providing cover for maternity leave has become a cost-cutting mechanism in many government departments and state bodies despite the negative impact on the new mother returning to work.
Through the National Women’s Strategy, the Government is committed to reducing the gender pay gap and addressing the glass ceiling for women in paid work. Both of these objectives can only be achieved if there is a real attempt to support mothers in paid employment. It is not surprising that of the few women who do achieve senior level in both the public and private sectors, they tend not to have young children.
Central to the difficulties that women experience on returning to work is the financial stress of accessing quality affordable childcare. The costs of childcare in Ireland are amongst the highest in Europe. Childcare costs represent up to 45% of average income, and we have one of the lowest levels of out-of-school-hours provision. This results in many parents juggling different low-cost childcare arrangements which make it more difficult to combine paid work and family life.
The lessons from the past and from our ‘economic boom’ show that we need to develop state supports that enable women to make real choices as to how they want to combine paid work and family life. We need Government leadership with regard to the redistribution of care work between women and men, so that men have a greater role with regard to the care of children. We need to actively change our workplace culture into one which recognises and supports the reality of family life and which in the long term will supports the development of a sustainable society and economy.
* Orla O’Connor is head of policy at the National Women’s Council of Ireland.
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