Call to make it easier for women to work

The emancipation of women was an unstoppable force in many ways, Mark Smith, a UK lecturer in employment studies, said yesterday.

He said that while a couple of generations ago it was acceptable for women not to go out to work and remain dependent on the male bread winner, younger women had different aspirations, higher levels of education and expected to gain equal access to careers and employment.

Dr Smith, who is a member of the European Work and Employment Research Centre at the Manchester School of Management, was speaking in an interview ahead of a public presentation at Le Meridien Phoenicia in Floriana today at 2.30 p.m.

The theme of the presentation will be Women and Employment in Europe - What can Malta learn?

He was invited to Malta by the Employment and Training Corporation on the occasion of the launch of the Gender Equality Action Plan 2003-2004.

From an economic point of view, a country needed to make full use of its labour supply, he argued. To have more women attending higher seats of learning and then for them to work for a short time and be out of the labour market was not effective use of resources.

Moreover, making it easier for women to join and remain in the labour market would give them economic independence. And men would benefit by not having to work all day long, allowing them to spend more time with their family.

Women did not have to stop working when they got pregnant. Differences across countries showed that stopping work was not an automatic outcome of pregnancy. Women in Sweden and Denmark, for example, continued to work almost continually despite having children, Dr Smith said.

He said there could be a better balance between family life and labour market life.

In countries where more women had a job, the family became an issue of public policy, an issue for the state, where the children were cared for and where support services for men and women were available.

On the other hand, in Italy and to some extent Malta, caring for children and the activities of the household were still the preserve of the household.

In the UK, men's wages had been under downward pressure, so in some places it was necessary for women to work because two incomes were needed to buy a house and other consumer goods. This was evident also in the US where women had had to increase their hours of work.

But the UK and the US did not have the same level of child care found in Sweden. In Sweden people either managed to pay for expensive child care or used less formal arrangements by resorting to friends or grandparents.

Children in care benefited from social interaction by coming in contact with other children. On the other hand, he said, spending very long hours in care would not be good for them or their parents.

People in such a situation could possibly work fewer hours in their current job, rather than staying at home. If a woman stayed at home for the first three years of her child's life and then went back to work she might suffer occupational downgrading.

Government policy should neither penalise women who wanted to stay at home nor those who did not, but policy needed to reflect the changes in society, Dr Smith argued.