The male model women can do without

Radically rethinking men's position in the family and society is a critical prerequisite for gender equality in Malta. Social scientist FRANCES CAMILLERI-CASSAR tells ARIADNE MASSA that unless the government pulls away from its strong attachment to the male breadwinner model and redesigns its welfare regime, gender equality will remain on paper.

Gender equality in Malta can never be fully attained unless social policy measures pull more decisively away from traditional gender expectations.

"In Malta, as in Ireland, social policies are committed to the maintenance of traditional gender roles with influential backup by the Church but, while Ireland unshackled itself from this grip and moved ahead after it joined the EU, no such thing has happened here," Dr Camilleri-Cassar said.

"Consecutive governments have been closely attached to the conservative Church which places strong expectations on women, not men, and before Malta reconsiders women's economic position, I'm afraid gender equality will be hard to achieve," she added.

Dr Camilleri-Cassar, who has just published the findings of her doctoral thesis in a book entitled Gender Equality In Maltese Social Policy? Graduate Women And The Male Breadwinner Model, says that governments actually mean well.

"However, the male breadwinner model is the most formidable foe of Maltese women in their decision to hold on to paid work and start having children. Unless we pull away from this hard-headed understanding of gender roles, we will remain blinded to the contradictions women face in their daily life and it's useless talking about equality and family-friendly polices," she insisted.

The Church was constantly speaking of women's role as wives and mothers and the importance for women to stay at home to care, teachings that brought reassurance to some and indignation to others. However, it was crucial that both the Church and the state gave a voice to women and listened to what women had to say.

"For the sake of gender equality, it is necessary for the government to move away from a strong male breadwinner model and redesign its welfare regime," she said.

Dr Camilleri-Cassar argues that a critical perquisite towards achieving gender equality in Malta would be to rethink men's position in the family and society.

Whenever policies are drawn up they are done so with the "woman as the carer and the man as the earner" in mind, because of ingrained traditional roles.

"When the government introduced reduced hours, how many men opted to work less and contribute more to unpaid care work? Is this policy not encouraging a one-and-a-half earner model, as in the UK, that brings low quality and segregated work for women," she asked.

Dr Camilleri-Cassar had thought that the recent family-friendly measures would have seen woman progress. However, her research showed otherwise and she was surprised to find that instead of promoting gender equality the policies actually strengthened the traditional gender arrangement.

"Recent legislation provides for three months unpaid parental leave for both men and women. However, men's take-up is low and admittedly this makes economic sense if the man is the main income earner in the family!" she added.

Dr Camilleri-Cassar, who examined the experiences of 39 women graduates with young children, found that they were struggling between a relatively high educational attainment and cultural constraints.

The majority were quietly submissive and accepted their fate - giving up their career to care for the family and resigned to men's minimal involvement in care work.

"My professor compared my data with that of another PhD candidate from South Korea. The women there are enraged and rebelled against the system while the majority of Maltese women accept oppression with quiet resignation," she said.

One woman who qualified as an electrical engineer quit her job in the private industry (which does not accommodate for reduced hours) to have children. This change in life led her to say that "my dream was to have children but my dream has ruined my life. The engineer part of me has died".

Another respondent, a medical doctor married to another doctor, had to work reduced hours to care for the family while her husband pursued post-graduate studies and furthered his career. For her it was "a real shock" to relinquish her spending power and rely on her husband for money.

However, while women may be unhappy to give up their career, neither were they comfortable with a reversal of roles, as cultural assumptions made them believe is was not the natural order of things for men to stay at home.

"Precisely because of this male breadwinner culture, women assume they are the ones who should stay at home," she said.

Dr Camilleri-Cassar insists that economic independence for women is crucial to avoid poverty and social exclusion but sadly about 70 per cent of women of working age remained economically dependent on their male partner or the state.

"This is quite a risky situation which can encourage a power relationship where men controlled household income and women relied on men's benevolence and that can lead to conflict, domestic violence and marital breakdown."

She points out that women who were staying at home could not contribute to national insurance and in turn forfeited their pension, even though they would have spent all their life looking after the family and doing unpaid care work. This is also a risk factor for poverty.

On the educational front, Malta could proudly boast that 56 per cent of the university population was female but Dr Camilleri-Cassar said that before crowing about this statistic it was important to establish where women ended up when they graduated.

"Are women graduates ending up in dead-end part-time jobs, working reduced hours, or staying at home? It would make economic sense for policymakers to carry out a cost-benefit analysis of Malta's human capital investment so as to determine to what extent benefits outweigh costs when investing in women's education."

Statistics only told part of the story and Dr Camilleri-Cassar suggests her findings provide an insight into what happens to women after they graduate and the reasons for their action.

She added that although we trumpet far and wide about the higher standards in education, it was interesting to note that while women's participation rate in the labour market was the lowest in the EU at 33 per cent, Malta also stood at the bottom of the list with a mere 42 per cent of women between 20 and 24 who attained at least upper secondary education. According to the EU Labour Force Survey, the average for the 25 member states was 80 per cent. The next lowest after Malta was Portugal at 53 per cent.

To move ahead Dr Camilleri-Cassar suggests that Malta needs a forceful equal opportunities machinery that gives women a voice by monitoring existing state commitments, debating at governmental level, highlighting shortfalls and weaknesses, influencing media and public opinion and accelerating the pace of change.

It also needed independent women's movements and non-governmental organisations to effectively highlight outdated policy approaches and ensure that tax and benefit policies include women in households who took main responsibility for full-time family care.

She argues that proportional representation and quotas for women could be the first step towards ensuring a gender balance in decision-making positions.

"In an ideal world, women should be selected in proportion to their numbers based on the general principles of democracy; in reality this does not happen automatically. Studies suggest that without quotas it is difficult for women to break the glass ceiling due to prejudice and bias. Some women are against quotas because they believe they should get the job on their own steam and qualifications. But, remember, the measure is only temporary and is proven to be the most effective to overcome gender imbalance," Dr Camilleri-Cassar said.

Dr Camilleri-Cassar warns that while encouraging women to return to the labour market, caution should be exercised to ensure women were not enticed to full-time employment and then made into second-class men.

"What is happening is that we're moving women into the male model of work but we are not quite seeing the need for male participation in care. We need to bring men into care for children" she said.

"We should reach a stage, such as in The Netherlands, where men have the responsibility and privilege to care for children. It would enable Malta's highly qualified women to make a full contribution to quality work, while giving time and care to children," she added.

At the end of the day, Dr Camilleri-Cassar believes that in order to achieve gender equality everybody - from policymakers to the Church, men as well as women - had to make an effort to seriously encourage gender convergence in household responsibilities and care while labour market regulations need to address goals of shorter working time.

"EU membership should help influence policies, especially since gender equality and reconciliation of work and family are the fundamental principles of EU activity. This is a vision to make full use of men's and women's education and skills while making time for family life and making men as responsible as women for family and childcare."

Dr Camilleri-Cassar is a social scientist with special research interests in welfare states and gender regimes and the implications of EU enlargement for Malta's labour market and its social policy. She has worked as adviser on gender issues at the Ministry for Social Policy, contributes to lectures at the University of Malta and has co-ordinated a gender and development studies programme at the Centre for Labour Studies for the last 10 years.