Economic empowerment of women in Malta

These last 50 years have seen enormous changes in the role of women in the workplace. During this year in the US, women will exceed men in the workforce. In the EU, women have filled six million out of the eight million jobs created since 2000.

But this formidable success has not been achieved everywhere at the same level. In Sweden the difference between male and female employment rates in 2008 was of just five per cent. In Malta the difference is a dismal 40 per cent. There are various reasons for our failure some of which are not the ones often quoted by some feminists.

Cultural issues have a great bearing on our inability to celebrate the successful empowerment of women achieved in other societies.

Religious influences in past decades have meant that married women with children who left their homes everyday to earn a living and, more important, to achieve personal fulfilment have been labelled as selfish and uncaring.

An equally debilitating cultural factor perhaps associated with this religious prejudice is that education for women was not really necessary. Many of my generation were brought up to believe and that only men should invest in themselves through education because their natural role of breadwinners was of paramount importance. Luckily, we are out of this depressing phase and today more female than male students are following tertiary level education.

Sexual prejudice in the workplace is a much less important reason for female emancipation than most think. There are of course some old-fashioned employers who still think that female workers are not suitable for certain top-level management jobs. These are a dying breed. The real reason why local women fail to penetrate more in the workplace and at all levels of management is the tough demands of motherhood.

In my several years of professional involvement in business management I have seen significant progress being made to encourage more women to leave their homes and seek paid employment. But what remains to be done is daunting. I am not a strong believer in positive discrimination because I think that it demeans women by implying that they cannot succeed in a meritocracy. What needs to be done is to provide real tangible assistance to ease the burdens of motherhood.

There are some very successful models that we can look at especially in northern European countries were female labour participation is impressively high. In Malta we also need to look at another dimension of this challenge that has so far not been really tackled.

Many women in their late 30s and 40s are now part of the "sandwich generation" - a cohort of women who are squashed between the pressures of raising a young family, holding a full-time job, and caring for elderly parents. While decent private residential facilities for the elderly have increased significantly in the last two decades, for most middle and working class families these facilities are still not affordable.

Many do not consider the limited institutionalised care for the elderly provided by the state as a viable option.

This is creating immense pressures on young and middle-aged females who should be at the peak of their working careers. I suspect that this pressure is taking its toll, not just on the financial resources of many young families, but also on their marital and mental wellbeing. This does not augur well for our society in the next two decades.

I continue to believe that we need to shake off the culture of dependence on state support to cushion us from all the risks that most of us face every day of our lives. I also believe that individuals and families should be thought the slow-burning skills that are more difficult to learn but will serve us a lifetime - skills like frugality, dedication to hard work and an unflinching determination to succeed in what we do.

But the state also needs to do more. Our social services paradigm needs to be revised to ensure that it supports those who are most in need of extra help. These services should be aimed to make individuals especially women, more independent through focused support at the right time in their lives, rather than more dependent on aid that keeps flowing as long as one remains stuck in social or financial poverty.

The economic empowerment of women in Malta can only be accelerated when our politicians manage to articulate a vision where the value of women in society is really acknowledged, encouraged and rewarded in tangible ways rather than rhetorical waffle.

jcassarwhite@yahoo.com