Ariadne Massa
18 million working days lost for mums
Tax is lost from mums at home
Mothers who drift in and out of employment in their quest to balance work with family lost 18 million potential working days in 14 years, largely due to the incompatibility between work and motherhood, latest research shows.
These mothers, who work mostly in the private sector where family-friendly measures are not so advantageous, only took on 35 per cent of the days they could have worked between 1996 and 2009.
“If authorities create structures that enable these drifting mothers to increase their actual working days just by 15 percentage points to 50 per cent, this will give families an additional €18.5 millionper year in household income,” ClydeCaruana, senior statistician at the National Statistics Office, said.
Not only that, but the government will rake in €5.1 million a year through income tax and National Insurance contributions, Mr Caruana told The Sunday Times, adding that these were just conservative estimates.
These figures emerge from a study titled ‘The Price of Motherhood’, carried out by the University’s Centre for Labour Studies researcher Anna Borg, director Manwel Debono and Mr Caruana, using data from the Birth Registry and the Employment and Training Corporation.
The full results of the study, that took nearly a year to complete, will be released during a seminar on Thursday.
The study set out to analyse the trade-off between female participation in the labour market and its impact on fertility, and examine the economic cost of low female participation after motherhood.
€5.1 million
– the annual figure the government could rake in through income tax and NI
The study defined three categories: career mothers who have remained in employment with the same employer; drifting mothers who have changed their employer and moved in and out of the labour market; and non-working mothers who do not have a registered employment history with the ETC.
The bulk of Maltese working mothers fall in the category of drifters (49.2 per cent), followed by those who do not work (30.3 per cent) and 20.5 per cent of mothers who have a career.
Ms Borg said although there had been a concerted drive to increase the number of women in the labour market in the past decade, this had not happened hand in hand with putting in place support structures for those wishing to combine family with paid work.
For example, Eurostat data shows that expenditure of government investment in services such as childcare facilities and after-school care is 0.2 per cent of GDP – one of the lowest in the EU – compared with 2.3 per cent in Denmark at the other end of the spectrum.
Mr Borg said in Malta it was unfortunately more difficult to have both a career and children.
“Interestingly, the majority of mothers who had a career, 52 per cent, were employed in the public sector, which shows family-friendly measures do help women to have the best of both worlds,” she said.
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Michelle de Maria
Nov 20th 2011, 20:14
what everyone seems to forget is that the choice for a woman to work or not once she has a family depends on whether loans and other financial committments can be paid out of one salary - if not , which is often the case, there is no choice in reality and the whole debate is useless. Mothers will have to work and juggle work and family life as best as possible which is no mean feat.
Simon Oosterman
Nov 20th 2011, 21:18
There is always the choice not to have kids till you can afford them.
Maria Agius
Nov 20th 2011, 19:08
18 million working days gained by kids who got to enjoy their mum's constant presence. 18 million working days gained by mums who fully enjoyed the very short time in which theyir children were still children. Tax isn't everyhing, you know.
J galea
Nov 20th 2011, 17:55
for me the only reason that the eu goverments want to increase the work force is to have a larger demand for jobs that the actual jobs availale so that employers can dedect the working conditions themselfs.
Wilfred Camilleri
Nov 20th 2011, 15:30
Raising children in their early formative years is far more important than lost income. The government should be concerned more about declining population growth because of women who put their careers ahead of raising a family than the €5.1 million in lost taxes mentioned above. As the population ages and there are fewer people to support the aging population, the €5.1 million will seem like spare change. Childcare facilities are not a real substitute for parental care of infants and small children. It is far better for children to be raised by their parents before they start school. The nanny state is a recipe for disaster and in the long run will hurt society.
Simon Oosterman
Nov 20th 2011, 14:26
This article is an example of the one sided reasoning that is usual when discussing the number of women in the workforce. Let me explain by way of the following example. Two traditional families (father works, mother manages the household and the children go to school) live next to each other. Than the mothers decide they want to enter the workforce. They each take care of the others household for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week at EUR 5 per hour for a gross annual income of EUR 10,000.00 each. GDP goes up by EUR 20,000 and government tax and NI receipts go up but the two families are no better of than they were before. On the contrary, they are poorer by the amount of tax and NI contributions paid to the government.
Of course reality is more complicated but we should not forget that women (or men) that manage a household perform vital services, even though they don't show up in GDP and are not taxed, and if these people start to work outside their homes, others have to be hired to perform these vital services.
A recent study found that in the Netherlands it did not make sense for a woman to work outside her home if the necessary childcare was not subsidized. That tells me that, if women (or men) are satisfied with their job of managing a household, there is no point in pushing them to start doing taxable work.