Female university students have outnumbered males since 1991. Natalie Bowen questions how this push for education fits in with the desire to become a mother.
International Women’s Day began in the early 1900s, to mark the huge political and employment demands and achievements that women had at the turn of the century: voting rights, employment laws and steps towards equality with men.
One of the most important aspects is access to education and for the past decades many more Maltese women have been choosing careers before settling down to have children, despite the island’s strong, family-orientated culture.
Younger women have embraced the opportunities available through the University of Malta, with more female students enrolling than males since 1991.
Women made up 80 per cent of graduates in the Faculty of Education and 72 per cent of Health Science graduates in 2010/11.
They are also advancing in historically male occupations but balancing work with family is a concern.
Marceline Naudi, senior lecturer at the University’s Department of Gender Studies, believes Maltese women are using their brains to juggle both commitments.
“My opinion is most women still remain the prime carers within their family,” she says. “We are now creating a breed of superwomen who do go out to work, come home and still carry the prime responsibility for the caring role both in terms of housework and in terms of childcare.
We are now creating a breed of superwomen who go out to work, come home and still carry the prime responsibility for caring
“It is possible the predominant role is neither one nor the other, but a part-time worker who is also a part-time, stay-at-home mum.”
And although the numbers seem stacked in women’s favour, Dr Naudi thinks they are slightly misleading, as women studying accountancy, banking, finance and insurance are modern successors to those who would study secretarial skills a generation before – and still find work as secretaries, only now with a degree in their chosen field.
“I think that what has happened is that women have started going to University, many more are graduating definitely with a first degree, but fewer with a Master’s and even fewer with a PhD.
“As we go up the hierarchy, the trend is that women decrease and the men increase.”
The same trend can be seen within teaching, she says, with women far outnumbering men in kindergartens and primary schools but the proportions start to switch at secondary school and male teachers are more numerous at college and university level.
Even law, once accepted as a ‘male’ profession, attracts more female students but Dr Naudi thinks a maternal urge is behind this too.
“One of the advantages of law is that once you have graduated there is a certain amount of flexibility in the job,” she says.
“It allows you to arrange your hours, to work for yourself or with a firm and still enjoy flexibility. Because women still remain the gender that bears the prime responsibility for the caring elements of the family.”
Getting women into the labour market is a major concern for the government: it is introducing a free childcare scheme for working parents and a consultation to encourage firms to hire up to 9,500 women on social benefits.
But for Dr Naudi, the issue is not getting women to work, but getting them into senior roles: “Based on the previous trends, what I have been waiting for years is to see women in higher positions in employment in Malta.
“We have had more women in tertiary education than men for so long now that I’ve been waiting for these women to work their way up into the top of the ship.
“I won’t say it has not happened at all, but it has hardly happened, certainly not as much as you would expect, so I hope that in 10 years’ time that those women will have by then at least worked their way to higher positions within the labour market,” she says.