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.