Should women juggle work and childcare? Give up work to look after their children? Or give up having children and opt for straight and narrow career paths? If women do have children, should the government pay for childcare? Or should husbands? Or should mothers themselves? The motherhood debate rages on. Yet the only thing to have become clear is that there simply isn’t a single, feasible solution to the conundrum. We are better off acknowledging this and rather than attempting - and failing - to come up with a miracle policy, striving to facilitate varying options.
New evidence from the US’s Universities of California and North Carolina highlights how social policy is floundering in its attempt to come up with a solution to the work/childcare balance which is universally satisfactory. One of the conclusions from Makiko Fuwa (University of California) and Philip N. Cohen’s (University of North Carolina) ‘Homework and social policy’ (available from the online research archive, sciencedirect.com) is that although facilitating extensive maternity leave may appear to be the way to mitigate gender inequity in the labour force, as well as inequity in the division of housework, Fuwa and Cohen demonstrate that doing so can also backfire in terms of equality of opportunity. A significant contributor to the pay gap between men and women, both in the US and in this country, is the greater ‘liability’ women present to employers: they are more likely to go on paid leave. For employers, paid leave means not just forking out for an absent employee, it means also having to substitute them temporarily, and then later re-train them on their return. Longer maternity leave, therefore, depletes female human capital even further. As Fuwa and Cohen comment, ‘… workers are presumed to be without family responsibilities,’ and therefore rights, particularly when they are solely for one gender, can be a handicap. Fuwa and Cohen also conclude that ‘… parental leave policy may actually weaken the housework bargaining power women get from full-time employment, by helping to maintain women’s primary role as mothers even when they are employed.’ Thus, policy makers must think carefully before providing what they determine to be the overarching solution to gender inequality and the work/childcare dilemma.
Comments (1)
Reduce house prices and housing costs. The economy currently runs on house prices. We have shrunk our industrial capacity.
Then, and only then, families will not be put under ridiculous financial pressure just to keep a roof over their head. Then families could decide for themselves how they work their lives.
Options in parenting for many will only truly exist if housing costs come down. Then we might see both parents being hands-on and or working part time.
I think it is wrong that parents are forced to both go out to work, take on second jobs, just to pay a mortgage and struggle to make ends meet. We are not Victorians. And the Victorian era was not a golden age for women, men or children!
Posted by John Niewald | December 18, 2007 11:42 AM
Posted on December 18, 2007 11:42