Women and work policies unfair, conference told

SOCIAL POLICIES that assume all women want to work are unfair and act against the wishes of most women, a conference in Dublin on women, home and work has been told.

Dr Catherine Hakim, sociologist and author from the London School of Economics, said that while such policies may be an attempt to promote gender equality, they had never worked.

She told the conference in Dublin yesterday, organised by the Iona Institute, that the myth that mothers had no other goal than to get back to work as soon as possible after having children, was wrong.

Social policies that assumed all women want to work were unfair and against the wishes of most women, she said, and could also be incompatible with quality care for children.

She said when women in Britain were asked about their preferences, only 20 per cent were “career-orientated”, 20 per cent wanted to focus on family life and child-rearing and 60 per cent wanted to combine both.

Dr Hakim also said most parents wished to avoid formal collective childcare.

She criticised the Swedish model, which provides highly subsidised childcare from 12 months on so that women can return to work. It was held up in Europe as a utopia, she said, but in fact it had not delivered gender equality

Sweden had the greatest level of job segregation in Europe and its pay gap was the same as other European countries.

She criticised academia, saying there was a lack of emphasis on family research and too great a focus on gender equality.

The Iona Institute has described itself as a pro-family think tank.

Jonas Himmelstrand, director of the Mireja Institute of Sweden, told the conference that 92 per cent of children aged 18 months to five years were in full-time day care in Sweden.

Full-time day care and dual-earner households were strongly encouraged both financially and culturally, he said, while home care was discouraged and the tax system made it impossible for women not to work.

The result of the policy, introduced in 1975, included “plummeting psychological health in Swedish youth”, Mr Himmelstrand added.

There were also poor academic results, severe discipline problems in schools, high rates of sick leave in women and a deterioration in parenting abilities.

“In Sweden today, childcare is ruled more by economics and political ideology than by parental love,” he said.

Chairing the conference, Finola Bruton, wife of former taoiseach John Bruton, said resources going into gender studies needed to be devoted “as much to the number of men on the dole as to the number of women in the boardrooms”.

The unemployment rate for Irish men was 70 per cent higher than for women, she said. She called on the National Economic and Social Council to initiate a study to find out why unemployment was affecting men so severely.