Bringing choice to worlds of work and family

Last weekend a conference was held in Lismullin Conference Centre in Co Meath on the theme of Women, Work and the Family. Leafing idly through the daunting seven-page CV of one of the speakers, 43-year-old Norwegian Janne Haaland-Matlary, I was taken by the fact that her four periods of maternity leave were given exactly the same prominence as, say, her time as State Secretary for Foreign Affairs in Norway from 1997 to 2000.

Janne Haaland-Matlary elaborated on this in her speech. When she applied for her present position as Professor of International Politics in the University of Oslo, she was shortlisted with a male candidate. They were told that they were equally qualified on the academic front. Ms Haaland-Matlary was taken aback, since the man was six years her junior. How on earth could he have achieved the same as she had, given that he had had six years less to do it?

So she sat down and added up as follows. Four children times nine months' pregnancy made three years. Four children times nine months' breast-feeding, another three years. Together that was six years. In addition, at least two more years of staying at home with the babies beyond the breast-feeding. In short, she had accomplished more than her male competitor when all the time spent in child-bearing and child-rearing was subtracted.

She made this point to the selection committee, which took it seriously and awarded her the job.

The reaction from the audience, at least where I was sitting, was interesting. Applause and laughter that someone, somewhere had finally recognised that childbearing and child-rearing were work. And a frank disbelief that it would be ever counted in this way in Ireland.

Janne Haaland-Matlary is the author of a book called A Time to Blossom - A New Feminism, which has been published in several European countries. One key question underpins the book: what constitutes the good life for women? She believes that what she calls the old feminism has never formulated an answer to that, so busy has it been cataloguing the multiple ways in which women are oppressed.

Janne Haaland-Matlary says that three spheres are essential for women's happiness: the family, the world of work and the public-political sphere.

She believes that the contribution of women is essential to all three. The days of the male breadwinner are gone, because with the advent of better education women will want to pursue careers. But this often leads to unbearable pressures.

She pointed out that in Norway 50 per cent of political candidates are women, resulting in about 40 per cent representation of women in public life. It sounds wonderful, until she revealed that women are leaving politics because they realise that, while many people can work in public life, being a mother to children is irreplaceable. Politics has not adapted to the needs of women or men who want to take parenting seriously.

She also explained that while there is a strong representation of women in politics and the public sector, women are still absent from power in business. In the private sector the pressure is to conform to the traditional male work patterns of being married to the job and working long hours.

She told of a fascinating ideological battle in Norway about direct payments to parents. Norway has wonderful maternity leave of up to a year, with job security guaranteed.

But after that, the automatic assumption is that the child will go to state-subsidised kindergarten, and there are enormous pressures on women to conform and to return to paid work quickly. In short, IBEC's dream situation, aside from the maternity leave, that is.

But when Janne Haaland-Matlary's party, the Christian Democrats, were in power, they proposed that parents should receive directly the equivalent of what kindergarten costs until the child was three.

Thus, parents could make their own decisions about childcare, and any parent who wanted to stay at home would have some help to do so. The proposal was painted as regressive, as putting back the emancipation of women by 20 years, as a disaster. The idea of choice for women in how they reared their children was immensely threatening, it seems.

When the scheme was finally passed, up to 80 per cent availed of direct payment rather than opting for an automatic kindergarten place. Not all chose to stay at home: some decided to employ someone to look after the children in the home instead. Remember, this is in Scandinavia, the home of quality affordable childcare in creche-style situations. But when given a real choice, parents chose to have their children minded in their own home.

Maybe that should give us pause for thought. Given that we have made so little provision for childcare in this country, that gives us an opportunity to get things right. That must involve workplace flexibility first. Of course, that should not be confined to women only. Younger Norwegian men who are parents are increasingly less willing to tolerate the endless hours at work which seem to be required for advancement.

Interestingly, the need for flexibility in the work place was echoed by one of the other speakers, political journalist Emily O'Reilly, who candidly admitted that had she been in a profession with more nine-to-five hours, her ability to juggle a career with five children would have been much more limited.

But she was equally candid that she has three childminders, one in the mornings, one from noon to 6 p.m. and one who steps in when the other two are sick or for babysitting. She feels that she has been privileged to re-create a modern version of the extended family as all three women are now like part of the family. But it does put into perspective the cost and juggling involved in really replacing a mother in the home.

Both Janne Haaland-Matlary and Finola Bruton emphasised the fundamental differences between the sexes. Finola Bruton has an incomparable ability to criticise the Zeit- geist, and better still the courage to do so. While acknowledging that social construction has some role to play in how we are socialised into roles as women and men, in a few well-crafted sentences she demolished the argument that social construction is the key factor. She did so by appealing to the sensual and the physical.

Since all experience comes to us through the body, no two people can experience life in quite the same way. But given that men's and women's bodies are so obviously different, as a direct result they experience the world in different ways. Any ideology which would seek to deny that fundamental difference is desexed, depersonalised and disembodied.

Finola Bruton also made one of the best suggestions I have heard all year, that the words "deeply offensive" should be banned from civilised discourse.

Now there's a radical proposal.

bobrien@irish-times.ie