Oct. 4, 2022 "Employers are missing out on this pool of potential employees eager to work": Today I found this article by Victoria Wells on the Financial Post:
Businesses looking to fill record job vacancies amid a wave of retirements and a skilled-worker shortage have been forced to seek out new sources of labour. Though immigrants are often touted as one solution, there’s another potential pool of unemployed workers out there: mothers of young children who want to re-enter the workforce.
Of course, getting them back to work is easier said than done. Mothers face greater barriers when trying to get back to work than fathers, and the younger the children, the bigger the challenge, says a recent C.D. Howe Institute study: Uneven Odds: Men, Women and the Obstacles to Getting Back to Work with Kids.
Authors Tammy Schirle, Ana Ferrer and Annie (Yazhuo) Pan analyzed Statistics Canada labour force survey data of married parents of children aged 18 and younger and discovered, perhaps unsurprisingly, that mothers with children under the age of one had the lowest probability of going back to work.
As children age, women are more likely to be working again, and by the time a child is aged seven or older, mothers are six percentage points more likely to be employed than women with two-year-olds.
The same can’t be said for fathers, however. The age of their children has no bearing on when they re-entered the labour force, highlighting the gap that exists between men and women when it comes to managing children and finding work.
It’s unlikely this study will surprise mothers. Women have historically borne the brunt of child care and home duties, something made even more obvious during the pandemic. As lockdowns hit in 2020, women dropped out of the workforce in droves after layoffs hit their families. Some also exited to provide care for kids stuck at home amid school and daycare closures.
Women lost 63 per cent of all jobs after the economy shut down in March 2020, resulting in a “she-cession,” says economist Armine Yalnizyann in a piece published by the Financial Post in October 2020. But when lockdowns eased, schools reopened and jobs returned, women remained out of luck compared to men. In September 2020, there were still 350,000 missing jobs. Of those, 85 per cent were once held by women, she says.
“There will be no recovery without a she-covery, and no she-covery without child care,” Yalnizyann said at the time.
The labour force participation rate among women has since bounced back to just above pre-pandemic levels, and in August 2022 came in at 84.4 per cent, 0.8 percentage points higher than in February 2020, Statistics Canada data shows.
However, affordable child care remains a critical factor holding women back from participating in the labour market, according to C.D. Howe.
It’s also a key reason why the federal government introduced its $10-a-day child-care program in 2021.
“COVID-19 has brutally exposed something women have long known: Without child care, parents — usually mothers — can’t work,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said when the plan was announced.
But if Canada is to succeed in getting mothers back to work, there are other areas that need addressing beyond child care, C.D. Howe says.
Fair pay is one. In 2021, women made an average of 89 cents for every dollar brought in by men, Statistics Canada data shows.
Closing that gap will bring more women into the labour market, C.D. Howe says. In addition, it recommends government offer mothers payouts to recoup costs associated with searching for a job — such as transportation and, yes, child care — and invest more money into programs that provide training to women.
Canada’s population is aging, and the wave of retirements isn’t likely to dissipate any time soon, so the existing labour shortages will be with us for longer. But there’s a whole pool of people who want to get back to work if only they had support. Getting more mothers into the workforce should be something employers and governments can both agree on.
• Email: vwells@postmedia.com | Twitter: vwells80
Employers missing out on this pool of potential labour eager to work | Financial Post
Stop them from having kids in the first place - problem solved - profits restored!
So the claim here is basically that any woman with a child under one year old is "eager" to go back to the paid work force, instead of being a stay-at-home parent.
Is there evidence for this rather startling assumption?
Given the expansion in recent years of parental leave it seems the logical conclusion is that many mothers (and some fathers too) are quite keen to have very young children largely cared for by family.
It seems both the original C.D. Howe study and this author parroting the results are a little too keen to entirely dismiss the preferences of the people involved.
Indeed the C.D. Howe study acknowledges personal preference as a factor, and yet immediately dismisses it as worthy of consideration because ", these preferences are not easily measured to determine their relative importance in decision-making".
"Women have historically borne the brunt of child care and home duties" And men have borne the burnt of labour market work and home maintenance duties. Gees, the sexism is rampant everywhere.
"In 2021, women made an average of 89 cents for every dollar brought in by men, Statistics Canada data shows."
Other than the ridiculousness of such a comparison, if women worked the same hours in the same profession women will earn the same as men, except, on average, women won't.
As demonstrated with doctors in Ontario where the pay is based on productivity, women earn less than men because they do less work as the prefers fewer hours.
Oct. 10, 2022 "The pandemic changed how we work. Now, mothers want it to stay that way": Today I found this article by Kiernan Green on CBC:
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Brianna Shereck was at odds between getting ahead in her career and caring for her two pre-school aged children.
"If you've ever had kids in daycare, you're familiar that they get sick all of the time," said Shereck. In 2019, she took five weeks away from her job in Victoria's tourism industry to look after her kids.
Despite the ease with which she said she could fulfil her role as marketing co-ordinator from home, Shereck said her company barred her from working remotely. She was let go following the pandemic's blow to Victoria's tourism industry. Today, she works entirely remotely for a Saskatoon-based retirement firm.
Shereck said neither she nor her husband, who works remotely in tech, could go back to traditional work while they have young children.
Pandemic introduced positive changes
Before the pandemic, she said there was "unspoken confusion" if she needed to work from home for the sake of her children. Now, Shereck said there's a better understanding about the lack of child-care options and the need to work remotely.
"I feel like there's been a massive social shift. People understand that you also have a family."
The number of Canadians working exclusively from home fell from almost 25 per cent at the beginning of 2022 to nearly 17 per cent in August, according to that month's Statistics Canada labour force survey.
In August 2020, a third of the Canadian workforce was concerned about returning to normal working conditions, according to StatsCan — of that number, half were mothers whose youngest children were younger than six.
As many Canadian workplaces mandate their employees to return to the office, Odette Hutchings, chief operating officer for the Women in Capital Markets (WCM) network, said they shouldn't miss an unprecedented opportunity to make the inclusion of new mothers in the workforce a legacy of the pandemic.
WCM's The Future of Work in Finance Report, conducted throughout February and March, found that work flexibility was a critical need for those caring for children under six years old. Sixty-seven per cent of 417 surveyed finance workers — 82 per cent of whom were women contacted through WCM's online network — said they found remote work allowed them to have flexibility without sacrificing productivity.
"Working from home helps women balance those responsibilities while still being able to perform their job at the same level," said Hutchings. "We're really at this golden opportunity to make workplaces more inclusive, more flexible and more welcoming to all kinds of people."
Having young kids makes return to work difficult
A Sept. 15 study from Canadian economics research organization the C.D. Howe Institute titled Uneven Odds: Men, Women and the Obstacles to Getting Back to Work with Kids, showed that having young children made the search for employment more difficult for mothers than fathers.
Women with two-year-old children were six per cent less likely to reenter the workforce than those with kids seven and older. For men, the age of their children was largely irrelevant to their reentry into the workforce.
Tiffany Cowper, a Victoria mother on maternity leave until November 2023, is worried about returning to work given the extra responsibility she's assumed for her three step children and her newborn.
"Before the pandemic hit, your kids are used to only having this percentage of access to you. When the pandemic hit, it didn't increase a little bit — I was with them all day, everyday," said Cowper, referring to the time she spent helping the kids with remote school and nightly homemade dinners.
What's more, the rising cost of living in Victoria could make returning to work more expensive than it's worth for her family of five.
The cost of food, shelter, transportation and other expenses included in Canada's consumer price index increased seven per cent in August over last year, according to StatsCan.
"If we're going to be spending more on me going into the office, in addition to full-time daycare, we might be putting out more than we're getting or breaking even. It seems to cost time and money just to go back to work. At that point, is it worth it?" asked Cowper. "It's a really hard position to be in."
Although her office doesn't endorse remote work, Cowper said being able to work from home would be "the absolute best case scenario."
Companies should model shift
According to Hutchings, the first step to ensuring mothers are included in the workforce is to avoid remote or hybrid work options that are tied to complex permission procedures.
"If these flexible work arrangements are so complicated to access that employees aren't making use of them, then obviously that's not useful," she said.
Parental leave should also be equalized for both caretakers, said Hutchings, noting that when mothers have access to longer parental leave benefits than fathers, it implies that women are expected to take time off at a higher rate than men.
For organizations to truly embrace the shift, company leadership needs to not only enforce equal use of parental leave and flexible or remote work options, but model its use themselves, she said.
"It's not enough to say [mothers] can access flexible work, meanwhile all of the leadership are going in five days a week."
Likewise, Hutchings said management needs to limit the amount of correspondence that occurs after work hours, when caregivers are typically occupied with home life.
"We have an opportunity to make a better working life for all people going forward," said Hutchings. "But if we don't take the opportunity now, we could really see that slip away from us."
The pandemic changed how we work. Now, mothers want it to stay that way | CBC News
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