I'm posting this in honor of International Women's Day which is Mar. 8.
Jun. 6, 2023 "Child care keeping women out of workforce despite COVID rebound: Report": Today I found this article by BNN Bloomberg:
Canadian women’s employment has rebounded since the losses of the early COVID-19 pandemic, but workforce gaps between women and men persist and child care is a significant sticking point, according to a new report.
Authors of the C.D. Howe Institute report titled ‘Juggling Act: Women, Work and Closing the Gaps with Men’ recommended flexible work options and accessible, affordable child care as options to help address Canada’s workplace gender imbalance.
“Reducing disparities in gender participation and employment rates and encouraging women to work in in-demand and high-paying jobs
would help mitigate aging’s impact on
Canada’s labour force growth,
address labour and skills shortages,
and strengthen the economy,”
Tingting Zhang, one of the report’s authors, said in written statement.
“This requires encouraging greater labour force participation and removing employment barriers for women who wish to work, especially older women and those with children.”
COVID ‘SHE-CESSION’
The report, released Tuesday, looked at Canadian women’s labour force participation before and after the pandemic.
During Canada’s “deepest, but also shortest downturn on record” from March to the end of April 2020,
women’s employment in the country fell by more than 17.6 per cent, seeing more than 1.6 million women leave the workforce.
Job losses were more significant for women than men because they disproportionately worked in sectors affected by COVID-19 shutdowns like the service industry, tourism, education and child care.
Women are also more likely to take on caregiving duties, the report noted.
Child care was a major factor in the gender employment patterns. The biggest decline in labour participation was among women with school-aged children, and the gender employment gap was largest for parents with young children.
Women’s employment had bounced back and made a full recovery by September 2021. As of February, women’s employment had exceeded February 2020 levels by five per cent.
Women had also switched into different industries, with fewer women working in food services and accommodation, and more in professional and technical services – “however, these shifts did not make a significant improvement in industrial and occupational gender imbalances” compared 2019.
PERSISTENT GAPS
Despite improvements since the employment losses of 2020, the researchers noted lasting gaps in employment statistics between Canadian women and men.
It noted that the employment gap has narrowed over the last several decades, but women’s labour force participation has “plateaued” since the beginning of the 21st century.
Women’s employment rose to 62 per cent in the early 2000s from 45.7 per cent in the 1970s.
But women’s participation rate was stuck at 61.5 per cent in 2022, and the labour force participation gap between genders was at eight percentage points in 2022.
The participation gap is largest for women aged 55 and older, according to the report.
Women are also overrepresented in the part-time workforce,
and child care remains a barrier to full-time work.
Among women who aren’t working, personal and family responsibilities have been cited as a main reason keeping them out of the workforce,
and women working part time reported that child care was the main reason they are not able to work full time.
There is also a large workplace participation gap between men and women between the ages of 25 and 54 with children. The gap is largest at 18.4 percentage points for people who have children aged five years old and younger.
However, the report highlighted “good news” as there were noticeable improvements for working mothers in 2022, and cited research from the Bank of Canada that suggested federal policies with universal child-care targets helping more mothers enter the workforce.
The “child-care factor” keeping part-time employed women from full-time jobs was lowest in Quebec, which has had subsidized child care since 1997,
“highlighting the role of accessing affordable child care in women’s employment decisions.”
RECOMMENDATIONS: CHILD CARE, FLEXIBLE WORK AND STEM TRAINING
The C.D. Howe researchers zeroed in on three recommended areas to boost women’s workforce participation:
flexible work arrangements,
affordable and accessible child care
and skills training to bring women into STEM fields and trades.
They noted that labour shortages have been challenging efforts to scale up affordable child-care offerings across Canadian provinces, and recommended funding to raise wages for early childhood educators in order to attract and retain them in the field.
It also suggested employers offer workplace-based child care to attract more woman workers.
Flexible work arrangements
like remote work
and flexible hours
would also help retain women, the report said, and help people in caregiving roles thrive in the workplaces.
It would also help improve employment numbers for older women who may want to work reduced hours, the report added, which could be a boon to businesses looking to fill job vacancies.
“It is important to continue applying a gender lens to designing social programs and labour market policy, post-pandemic,” the report said.
“Investments in the labour market outcomes of women are essential to Canada’s continuous prosperity and inclusive growth.”
Mar. 8, 2024 "Not just a glass ceiling: Working moms on the 'maternal wall' that can stall careers": Today I found this article by Tara Deschamps on BNN Bloomberg:
When Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin went into labour with her second child early, she was in the middle of grading her students' work.
“My closest friend was telling me to go to the hospital. My partner was like, ‘Let’s go to the hospital,’ but I’m like, ‘No, I have to finish this because once I have this baby, I don’t know how I’m going to do it,’” the Queen's University associate professor recalled.
“This is how wild it can be sometimes because you don’t want to feel like oh, I’m not doing my work.”
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin’s insistence on finishing her marking despite being on the cusp of one of her family's most important moments was a product of the pressure she and other women feel when juggling motherhood and their careers.
The challenges they encounter form what some call a "maternal wall:" the ways that negative perceptions of mothers in the workforce can block opportunities for career advancement.
For many, the maternal wall crops up when employers and peers start to doubt their ability to do their jobs because they're also raising kids.
A 2023 report from international non-profit Mothers in Science found one-third of women working in the sciences while raising children had their competence questioned by employers and colleagues after becoming a parent.
But the phenomenon is not contained to a particular field.
"It's shocking how prevalent it is," said Allison Venditti, founder of advocacy group Moms at Work.
You might assume there would be less of it in areas like health care, which have historically employed a higher number of women, but there are examples of it everywhere, she said.
It even affects women who aren't pregnant and don't have kids, Venditti said, because many see them as a "breeding horse" as soon they hit the typical child-bearing years.
"People are looking at you going, 'I wonder when she's going to have a kid,'" Venditti said.
"I've had conversations with the human resources person when people are looking at layoffs and whatever and they're like, 'Well, how many more good years does she have left?'"
If women have kids, Venditti said they are frequently become the "default" for childcare and housework, but their employers often view these responsibilities as a distraction from work. If the demands of child-rearing become too steep, mothers are commonly expected to put their careers aside.
"When couples are having these discussions about whose job to protect ... they're focusing on the person who's making more money and that is predominantly men," Venditti said.
Statistics Canada found women between the ages of 25 and 54 earned 89 cents for every dollar made by men in 2021.
Those who take time off for caregiving often find the wage gap is even larger because their absence can affect seniority and the opportunities open to them.
Some companies are trying to help with the challenges of motherhood.
Apparel brand Patagonia, for example, provides workers with on-site child care at its headquarters and one of its distribution centres.
Consulting firm PwC offers
maternity top-ups for birth mothers,
financial support for parents who adopt children,
fertility coverage
and parental leave coaching
aimed at helping workers focus on their family while away and then return to work with their long-term career goals in mind.
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research reimburses individuals with a dependent under the age of 12 for costs associated with childcare when it holds meetings.
However, Adeniyi-Ogunyankin still sees hurdles in areas like research travel.
“If you're going to go away and do research, you can't just go there for a week or two weeks in order to get something substantial,” said Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, a CIFAR fellow who researches the politics of gender and neoliberal urbanism in two Nigerian cities.
"To understand the context, you need to be there for months at a time ... so that becomes challenging when you have kids."
She's contemplating what to do with her kids if she is able to travel to Nigeria. Plane tickets would cost $2,000 per child and she’d have to cover daycare fees to keep one of her kids from losing their spot.
But she's made her career and child care work several times before.
When she was interviewing for a job while one of her children was a few months old, she heard a common refrain: don’t let people know you have a child.
“I decided not to do that,” she said. "I was like, 'I have a three-month-old, so you need to schedule some breaks in for me.'”
She has brought her baby to presentations and dinners during the recruitment process. She figures it was more acceptable because she's in the gender studies field, but still argues "we don't need to make that part of ourselves invisible."
Jessica Metcalf, a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar who teaches at Colorado State University, agrees. She strives to be a role model for others aspiring to pursue academia and have kids.
Doing both means sometimes making "hard decisions" because "the reality is I can't do everything," she said.
"I have to do in 40 hours a week, what some people have 50 or 60 hours a week to do," she said, noting she can't catch up on work during the weekend because she has to care for her kids then.
"I always joke, if I was as efficient as I am now when I was in grad school, I would have finished in, like, half the time."
To manage the demands of work and motherhood, Metcalf hired a sleep consultant to smooth out her kids' bedtime so she isn't awoken several times in the night, and feverishly uses her calendar.
She sees signs that conditions are improving for working mothers. Her employer, for example, is exploring a pilot project which could offer financial support or temporary caregiving during research periods.
But supporting working moms can't come solely from small policy changes, Venditti said. It has to come from companies' operating ethos or from a new generation dramatically improving the work situation for the next one.
"When women run companies, when people start companies because of the way they were treated, magic happens," she said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 8, 2024.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/working-moms-on-the-maternal-wall-that-can-stall-careers-1.2044299
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