What women need are jobs, training and the will to work, not childcare

Daphne Caruana Galizia Sunday, 10 November 2013, 10:49 Last update: about 11 years ago

Once more, childcare is being touted as the solution to the problem of Maltese women’s low participation in the workforce. I have read the facts, figures and comments swirling around the government’s childcare proposals in last week’s budget speech, and cannot reconcile them. Put simply, little of it makes any sense.

We are told that by providing free childcare, the government will be encouraging women into the workforce. In the next breath, we are told that the main problem lies with women over 40. But women over 40 don’t need childcare – our children are at school or university by then; some of them are even working. What women over 40 do need, especially if they have been out of the job market since their late 20s, are jobs, training and above all, the will to work. All three factors are crucial, and all three are interwoven and interdependent.

Women who go back into the workforce in their 40s, after raising a family and keeping house, are competing for jobs with people half their age who are better trained and far more up to speed with current systems. And they don’t stand a chance unless somebody especially wants to do them a favour, perhaps because they are a friend. There are two solutions to this: state-sponsored incentives for those who employ women (call it ‘home-makers’ to get round gender discrimination rules) returning to the workforce, and training to equip women to compete and survive. But none of this is ever going to get results, even if everything is put in place and laid out on a silver platter, without the most important factor: the will to work.

All too often we seek to blame external factors for women’s lack of participation in the workforce, because it is more convenient to do so than to face the truth that most women over 40 don’t want to work. They have become accustomed to their freedom and making their own routine, and they won’t plunge back into the nine-to-five unless they absolutely have to for financial reasons. Even then, they would most times much rather get by on one income than sacrifice their freedom to be able to buy more on two incomes. We speak of fulfilment, but the fact is that most jobs are boring and many women have a more comfortable and interesting life outside shops or offices, a life built around friends, socialising, taking their time doing their chores and errands, and pretty much making their own day. Women who work wonder what women who don’t work do all day and why they don’t go berserk doing it. But women who don’t work wonder why other women bother working and why they put themselves through all that hassle when they could avoid it and have a much easier life.

The erroneous assumption is often made that the older children grow, the more interested women become in returning to work, because they have more free time and the children can fend for themselves. But the opposite is true. When women find themselves with their routine easing up and fewer demands on their time, often the last thing they want to do is dive headlong into a replacement high-pressure scenario of paid work. Instead, they prefer to enjoy their newfound ‘me’ time. After a few years of doing this, one naturally becomes accustomed to it, and to being mistress of one’s own day. It becomes virtually impossible to adjust to being in the office at the appointed hour until the required hour for departure, being told by others what to do, and forever having a pile of tasks that has to be got through. And even if, after those few years of ‘me time’, a woman decides she wishes to find something else to do, by then it’s generally too late. The workforce is packed with women (and men, for that matter) half her age and with a contemporary skill-set. She has missed the boat.

With remarkably few exceptions, the women among my contemporaries who are working are those who never stopped. They never left the job market and they never had to get back into it. They are by far the minority. Those who did leave the job market – the great majority – have long since made not working a way of life. Years and years of ordering one’s own day quite literally change one’s personality and psychology – it becomes difficult to adjust to the discipline of an office routine, the demands of a boss and cooperation with co-workers.

In any case, none of these are in the childcare bracket or even the ‘breakfast club’ bracket. And that, too, seems rather half-hearted. There is no point in being able to take children to school earlier than the norm if you can’t also pick them up later than the norm from an ‘after school club’. Most jobs do not end with school hours. Anna Borg of the University of Malta’s Centre for Labour Studies told the press: “It’s a good move, but things need to be seen as a whole – if there is a before-school service then it’s important to have after-school activities and I didn’t hear these mentioned in the budget.”

However good the childcare facilities, the bottom line is that there is no point in having them unless there are jobs for women and unless women are trained to do them. If a woman is trained for nothing and has been out of the job market for years, no amount of childcare or breakfast club facilities are going to make her employable.

Women who have been out of the job market for 15 to 20 years have basically had it; they are unemployable. Childcare and breakfast clubs are not the reason they don’t work. They are beyond that. The only schemes that will help are those to do with training and employment incentives. But if women over 40 are more comfortable not working, then we have to accept that it’s too late, it’s their choice, and perhaps the next generation will be different.