Statistics out last week showed that a substantial gender pay gap, of 12 per cent, still exists in Malta, as it does in other EU countries. Perhaps even more worrying, however, is that the gap appears even wider when it comes to non-monetary issues. Women are getting the brunt of the burdens and the burnout from the efforts required to fulfil both work and family responsibilities.
The ‘Gender Equality Index 2019: Work-Life Balance’ confirms that working women all over the EU still take on more family responsibilities than men. Among Maltese couples with children, for instance, women are much more involved in daily care activities (85 per cent compared to 58 per cent). Around 81 per cent of women do cooking and housework every day for at least one hour compared to just 37 per cent of men. Meanwhile, Maltese women are more educated than ever but only have a nine per cent representation on boards of the largest publicly listed companies.
A recent New York Times article blamed the “always on” culture; a culture of overwork as a result of which both genders are suffering. But at a time of ever-growing financial needs and aspirations, the highest price is being paid by women, especially mothers. Take, for example, a man and a woman who met while studying law and both became lawyers. Ten years later a gender gap will have opened, especially if they have become parents. As the NY Times put it, “parents can be on call at work only if someone is on call at home. Usually, that person is the mother”.
Even if men are starting to contribute more to the home, women still tend to be the ones who sacrifice leisure time, career ambitions and rest at the altar of family responsibilities. And given the pay gap, for a woman to earn as much as a man she must often work extreme hours, finishing work after the children are in bed asleep. Meanwhile the man works long hours to justify the higher salary he needs to maintain his family’s standard of living – foregoing time with that family.
Are there solutions? Improved parental leave, free childcare, longer school days and shorter school holidays could all help the cause of work-family balance. As might allowing parents to use their sick leave to care for a sick child at home, with adequate safeguards against abuse.
But according to research, the real solution lies in a re-organisation of work. In short, employers need to be more flexible; they need to change their mindset, deploy technology and make better use of approaches such as work from home and job sharing.
Unfortunately, the EU report shows that access to flexible working arrangements is lower in Malta than in the EU. Is it any wonder that Malta has a low fertility rate, of 1.26, when a population needs a rate of 2.1 to remain stable?
What needs to be understood is that achieving a work-life balance is not beneficial only to employees. The well-being of a company is hardly promoted when a substantial part of its workforce is distracted and exhausted trying to cope with the demands of everyday living.
If all people do in life is work – both at the workplace and at home – there would be nothing worth working for anymore.