New Year's resolution

"Full equality on the labour market between men and women will only be attained if working fathers take more responsibility in family affairs, such as looking after their children", said Vladimír Špidla, Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. Hear, hear!

Under new rules agreed by EU ministers on December 1, which are to be adopted in the coming months, parents will have the right to longer parental leave. The European Commission said that the revised Directive on Parental Leave will give each working parent, fathers included, the right to at least four months leave after the birth or adoption of a child (up from three months now). This augurs well for Maltese mothers whose place is in the home, according to some males' archaic mentality!

The agreement will also, hopefully, encourage employers to implement the new rules that will apply to all workers, regardless of their type of contract, be it fixed-term, part-time, agency workers etc.

Apart from proposing longer parental leave, the new rules will ensure that no discrimination exists between workers who do take up parental leave as opposed to those who do not. Furthermore, employers, balancing the needs of the company and of the employees, should offer temporary changes to work schedules to employees returning from parental leave who will have the right to request alterations to their working hours for a limited period. Employers will also assess specific needs of parents of adopted children and children with a disability or long-term illness. It is important to note that all matters regarding the income of workers during parental leave are left up to the member states and/or national social partners to determine.

Putting it mildly, Malta is not faring any better than her European counterparts. In a nutshell, The Times editorial of December 14 said it all: "Sadly, it is not just in the field of politics that Malta is backwards. When it comes to the failure of having women in top positions, this malady afflicts every sector and one survey after another keeps confirming this."

Although Malta's seven per cent unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the European Union, lying 3.8 per cent below the EU average, we have slipped six places in the Global Gender Gap Report for 2009 compiled by the World Economic Forum. To quote timesofmalta.com (October 28): "The section on Malta shows sharp disparities between men and women on political empowerment, labour force participation, earned income, the proportion of legislators, senior officials, managers, professionals and technical workers."

I believe the government has offered several opportunities and incentives to encourage females to join or lure them back to the labour force. In fact, since 2006, the government has given €3.2 million in income tax refunds to women who chose to take up the scheme and started working again.

The Nationalist government has also steadily invested heavily in education. It has not only modernised its schools, it opened many more state-of-the-art environmentally-friendly colleges and more child day centres. It has raised the standards of the teaching environment and distributed thousands of laptops to teachers, administrators, classrooms and laboratories. It has offered 540 scholarship schemes over the last four years and some 15,000 students are benefiting from €21 million every year in stipends.

Happily, Malta's percentage of four-year-olds attending kindergartens stands at a remarkable 95.5 per cent. This is nine per cent above the EU average. Although the percentage of early school leavers is slowly but steadily falling, from 55 per cent in 1999 to 32 per cent in 2008, it is still 32 per cent too high. It is indeed encouraging to note that the number of female students at the University has surpassed the male population.

Although the future augurs well, there is no doubt that many mothers still opt to stay at home. More importantly, the few women who do work seem to fail to reach the top in most sectors! So, why are they lagging behind? Why are their talents not being recognised and rewarded? Could it be that the "traditional" chauvinist mentality in this man's world is still rearing its head and acting as a deterrent to having men bow their heads to a female boss?

Yes, I have a niggling feeling that there is still much covert gender discrimination in Malta and, more often than not, merit falls by the wayside. Perhaps in the following definition of the word meritocracy, in Malta we should add the word "gender" to favouritism: "Meritocracy is a system of a government or other organisation wherein appointments are made and responsibilities assigned based on demonstrated talent and ability rather than by wealth, family connections, class, friendship, seniority, popularity or other historical determinants of social position and political power. In a meritocracy, society rewards those who show talent and competence as demonstrated by past actions or by competition."

We are on the threshold of the year 2010 and, perhaps, one of our New Year's resolutions should be to commit ourselves, boys please note, to doing our utmost to change our mentality and eliminate all forms of gender discrimination, once and for all, everywhere and at all times.