Women, family, and the labor market - is care free of charge?

By Ema Stepanovic posted 04-01-2022 20:33

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“No man can call himself a liberal, radical, or conservative

advocate of fair play if his work depends in any way

on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home or in the office.”

Gloria Steinem

The economy as we know it rests on the backs of unpaid domestic work, which is performed by a disproportionately large percentage of women. The problem that this text deals with is at the same time the issue of gender equality, economic efficiency, family well-being, depopulation tendencies, and the development of society as a whole. Women in Serbia lack systematic support to reconcile their role in the family and their activities in the labor market, in a way that would enable them to fully reach their personal and professional potentials and economic independence, which is a precondition for any other form of independence.

The lack of this support is evident in the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia Labour Force Survey [1], according to which as many as 52.9% of women in Serbia are not active in the labor market. Among inactive citizens who are not looking for a job because they are providing care for children or adults - 96.8% are women and only 3.2% are men.

The Employment and Social Policy Reform Program [2], one of the key instruments in the dialogue between the Republic of Serbia and the European Union, identifies the main causes of this inactivity: unpaid domestic work, insufficient support for women and men to reconcile family and business obligations, and discrimination of young women without children, pregnant women, and mothers by their employers.

Unpaid care jobs

Both society and the labor market consider women to be predestined caregivers. The Survey on the Use of Time in Serbia [3] states that women spend twice as long on unpaid household chores (cooking, cleaning, maintenance, caring for children and elderly family members). For example, women spend almost an hour and a half on average preparing meals, while men do this for 10 minutes a day on average. All forms of unpaid work especially affect women in the countryside, who are among the most suppressed ones by society, unable to step out of their traditional gender roles. The International Labour Organization predicts that, at the current pace, the gender gap in household chores will be closed in 2228 [4]. In 208 years.

Major economic indicators such as GDP (whose validity can be widely debated) remain completely blind to unpaid care jobs. A few months ago, UN Women quantified the value of unpaid work in Serbia, estimating it at 21.5% of total GDP (out of which 14.9% is the share of women's work and 6.6% of men's work). If we were to express the average economic value of an individual's unpaid work, a woman would receive an annual gross salary of EUR 9,060 for her unpaid household work, 26% more than what a man would be paid for his unpaid work [5]. These inequalities in unpaid work between men and women within households, clearly spill over into their inequality in the labor market. It is important to understand the share of unpaid care work in total economic activity so that we can identify the scope of the problem, its implications, and public policies needed to address it.

Discriminatory practices of employers

When they are empowered enough to participate in the labor market, women face many problems trying to reconcile their professional and family roles. The annual report [6] of the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality states that in 2019, women mostly contacted this institution because of the worsening work conditions during their pregnancies and after returning from maternity leaves. The report emphasizes the practice of some employers to ask questions about family and marital status during job interviews, or automatically exclude women due to the assumption that they can't reconcile private and work obligations. In addition, after returning from maternity leave, some women are transferred to lower-level jobs with lower salaries, are not promoted, or are being fired. Employers and colleagues often do not recognize the extent of the obligations to which women with children are exposed, and single parents are particularly vulnerable in this regard.

It is necessary to promote and regulate the work culture that allows employees with children, both men and women, to reconcile work responsibilities with family dynamics - such as flexible working hours, flexible paid leave, working from home… It is crucially important to emphasize - work flexibility that addresses only the needs of mothers in this imperfect world often leads to their further discrimination and removal from the labor market. That is why it is important to introduce this measure together with the introduction of the fathers’ non-transferable right to paternity leave.

Fathers’ non-transferable right to paternity leave

According to the Law on Financial Support to Families with Children, a woman has the right to maternity leave from her job for a total period of one year. The man has the right to paternity leave as well. However, in practice, very few fathers use this right and if they do so, they are often stigmatized. Obstacles to using paternity leave, in addition to social pressure, are the men’s decision to dedicate themselves to furthering their careers development and maintaining better-paid positions they usually take. The numbers paint a sad picture: in 2019, 64,399 babies were born in Serbia [7], while only 328 fathers took paternity leave [8]. Having all this in mind, it is important to legally regulate the fathers’ non-transferable right to paternity leave. In practice, that would imply that they have the right to this leave for, let’s say, a minimum of 3 months, and they cannot transfer that right to the mother. In this way, fathers are sheltered from the social pressure that accompanies their decision to take care of their newborn child. Moreover, they have the opportunity to form a stronger relationship with the child and other family members, and to take the bigger part of unpaid household work. On the other hand, such legislation would reduce the risk of discrimination of women by employers, because both a potential young father and a potential young mother would have a guaranteed and certain leave for child care.

Let us now look at how much the state values the care for a newborn child.

Law on Financial Support to Families with Children

This law was amended in 2017 and 2018, without a public debate, through the urgent procedure, along with many citizens on the streets and the Prime Minister stating that women give birth to children so they can receive financial assistance from the state.

While the law changes seemingly expanded the right to maternity leave compensation to include women working without an employment contract, at the same time they have damaged women’s rights in multiple ways. For example, families with children with mental and physical disabilities, who are most often cared for by their mothers, must choose between their right to work and the child's right to adequate care. In their case, the mother's right to use her maternity leave allowance is revoked if the family decides to receive the allowance for another person's care based on the child's health needs.

In general, the law has significantly tightened the conditions for exercising the right to paid maternity and paternity leave and the conditions for determining the amount of financial compensation. As a result, there were situations in which women received an allowance of only a few hundred dinars a month.

By acting like this, Serbia directly violates international obligations and standards. The International Labour Organization's Maternity Protection Convention, which Serbia has ratified, says that the amount of compensation a woman receives during maternity leave "shall be no less than two-thirds of her previous earnings or a comparable amount."[9] It is of crucial importance to urgently repeal many restrictive measures of this Law, all of which are not even addressed in this text. Due to their extensiveness, they require to be addressed in a separate article.

Availability of care economy services

After the maternity leave is over, what are the options that a working woman has in front of her? Accessible and adequate care services for children and the elderly are crucial because, on one hand, they contribute to women having the same chances for professional development as men, and on the other, they help to a more fair distribution of unpaid work. According to data provided by UNICEF, about one-third of children aged 3 to 5.5 (which is the age limit after which children start the compulsory preparatory preschool program) are not covered by kindergarten services.[10] The unions warn that up to 60,000 children are already enrolled in kindergartens above the norm and that the capacities are alarmingly insufficient.[11] At the same time, the Law on Preschool Education prescribes "equal rights and accessibility" of preschool institutions as its first principle. In order to respect this principle, it is necessary to neutralize the existing time gap between the end of paid maternity leave and the beginning of compulsory preschool education, by guaranteeing the right of every child to a place in a preschool institution. As the age required for retirement is getting higher, fewer and fewer grandparents can provide support to the parents, by taking care of their grandchildren. For that reason, it is important to harmonize the working hours of all preschool institutions with the parents’ working hours. The government must increase the coverage and quality of public services providing care to children, the elderly, and the ones with impaired health. These public services are lacking quality and are only partly available because budget expenditures to finance these services are often replaced by unpaid care work (mostly) performed by women in the households.

Decisions

Taking into account the above-mentioned, it is clear that giving birth to a child in Serbia today, while wanting to have a fulfilling career, represents a social and economic risk for a woman. Women must be free to decide about their professional and family roles in a way that guarantees that they will not be discriminated against because of that choice. Currently, the vast majority of women can choose between giving up the labor market, their career development, and independence, or on the other hand participating in conditions of extreme inequality in the labor market, while remaining overburdened with unpaid work in their households.

This is not "just a women's issue", this is the turning point in the development of society as a whole. And to answer the question from the title - is care free of charge? No, women pay for it with their inequality.

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Apologies for the attachments in Serbian. :) In case you need additional information about them, feel free to reach out.

The article was written and published in December of 2020.

[1] https://publikacije.stat.gov.rs/G2020/Pdf/G20205658.pdf

[2] http://socijalnoukljucivanje.gov.rs/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/SIPRU-ESRP-2016-Srpski.pdf

[3] https://publikacije.stat.gov.rs/G2016/Pdf/G20166006.pdf

[4] https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_674595.pdf

[5] http://socijalnoukljucivanje.gov.rs/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Analiza_monetarne_vrednosti_neplacenog_rada_UN_Women_SRB.pdf

[6] http://ravnopravnost.gov.rs/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/FINAL-RGI-2019-ZA-NARODNU-SKUPSTINU.pdf

[7] https://publikacije.stat.gov.rs/G2020/Pdf/G20201173.pdf

[8] https://www.unicef.org/serbia/media/16276/file/Poslovanje%20po%20meri%20porodice.pdf

[9] https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C183