OPINION:The work of caring for children needs to be valued, but this requires a giant leap, writes Victoria White
WHAT IF we admit that lots of women want to care? That's the one question which keeps nagging after reading Fintan O'Toole's brave attempt to tackle gender inequality in this newspaper last week.
Yes, of course pensions are a gender issue. Yes, of course the Pensions Board advertisements alerting women to their relative lack of cover "mark the frontier in what is still a very real divide".
But is access to paid work the only way we can provide pension cover for women? Because if it is, it will be extremely difficult for them ever to get equal cover. This is because no matter what childcare and parental leave and eldercare arrangements are put in place - and O'Toole is right to point out these massive infrastructural deficits - huge numbers of women, and particularly mothers, will still take career breaks, will still go part time and will still opt completely out of the paid workforce for long periods.
Or they may simply opt for less senior positions. It is worth noting that in Scandinavian countries, where the childcare infrastructure is much better, the proportion of women in senior management positions is similar to the proportion in Ireland.
The "marriage bar" which forced women in the civil service and public service out of their jobs upon marriage was quite obviously an abomination and, again, O'Toole is right to point out that these women suffered a second blow of the "bar" because of their consequent lack of full pension entitlements.
Now we have no "bar" and marriage is not usually significant to a woman's career status. This is because few women now consider service to their husband as a job. But when they have children, huge numbers of mothers take a break from paid work, go part time or change to a more family-friendly job, because they see that the care of their children is a job in itself.
You can go on forever trying to explain this, and all of the explanations have some truth in them. Yes, women may feel bound by tradition to some degree. Yes, childcare provision is poor. Yes, men often do not take enough responsibility for home and children.
Women of my generation (born in the 1960s) are very likely to have been brought up to believe that these were the only reasons more women than men cared for children in the home. That is what I believed, until I had children.
Now I believe that lots of women want to care. The National Women's Council itself points to the fact that the majority of women in part-time work do not consider themselves underemployed. You can argue that that's because they know they have no choice. In some cases, that is true. But the thousands of conversations about work that I have with mothers of young children are all about how to access part-time or flexible work, or how to exit and re-enter the workplace.
If women want to care, and we are content with a system which does not reward this work, it's a case of persuading women to want different things.
The other option is to change the system and value the work of caring. To make a giant leap and understand that caring for a young child is vital and necessary work, which should, at the very least, attract full social welfare and pension entitlements. The National Women's Council itself argues as much.
If you have a problem with this, do you have a problem with professional childcarers getting their entitlements? If not, why not? What is the difference?
There are several. The main one is that our economic system has not found a way of counting care of one's own children. It could count the work if children were killed and sold as meat (the reference to Dean Swift is deliberate). It does not know how to count the value of a child reared to adulthood.
The other difference is the factor of choice. The prevailing wisdom is that women would never choose to rear their own children, and that it should not be encouraged. This is because rearing children is considered low-grade work, akin to putting out the bins.
And this is another major reason why outsourced care is favoured. Because we tacitly expect that less educated women will care for children while more educated women get out and make dough.
Of course, while we hold these entirely culturally conditioned views on the value of care we will never value childminders, or indeed nurses and teachers, or indeed children themselves.
The reason that gender equality is barely discussed anymore may be, as O'Toole says, because what remains to be done can't be fixed with a "simple, legislative change".
But I think he underestimates the scale of the feminist revolution that is necessary. What we need is a change in our system so that we actually change what we value, and then put our money where our mouth is.
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Victoria White is a part-time journalist and full-time parent of four children