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Ania Plomien, Assistant Professor in Gender and Social Science at the LSE Gender Institute, reflects on the Commission’s crossing-cutting theme of work-life balance
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the podcast series for the Gender Institute at LSC. In today's podcast, Dr. Anya Plomian reflects on the Gender Inequality and Power Commission's cross cutting theme of work life balance.
- [00:14]
B
In the recent years, both in the UK but also in other industrialist countries, we have a situation where both the labor market and demographic change in societies has led to a situation where women are now more and more, more to a greater extent participating in the labor market. And this growth we are seeing, especially among mothers in the country like the U.K. for example, we also have a growing numbers of dual earner households and that gives rise to challenges in balancing work and family life. So we have concerns emerging about increased stress levels, about long working hours, especially among fathers, increased sickness and absences from work, and some evidence on pressures on family relationships that emerge from this.
- [01:13]
A
So what do we know already? What facts and figures do we have about how big an issue, how big a problem this whole issue of work life balance is for society as a whole.
- [01:23]
B
Work life balance is the major factor that continues to differentiate women's and men's lives. The problem does not only persist, but it is a widespread problem. It is of relevance to all sections of society. So whether we focus on private individuals such as parents or children or grandparents, it affects a whole range of people with caring responsibilities at different points in their lives. In England alone, we have 5 million of adults who have caring responsibilities for sick or disabled or elderly persons. So it is quite a big problem numerically. It also is a problem when we think about people in their various relationships to paid employment. So those who are constrained in spending more time on paid work and vice versa. And in this country, about 1 in 6 carers either has to give up work or cut back on work to participate in care. So this widespread issue is quite a concern for the Commission.
- [02:38]
A
Now, there are different views of what work life balance means between individuals and even countries. What does the Commission take it to mean?
- [02:46]
B
Yes, I think it's important to recognize that work life balance can be interpreted in different ways. And any such interpretation would be influenced by where different individuals stand in relation to work, or where different societies or countries are positioned and where they wish to go.
- [03:05]
A
I guess it also manifests itself in different ways as well, doesn't it? For different people in different places at.
- [03:11]
B
Different times, it can be seen as a conflict between earning and caring. So, for example, the proportion of one parent families has tripled in the UK, so we now have about 22% of families that are one parent families. Work life balance, for them would mean something different in terms of access to resources, such as time and income, than for somebody who is in a dual earner carer family. For a father, work life balance may mean something different, where his employer would not approve his request to work flexibly so that he could do school pickups, for example. But also work life balance poses a problem when earning is caring. So for a care worker, for example, often in this country, a migrant whose low pay, long working hours and increasing pace of work reflect precarious working conditions. The issue here is with the role of the state, the role of the community and the role of social investment in the care sector to make this livelihood more secure.
- [04:25]
A
And so what then are the ramifications, the implications for the Commission, whose role is to look at this in the context of gender equality?
- [04:34]
B
For the Commission, achieving work life balance should take to mean that people have genuine opportunities to engage in work and in care. And that requires that perhaps a masculine model of employment of long working hours throughout the life course is not a sustainable model if we want to combine work and care. And for us, it also means that people who do perform care, whether this is in the paid or unpaid sphere, that people do not face a lifetime of material and other disadvantages. All members of society should be able to receive good quality care when needed.
- [05:19]
A
Now, one of the main issues or barriers to achieving work life balance, as you sort of really pointed out already, is around caring for children and for elderly parents. What has the Commission learned about this from the various sessions that it's held?
- [05:32]
B
Care still is an issue that is gendered, that women still continue to do more care than men, and that this has implications for their financial well being. Childcare, for example, is one of the key elements that explains the gender pay gap in the uk. But we have also learned that care is represented as a particularly gendered problem, that it is a problem of reconciling work and care for women more so than for men. That childcare is something that mothers have to resolve, parents more generally, and not so much fathers.
- [06:11]
A
I know that one of the emerging pieces of evidence to catch your eye is this whole idea of a mumpreneur.
- [06:18]
B
This is a mom who can not only look after the household and at the same time look after her children, but also take the time and effort to engage in entrepreneurial generating activities from her own kitchen. Now, the extent to which this is available to most people who where care and household work takes up a lot of time, this is questionable. But that model is very much presented. It's something that can resolve the issue.
- [06:52]
A
There's been so much interest in the area of shared care and policies that have been developed around that. I know there was a particularly interesting case study from Norway that caught your eye.
- [07:02]
B
In Norway, a much more developed and long standing commitment to, to supporting men as fathers give fathers a sense of entitlement to take these various forms of leave and a sense of right in requesting time off from work to look after children. So in Norway, as in other Nordic countries, we have a much higher number of men participating in father leaves than we do in the uk.
- [07:30]
A
And when we think about care, there are a whole range of other factors we need to consider as well, aren't there?
- [07:35]
B
It's not just a gendered issue, an issue that is inflected by social class, by ethnicity and by migration. So the people who participate in care as paid employment often come to work here as foreign nationals in domestic work. Care work tends to be underpaid and if access to Social Security benefits and decent labor market opportunities is restricted, the kind of care that we are outsourcing or moving from, from the private sector into the paid sector, it may help us resolve some of the gendered inequalities, but may then shift inequalities onto different social, ethnic or migration differentiated groups.
- [08:28]
A
I'm wondering if rather a lot of people might say, well, hold on a minute. There have been some real developments around statutory leave, around the organisation of work and time around the provision of childcare. A great deal has been done already. Is that fair?
- [08:42]
B
All these three pillars in the UK have seen quite a lot of development in the last more than a decade. At the same time, significant gender equality problems remain in the uk. Women still are the main carers, both for children and for the dependent adults. And compared to men, women are more likely to be involved in paid and unpaid work in all EU27 member states. And also women's working life is more likely to be affected by the care needs of others and that's evidenced by their higher take up of parental leave, a generally weaker labor market position. So despite these various changes over the last few years, we still have a problem on our hands where reconciliation of work and care or work life balance is a goal to achieve.
- [09:43]
A
So, as the Commission moves towards producing its final report, what are the key recommendations relating to work life balance that are likely to be set out placing.
- [09:51]
B
Care more firmly on the political agenda. This includes also more research on the issue on the care sector as a potential growth sector. Something that we want to highlight as well is the need to invest in the care economy the need to improve the provision of affordable care services which are of good quality. We also need to recognize the real value of care work. What is the potential of care work to provide decent jobs with good pay and working conditions? We need to address the dual gendered model of short and more precarious part time work that typically women avail of and the very long full time, often including overtime work that characterizes many men's lives. We need to make sure that part time employment is more secure, more attractive and that full time working hours are shorter and provide the possibility for people to engage in other dimensions of life. We also need to draw attention to encouraging men and fathers to take parental and paternity leaves and to participate in care. So here there's quite a lot of scope to improve our policies, to increase income support that's related to earnings and to implement an individual earmarked non transferable right to leave for fathers.
- [11:27]
A
Finally, I wonder if you can sum up personally what you feel the last few months have achieved when it comes to exploring the question of work life balance across the key areas of politics, law, employment and the media.
- [11:38]
B
What these interdisciplinary sessions drew attention to is the multiple and the interconnected causes for inequality in which work life balance is a key theme, and how these causes are much more structural than they are represented to be. While they demand individual change of behaviour, they also demand collective solutions that recognize this complexity.
- [12:04]
A
LSE's Dr. Anya Plomian was talking to Chris Garrington following the Commission's final session, at which it reviewed the evidence it's been gathering and discussed the recommendations it will incorporate in its report. You can find out more about the work of the commission@www.lsc.ac.uk genderinstitute and you can also follow us on Twitter scendertweet.