Childcare situation has brought women to ‘breaking point’
Women Considering Work Because Juggle Of Are To Of And Leaving Trying The Difficulty Employment Childcare Many
The Covid-19 pandemic and the lack of both formal and informal childcare support has brought women to “breaking point”.
That’s according to director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) Orla O’Connor who says many women are considering leaving employment as it “just isn’t possible” to juggle work and childcare anymore.
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, data from Ireland’s Economic and Social Research Institute suggests women were performing, on average, around 13 more hours of housework and 10.7 more hours of unpaid care work than their male counterparts.
A NWCI survey of nearly 1,500 women in May revealed that 85% of women believed their caring responsibilities had increased further since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, with more than half reporting their caring responsibilities had increased ‘a lot’.
Ms O’Connor said women have been making decisions about their career based on childcare for some time, but Covid-19 has exacerbated the problem and it has only gotten worse as the country has moved throughout the pandemic.
“You have women making decisions whether to work part-time or work full time, the type of job, because they are making their decisions based on their childcare arrangements," Ms O'Connor said.
"What a lot of [working] women are saying to the Women's Council is at this point, it is better to give up work ... there are women who haven’t returned after maternity leave or women on the pandemic payments who are thinking of not returning to work.”
The issue is “magnified” for lone parents according to Karen Kiernan, CEO of One Family, Ireland’s national organisation for one-parent families.
According to the CSO, 86% of one-parent households are headed by a female.
A short survey (153 respondents) carried out by One Family in September of last year showed that 31%, or almost a third, of one-parent families have had to apply for a social welfare payment because they have been unable to work due to a lack of childcare during Covid-19.
Ms Kiernan said One Family’s helpline was “flat out” with calls from anxious parents last year.
“We got a spike in people looking for counselling as each lockdown came in.”
The issues facing lone parents have changed throughout the pandemic, Ms Kieran said, with homeschooling presenting an issue for months now.
Parents are “absolutely on their knees” trying to balance work and educating children with many children still not back at school, she said, and for lone parents, it isn’t possible to do “anything else” unless somebody is minding their children.
Ms Kiernan said the issue of accessible and affordable childcare is something the group has been working on for many years, but the pandemic has really “shown up the cracks” in the system.
NCWI’s Orla O’Connor agrees and says the only way forward is the establishment of a public model of childcare funded by the State.
“At the moment we have a system that's based on a private market model and it's not working for parents.
"If you look at a country like Denmark, they're paying about a third of what parents are paying here and that's the absolute maximum. For parents who are low income, it's free for them, and that's the norm, across Europe.
"We're so used to getting a pretty raw deal in terms of child care, that that is often seen as aspirational or idealistic,” she said.
“It absolutely isn't. It's actually what is the norm in many European countries.”