Speech by Emma O’Kelly at NWCI Website & Care Publication Launch

Published: Sunday, October 18, 2009

19 October 2009

I'm delighted to have been asked to launch this document. Delighted because I love statistics and I think its really important that data such as that contained in this document is gathered and made accessible.

I read the document on Friday and over the weekend I was thinking of my own experience combining a career and caring and also the experiences of past generations of women in my family. And if I could just mention two experiences I think they both illustrate important points that I'd like to return to.

My mother like many women of her generation married relatively young and had children early. In her early thirties with three young children she did a H-Dip by night. Her motivation was probably financial in part but also I know it was because she felt she would go mad if she didn't get out of the house.

She was lucky to have a husband who was more than willing to take on his fair share of the domestic and childcare duties. When my mother went into fulltime work he taught himself how to cook and how to bake bread. He arranged his shift work as much as he could so that he could care during the day for my youngest sister when she was a baby. He got and continues to get a lot of fulfilment from such domestic and caring duties.

My grandmother, my mother's mother, always worked. She was a primary school teacher and somehow managed to evade the Marriage Ban which sent so many other women back into the home. (My mother remembers as a child in town on Saturdays listening to interminable conversations between her mother and other women and this mysterious phrase surfacing again and again; 'The Ban'.) My strongest memory of my grandmother is of a woman sitting in an armchair, with glasses perched at the end of her nose reading the Irish Press and emerging every now and then to give out about something - far from a stereotypical 'grandmother' picture.

But she was able to continue working and engaged with the politics of the day because of the unpaid labour of her sister, Babe. Babe never married, and she cooked and cleaned for her sister and her children, as well as for several of her brothers who were single men and factory workers. Without her unpaid labour I can't see how my grandmother could have continued working.

I'd like to return to those two illustrations shortly.

Today's document grew from a series of workshops that were held last year. A feeling emerged that there were myths out there that needed to be challenged. Myths such as 'things have changed. Men are doing much more care work than before.' This booklet gathers statistics which show that women do 86% of child supervision, 69% of playing with children, 82% of care to adults, 80% of cooking, and - an area that is often the most contentious - women do 86% of the cleaning.

It also illustrates the impact of this. While men spend almost a quarter of their day working or studying, women spend on average just one tenth. At the weekend, men spend one third of their time on leisure activities. Women spend just a quarter.

So because women spend up to four times more time caring, they have less time for work or leisure. Also of course their caring frees up men to spend their time on these activities.

Moving beyond children the document shows that the majority of unpaid carers of the elderly or of disabled people are women. And this rises during the working years between age 30 and 64. When it comes to people in their thirties - a time when working people should be consolidating their careers - women comprise 70% of people providing unpaid care.

Returning to the issue of childcare, again the statistics tell us that being a father does not impact on the likelihood of a man working or not. But when it comes to women, nine out of ten women who don't have children work, but only six out of ten women with children work.

And of course all this leads to disparities in income. On average women earn just two thirds of what men earn. And the gap widens with age. By the time women are in the 55 to 64 age bracket their income is just over half of men's.

When it comes to pensions, women are less likely to have private pensions and in terms of the state pension, 80% of men have a contributory state pension compared to just 60% of women.

We can take this even further and wonder, along with Annemarie Hourihan in today's Irish Times, why women don't feature even half as much as men among the obituary notices of that paper. I think the data in this report tells us why. It's because women for all those reasongs are less likely to be in positions of power and/or influence.

To return briefly to what I began with; the experiences of my mother and her mother. Taking on his share of the caring and domestic duties was something that my father got and continues to get great personal fulfilment from. I have an eleven year old son who, like his grandfather, is a tremendously tender hearted and caring person. Right now he's obsessed with his future life and he tells me that he wants a career that will allow him to finish in time to collect his children from school. Redressing the care imbalance not only benefits women, it also gives men the opportunity to experience the joy and fulfilment that can sometimes come from caring. I want my own son to have the freedom and incentive to play a strong role in caring - a role that right now he's adamant about - when he is a man.

And finally to my grandaunt whose unpaid work enabled my grandmother to have a career. This is beyond this document, but it's important to remember the army of low paid women, the cleaning women and the childminders, whose often undervalued work enables other women to keep a career and family going. Very many of these women are the women who will retire on nothing more that the non-contributory state old age pension even though they have contributed by working hard over a lifetime.

Incidentally my grandaunt Babe got the state pension too when she was older, although she never knew it. A man from Social Welfare called to the house one day and asked her was she of an age to get the pension. Babe rubbished the notion that she deserved anything from the state and refused to apply. So Social Welfare paid Babe's pension to her family secretly, without her ever knowing it. And the money went a small way towards caring for her when, in her turn, she needed it.

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