The childcare sector has one of the lowest participation rates by men for any career, with as little as one per cent of workers in creches and play schools being male, childcare experts said yesterday.
Increased male participation in childcare would help tackle the chronic shortage of trained childcare staff working in the pre-school and after-school area, the country's first conference on men in childcare was told.
The conference heard that a pilot programme in Ireland has also found that the involvement of men in childcare has a positive effect on children, parents and workers, but not enough men are coming forward for training.
The primary school system should also be reformed to take children as young as three, while tax allowances should be provided for childcare costs, the conference was told.
Ms Gretta Murphy, of the Kilkenny Childcare Committee,which organised the conference, said that male participation rates in Ireland were lower than those in Britain, where between one and 5 per cent of professional childcare staff were male.
"In Kilkenny there are just three men working in 79 facilities looking after pre-school children," she said.
Mr Charlie Owen, an education expert at the University of London, said that men account for just 1 per cent of nursery nurses, 2 per cent of child minders, and 5 per cent of playgroup workers.
While women had been successful in entering male professions, childcare remained an effective no-go profession for men as they tend to be "the jobs with less power, less influence and less pay".
Male childcare workers have often tended to be viewed with suspicion by parents and wider society in relation to the issue of child abuse, he said.
"In the UK, there has only ever been one case of a man found guilty of abusing a child in a nursery setting."
The concentration of childcare on indoor activities such as drama and painting, as opposed to outdoor sports, made the work less attractive to men, according to Mr Jan Pettersen, a lecturer in childhood education at the Dublin Institute of Technology, and a former childcare worker in Norway.
Dr Margaret Fine-Davis, director of the EU-funded Work Life Balance Project, said that a pilot project on promoting men into childcare was producing positive results.
The project was working alongside the State training agency FÁS. To date, two childcare centres have recruited three men in the Dublin area, she said.
"It is clear from our initial research that having male childcare workers was perceived as very positive from all points of view, that of the centre managers, parents...and most importantly the children."
She said the "main problem" continued to be that "not enough men are coming forward" for the training programmes.
Dr Fine-Davis also said there needed to be a series of reforms to national childcare policy to address the high demand and high cost of childcare.