Progress? What progress?

High childcare costs are deterring many women from returning to work. Isthis an echo of the marriage bar 30 years on, asks Kathy Sheridan

If ever a week summarised the muddled world of work for women, this was it. At one end, hats being doffed to mark 30 years since the abolition of the marriage bar; at the other, reports that in this economic powerhouse that is the Irish Republic of the new millennium, Irishwomen are being forced out of the labour market by childcare costs.

For those too young to know of it, up to 1973 a woman working anywhere there was a marriage bar - the entire public service, banks, Guinness, oil companies, trade unions, anywhere there were "good" jobs for women - lost her job merely for getting married. The true hypocrisy of it was that she was frequently re-hired, on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis, usually at less pay, on a lower grade and with no pension entitlements. She also paid more income tax, while her husband picked up a little something in the tax-free allowance.

Those who left quietly and took the marriage gratuity - which often went towards a deposit on the new marital home - were out of a job, left sitting pretty in the new house, deprived of opportunities and a pension in their own right.

"How many times can you hoover the carpet - and that's if you had a carpet?" asks Eithne Fitzgerald, a former politician and now an independent social researcher. "Whatever you did, you were absolutely a second-class citizen. I remember when we applied for a mortgage, and I wrote down my occupation as civil servant, they wouldn't take my income into account. When I put down economist instead, they said they'd take half of it into account. Even when you were in work, you were regarded as a temporary fixture, so were you worth investing in? You were a non-person."

Fitzgerald was an administrative officer, graduate entry grade, in the Department of Finance when she got married in 1972. Although women provided 50 per cent of the graduate intake every year, only two in her grade or above remained. Both are now in very senior positions.

"My generation was cleaned out by the marriage bar. Look and you'll see that it's only in the past five years that women who are about five years younger than us have begun to come through." They include Julie O'Neill, now the Secretary of the Department of Transport.

As for Fitzgerald herself, she was one of the "lucky ones", one of four women re-hired on a day-to-day fee basis after marriage, and therefore docked a day's pay when the new Hallowe'en holiday was introduced. When the marriage bar was abolished, the four were told they would have to re-sit the entrance exam to re-enter the civil service and regain their pension rights. She and a colleague refused in principle to re-sit the exam. Fitzgerald went on to become the Cabinet Minister who piloted the Freedom of Information Act into being, as well as legislating for family-friendly policies in the workplace. The other woman is now a top figure in Irish banking.

Fitzgerald is clear on where feminism stands today. "It's very easy to say that feminism is dead and young women do say that - until they have children." She has seen mighty strides in the civil service regarding family-friendly policies but not in the public sector.

"It wasn't until the Celtic Tiger era that we began to hear about childcare. But that was never about children and women; it was about the labour force. You see that in report after report."

And now that the Celtic Tiger has passed on, is a tedious old pattern reasserting itself, whereby women are herded back into the home? Or is something new afoot?

ESRI economist, Prof John Fitzgerald (the husband of Eithne Fitzgerald), who spotted the drop in female participation in the workforce among the 25-34 age group, concedes that there is no evidence that childcare costs are the primary reason. But there's little doubt that it is young mothers who are dropping out. While labour force participation by the over-40s and the over-55s in particular has risen "pretty dramatically", he notes, the 30-34 age group, already dropping slightly year on year, has shown "the first significant drop in 15 years". But unlike the over-55s, for example, who in general will have low education attainment, a fall in the younger cohort "will see a significant impact right across the educational spectrum".

The inferences are obvious. Employers who were "beating the bushes for employees" a couple of years ago, are cutting back due to the slump. Those still recruiting are offering lower returns; meanwhile, the cost of childcare has soared. Households already feeling the pinch of high mortgages and cost-of-living increases are facing tough choices. Look behind the headlines of this week's CSO Quarterly Household Survey on the cost and extent of childcare in the Republic, and a salient point comes through: fewer families are availing of childcare once the second child is born, where logically it should be more.

"So either families are unable to manage at that point or they cannot afford the childcare costs," says ICTU assistant general secretary Joan Carmichael. "And it's the women who have to make these choices. It's going to be the person who is earning less, because you're losing less. So that hasn't changed much."

Looked at another way, however, a lot has changed. In 1966 (while the marriage bar was in place), only six per cent of married women were in the labour force. That figure is now 47.8 per cent. So is this not a resounding success for women? Has that nirvana of economic independence - the catch-cry of any feminist worth her salt in the 1970s - finally been achieved?

That's not at all clear. According to the CSO, nearly 60 per cent of families with young children still take care of them without outside help. This implies a huge number of stay-at-home mothers.

Of the remainder, only 12,500 families - of a total of 353,000 with young children - were paying more than €157 a week for more than 40 hours of childcare, which suggests that only a tiny percentage of such families have two parents in full-time work. And we know that of 228,000 declared part-time workers (under 30 hours), 75 per cent are women.

So, in 2003, it seems that the work-family balance in Irish society is still determined by women, women resorting to temporary, part-time and flexible work, depending either on unpaid family members to pick up the slack after school, or on carers, to whom they pay a mortgage-sized, already-taxed, chunk of their wages. Would they prefer to be at home all the time? The survey suggests that only about 10 per cent would prefer to mind their children themselves.

Behind the figures, then, is a picture of women with the will to work, probably with a need to work, but who do not want to be corporate queens, furiously engaged in a lonely, daily struggle to achieve a work-life balance in the early years of their children's lives. How much priority this is likely to get from a Government looking at rising unemployment and diminishing tax yield can only be guessed at. It is telling that the CSO's study is the first official childcare survey of its kind.

In the 1970s, when equal pay was the campaign issue, recalls Sylvia Meehan, who was chair of the Employment Equality Agency for 15 years from 1977, women were told jobs would be lost by the thousand if they insisted on pay parity. Now, as the long-reported, anecdotal experience of struggling families finally finds voice in an official survey, any answer that smells of cost will likely get a similar response.

But something has changed. We know now that the economy depends on women in the workforce. "The world of work changed when women with family responsibilities remained at work. It's the world of work that has to change," says Carmichael.

It may cost both Government and industry in the short term, but it will cost even more if women drop out. "It's not rocket science," says Carmichael, "It's plannable. And that period of any worker's life is short; it's just 10 years out of 45, when they need that flexibility for children."

Childcare is a complex issue that changes along with the child - most children aged five and above, for example, want to be kicking a football on the pavement or in a field, as opposed to being in a creche - and with each additional child. Carmichael points to fine school facilities lying idle for half the day while parents search frantically for ruinously expensive, private childcare.

"There has been a market failure in childcare," says Eithne Fitzgerald. "It doesn't provide childcare at an affordable price." She suggests some form of subsidy, related to the age of the child, and believes it should go to the child's carer, whether that is the mother or someone else. In Finland, she says, there is a payment targeted at children under three, and an assurance of a pre-school place for every child.

"We should be looking at this harder; we should be getting men to look at it harder," says Mary Maher, former journalist, author and a co-founder of the Irishwomen's Liberation Movement. "We don't have it right. There are plenty of women who don't want to put their kids in a creche. The problem is, you can't pay anyone to love your child."

So where do men stand in all this? "I think that men would pull their weight if taking part-time work for a time was not seen as a sign of weakness, a sign that he is less committed to the job," says Carmichael. "What you need is for it to become so much the norm that it's hardly noticed, at any grade, however senior. But for now, the sense remains that this is just a woman's issue . . ."