ECONOMIC SUCCESS has brought us the concept of "time poverty". We earn more than before but we have less time to enjoy our prosperity. A report from the Equality Authority and the ESRI last week emphasises that time poverty affects women more than men. If time spent on paid work, housework and caring are added together, women work, on average, 39 minutes a day longer than men. At first glance that may not seem like a huge difference but, as Equality Authority chief executive Niall Crowley pointed out, it adds up to a month per year and that is significant.
It can be argued that time spent caring is "family time" and that it should not be counted as work. But getting children to school, dropping them to and collecting them from a variety of extra-curricular activities, and keeping them fed, washed and dressed at the same time feels like work to the person doing it. Indeed, the woman (as is usually the case) who has left paid employment to raise children may look with nostalgia on a past in which there were coffee breaks, lunch with colleagues and a start and finish to the working day.
It seems fair to suppose that some men would like to swap roles with their partners. However, it is still the case that men are more likely than women to be in the best-paid jobs. Mortgages and the cost of living often dictate which parent will remain in paid work. This, of course, is not the only factor behind the unequal division of labour. In dual-earning couples, women still do more unpaid work than men. When children are born, fathers do more paid work than other men and mothers do more unpaid work than other women.
Mr Crowley suggested three measures to address this situation. One is the introduction of paid paternity leave and paid parental leave. The second is a legislative requirement on employers to accommodate, within reason, the needs of employees with caring responsibilities. And the third is to increase the provision of affordable childcare. All three proposals deserve support. The need for business to function efficiently should, and could, be taken into account in the design of these measures. But we can probably do better even without legislation. The report points out that our cultural norms lag those in other EU countries on this issue.
In other words, we need to change our attitudes towards the respective roles of men and women. We could begin by teaching children the concept of "equality in action" when it comes to unpaid work. Who better to model this concept than their fathers?