The work-life challenges of women and men

(intro)

00:00:16 Mary McCaughey
Hello, and welcome to this special episode of Eurofound Talks, which is to mark this year’s International Women’s Day, which takes place on 8 March. Today, we're going to look in this particular context at women in the workplace, their work challenges, their life challenges and how they intersect. How we're going to look at that is, we're going to actually delve into the research that we've carried out on a large-scale survey, interviewing about 70,000 people across 36 countries in the European Union, which took place in 2021. It's called the European Working Conditions Telephone Survey. It looks at job quality, it looks at working time, but it also looks very specifically here at the intersection between work and what we call our private life – and that, of course, is the intersection, the Venn diagram where most women are operating, and here we're going to try and explore a little bit the gender roles and the expectations both in the private sphere and also in the workplace, and how this can impact on women in particular, but not only women, also men, and we're going to look at how they differ. So, today to join me, I'm delighted to have two colleagues from Eurofound who have been working in this area for some time: Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė and Jorge Cabrita. Welcome.
                
00:01:52 Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė
Hello.

00:01:52 Jorge Cabrita
Hi, good morning.
                
00:01:53 Mary McCaughey
Today, maybe we can just take a big picture look, Jorge, and I'm going to go straight into it here and just look at the labour market. What's interesting here is, can you talk to us a little bit about how women and men are engaged in the labour market? Is it the same? Is it very different? Are they segregated? Talk to me.

00:02:15 Jorge Cabrita
Thanks, Mary. That's a very, very good question. First of all, what we have to understand is that men and women have a very different role in the labour market. Overall, if you look at our employment structures, we can see that men and women are not doing the same things, they are not working in the same sectors. So, if we start from a sectoral approach, what we can see is that most men are actually working in men-dominated sectors, whereas women, many of them are also working in women-dominated sectors.

00:02:41 Mary McCaughey
So, where would they be, Jorge? What are those male-dominated sectors?

00:02:45 Jorge Cabrita
If you think about sectors such as, for example, construction or information and communication technologies, those would be sectors which are predominantly occupied by men, whereas, on the other hand, if you think about sectors such as education or health or even cleaning, you would find those jobs mostly occupied by women. This is at the sectoral level. But if you go down to the occupational level, the level of segregation is even higher. So, at the sectoral level, it's about roughly 40% of men and women, in total, working in gender-mixed sectors, but if you look at the occupation, the type of jobs that people do, it's a much smaller share of men and women in gender-mixed occupations, it's only 25%, so it's a big difference. The further down you go in more specific perspectives, the more segregated it is between men and women. The occupations we are thinking about are, for example, cleaners or nurses, which are mostly occupied by women, whereas builders, in reference also to the sector of construction, are mostly occupied by men.

00:03:54 Mary McCaughey
When you look then also, Viginta, at the work–life challenges for men and women, are they also different? We in Eurofound talk about paid and unpaid work, but maybe you can talk to me a little bit about what that means. How are women and men experiencing this?
                
00:04:10 Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė
Exactly. Our European Working Conditions Survey asked respondents not only about working hours in the main and other jobs and commuting, but it also asked about hours spent on taking care of, educating children, grandchildren, caring for the elderly and relatives with disabilities, and also cooking and housework. Altogether, we refer to it as unpaid work. Other work, like voluntary work, we acknowledge that it is very important, but in our survey it's not covered. We look at paid work, as I mentioned, the main job, other jobs, and then the other part, as you referred to at the beginning, it's a private sphere that you wouldn't do and we look at how many hours women and men spent on unpaid work.

              
00:05:01 Mary McCaughey
And the difference, Jorge, between men and women in terms of this paid and unpaid work?

00:05:07 Jorge Cabrita
That's quite an interesting one, because when we look at the figures – and this has been around for decades now, I would say, but it continues – when we look at our data from 2021, we can actually see that men tend to spend a bit more time on paid work. Overall on average we're talking about 6 hours per week, whereas women spend much more time on unpaid work. Overall, on average it's 13 hours. So, when you take everything altogether, paid and unpaid work, we are talking about a difference of 7 hours in which women spend on work in comparison.

00:05:41 Mary McCaughey

So there, Jorge, if I'm correct, it's unpaid and paid together versus men paid and unpaid, and women consistently do 7 hours more.

00:05:51 Jorge Cabrita
Correct. In a yearly time period, in one year, you can think that if you put all that difference together, we are talking about 8 weeks of 40 hours of work that women are doing overall more than men. That's a big difference and it's mostly due to unpaid work. So, it's a lot of unpaid work in an unfavourable situation for women. These differences are across the board, so if you look at the Member State level, as well, and this is quite interesting, they are the same everywhere so, you can find that difference. The difference is smaller, though, in some countries. For example, in Luxembourg and France, we are talking about around 3 hours difference, where women put in more than men, but you go all the way up to 17 hours of difference in Croatia, for example. This is kind of symptomatic of the distribution of working time between men and women. So, there's a big difference there across the board in most of the countries. In some it's rather small, but in many countries it's very, very significant.

00:06:45 Mary McCaughey
And also, it reflects back to what we talked about earlier, about the segregation in the labour market and the kind of jobs that are being done by men and by women.

00:06:57 Jorge Cabrita
Well, it's partly related to that, but it's also related, in our opinion, to the country’s culture, for example, and the way people see the roles of men and women in society. The fact that in some countries women spend more time in unpaid work is symptomatic of that kind of approach and behaviour from society in general. In countries with a more egalitarian approach, the differences tend to be smaller.

00:07:24 Mary McCaughey
So, this gender inequality is embedded in society and embedded in the labour market.

00:07:28 Jorge Cabrita
Correct.

00:07:30 Mary McCaughey
Not good news, Viginta, but if we look at this in terms of the more unpaid work by women that we talked about, when we break this down into care responsibilities, is there an equal gap here?
                
00:07:44 Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė
Well, the short answer is no. If we look at all those three unpaid activities that I mentioned before, we see that gender gaps are really different and it's probably worth looking at it from the age dimension. For example, we are looking at caring for children and educating children and grandchildren. If we look at the youngest age groups, I mean people from 16 to 24 years old, there's literally no gap in how often they take care of children. But then this gap gender gap increases with age, peaking at the age of 35 to 44, where there are 18 hours more of unpaid work for women compared to men, and most of it is because of childcare, I think 11 hours, they're taking care of children. And then, with age the gender gap closes. For older people, 56+, we don't see any gender gaps anymore, so it closes. 

But then, the story is a bit different if we're looking at cooking and housework. What we see is that 40% of men do cooking and housework daily, only 40% of men, and it stays stable across the age groups. If we look at women, the story is different because we see that the share of women doing housework and cooking increases with age, again peaking for the age group of 35 to 44 and the gap stays quite large for the remaining group, so, it never closes. This is exactly a sandwich generation because probably children are arriving around that time, career is progressing at that time, so financial needs are increasing and, of course, older relatives require more care. So, of course, this age group is the one which spends most time on unpaid work.

But then, if we're looking at caring for elderly or disabled members of the family, the levels or the share of people who do take care of relatives is really small for both women and men, and it actually increases slightly with age, but there is no gender gap as such. So, this is one activity where we see that both – more or less equality. 
Taking all three unpaid activities together, we see that for almost all age groups, women are the ones who work the longest hours, except the very youngest group, from 16 to 24, but later these hours are increasing and peaking at the sandwich generation group.
                
00:10:24 Mary McCaughey
And you can imagine that that would cause some level of conflict within the household. You can imagine at a societal level it's building up tension, this sort of gender divide, which seems to be fairly entrenched. We've talked always about work-life balance, it's kind of a benign concept in some ways, it's how we balance our life with running and jogging and doing all that's good for us with our work. But in fact here in the EWCTS, the most recent survey, we're talking here about work-life conflict. Talk to me, Jorge, about the difference here between these indicators.

00:10:57 Jorge Cabrita
That's a very good question, Mary. Work-life balance is a term which has been used very popularly among businesses, in policy-making, in research. So, it's very popular to some extent, and it reflects exactly what you said, it's the intention or the aim of men and women to balance, to even out their work with their private sphere. What is interesting to note there is that this concept has been increasing in its importance in the EU policy context. We have, for example, the European Pillar of Social Rights, which in Article 99 refers specifically to work-life balance, and we also had recently in 2019 the European Directive on work-life balance for parents and carers. 

So, in our Working Conditions Survey, what we look at is basically the relationship between working hours, the time that people devote to paid work, in relation to their private life. So, we ask people to what extent your working hours fit with their family and social commitments, but this only gives us one aspect. It's just about time, basically. But we know that there is much more than time, so that's why we talk about work-life conflict, and work-life conflict is all about the relationship and, sometimes we talk about spillovers – the spillover of the effects of work into our private lives and vice versa. In the Working Conditions Survey, we have three questions. In 2021 we asked three questions. There's more but in 2021 we capture three, and two of them are in the direction of work over your private life, and the first one is about worry. So, we asked people if they kept worrying about work during their free time, or non-working time. So that's one. The second one is if they felt tired after work in such a way that they were not able to do household…

00:12:54 Mary McCaughey
They were prevented from carrying out their household duties…

00:12:55 Jorge Cabrita
Exactly, precisely. So, it's related to physical but also mental, psychological exhaustion. It's that kind of thing that we're capturing there. But we also ask the reverse, we asked to what extent people found it difficult to concentrate at work because of their families and social commitments.

00:13:13 Mary McCaughey
Because of their family commitments? OK

00:13:15 Jorge Cabrita

Yes, there's the reverse spillover effect as well. So, we have these two different aspects and both of them are quite interesting and important to acknowledge when we talk about work-life balance and work-life conflict.

00:13:28 Mary McCaughey
And, again, Viginta, not to labour the point too much, but I presume there are differences again between men and women when we talk about this satisfaction with their work-life balance.
             
00:13:39 Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė
Exactly, there are quite some differences and, probably a bit counterintuitively, we see that more women are satisfied with their work-life balance than men are. You would probably expect it to be different, the other way around, because it's mostly women who spend more time on paid and unpaid work altogether, but it seems that probably women tend to adjust the working time according to the needs of the family members, so they usually reduce their working hours, for example, when children are born.
                
00:14:12 Mary McCaughey
They go part-time.
                
00:14:13 Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė
They go part-time, exactly, or they drop out of the labour market completely. In our survey, of course, we're looking at women who stay in the labour market. For men, they tend to organise the work time around job needs and of course there are then tensions. They are not always happy that they put so many hours in paid work. I would say it's almost always that women have this greater perception of better work-life balance. There's one exception, though. If we're looking at different household types, I mean, if we are looking at the people with children, without children, we see that for men, gender balance is worse when they have children and they live with partners, so of course they would like probably to spend more time with their children. For women, well, actually, the most problematic situations are for single mothers. They really want to have a better work-life balance. Indeed, if I go back to paid/unpaid work, I see that women, single mothers, spend 20 hours more than single fathers. Why is that? We assume it is probably in cases of divorce. It's still mostly the children that stay with the mothers and even if they have shared custody, which is increasing in Europe, we still see that it's mainly mothers who spend more time so, probably for them, it puts a lot of pressure on the work-life balance perception.
                
00:15:41 Mary McCaughey
So, here we were looking at a particular pain point, which is single mothers when we look at this work-life balance issue.

00:15:48 Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė
Exactly.

00:15:49 Mary McCaughey
But I assume not only. We can we can come back to that at another stage. Jorge, when we look at this work-life balance, for various reasons, which actually probably dictate a little bit that better feeling of work-life balance for women, part-time working and leaving, well, in this case, we can't see them leaving the labour market, but women tend to take steps to address that in advance. When it comes to the work-life conflict, what's the situation between men and women?

00:16:15 Jorge Cabrita
It's interesting to see that it's the reverse, actually. Women tend to fare worse than men on average in relation to work-life conflict. This is mostly because here we are talking about certain characteristics of the working conditions of women, because in relation to the data that we collected back in 2015, we did an assessment of that data and analysis which showed us that certain working conditions are associated with this poorer work-life conflict. And we are talking about, for example, having meaningful work, or having recognition for the work that you do, or having less flexibility in your working hours. There's a number of things.

00:16:55 Mary McCaughey
So not necessarily working time per se. There are various elements and indicators.

00:16:58 Jorge Cabrita
Exactly. And that's why it's important to move away from just this working time approach because there are many other aspects there impacting on this idea of work-life conflict, this idea of spillover between work and private life.

00:17:15 Mary McCaughey
That's fascinating, Jorge, because that dovetails in with this quality jobs aspect, which is, we know bad jobs make you sick and so, therefore, it also represents less job or work satisfaction. Then you look into society at large and how that spills over again into how people present in our societies, maybe with bad health, with psychological issues, with mental health concerns, etc.

00:17:42 Jorge Cabrita
Correct, and actually what we can see is that in our data from 2021, women tend to fare a bit worse in terms of job quality, which is shown by this indicator which we created. So, women are more likely to be in jobs which are called strained jobs, where job demands…

00:18:00 Mary McCaughey
…are under pressure.

00:18:02 Jorge Cabrita
They have more job demands than they have job resources that help them to carry out their work properly. This then reflects, of course, exactly this work-life conflict. So, it's not surprising that women are reporting this way. In general, women also tend to report worse health than men do. Although they live longer, the level of morbidity is higher among women. This applies to the general population, but also to the working population, obviously.

00:18:34 Mary McCaughey
So then, Jorge, that is another takeaway. I mean, if we address the job quality issues and if we look at quality jobs and improving working conditions, we actually have these ripple effects which go well beyond just the immediate workplace. It's the work-life balance, work-life conflict, work satisfaction, and indeed life satisfaction.

00:18:53 Jorge Cabrita
Absolutely. As mentioned here before in a previous podcast where we looked at job quality, specifically, job quality is at the core of the transformation where we need to have this ripple effect, as you mentioned, in our societies in general, and especially to improve the condition of women in this situation because as we can see, when we are talking about all these things, they tend to fare a bit worse than men do.

00:19:20 Mary McCaughey
Yes, because again, not to dwell too much on it, but we often talk about the gender pay gap and the gender employment gap. But, in reality, pay is just one factor that we should be looking at with so many other elements, part of this job quality composite index that we have. It's so important to look at all of them in a holistic way.

00:19:37 Jorge Cabrita
It is. Pay is just part of the package, if you wish. We have to look after the job demands and the resources that people have access to in their work. The workplace is actually – because we spend so much time in our workplaces, don't we? – that's where we have to start the change, perhaps. The addressing of the gender pay gap is just part of the equation.

00:20:02 Mary McCaughey
Looking at this, Viginta, we are looking at prospects for how we can make things better, how we can change things, how we can see an evolution which offsets the rollback in gender equality that we've experienced over recent times. What do you see as being the primary factors that we need to address?
                
00:20:19 Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė
I'm not so sure if I can refer to it as the primary factors, but certainly there are a few things we can address, and I want to go back to pay, for example. Financial incentives are one of the reasons why many women do more unpaid work at home. For example, when a kid arrives in a family, given that women earn on average less, then the family is financially better if the woman actually reduces her working time or leaves the labour market, because still the main earner is a man and then they calculate, they look at those things. So, I think the Pay Transparency Directive is good way to address this problem with the gender pay gap. 

But then, there's another aspect, that we tend to overlook: tax and benefit systems, and especially gender-biased taxation systems, joint taxation or specific tax allowances or tax credits for a spouse with little or no earnings. It incentivises second earners – and we know that second earners are usually women – to reduce their working hours or drop out of the labour market completely. In the short term, it increases woman's financial dependency, first of all. In the longer term, of course, these inequalities accumulate. Women tend to contribute less to social security schemes, meaning to pension rights, and in old age they tend to accumulate less wealth, less pensions. And what do we see? We see actually an even higher or bigger pension gap in old age and we see more women at risk of poverty in old age.

00:22:01 Mary McCaughey
So we see a sustained gap through the entire life course.

00:22:04 Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė
Exactly, so it all accumulates. Then, what happens in case of divorce, and we know that this is happening more and more often in Europe. Women are left in more precarious situations because they made some decisions to reduce their working time. Of course, working part-time, dropping out of the labour market, these things should be should be addressed also, as I mentioned, through ensuring that they can earn more and then removing gender bias in taxation so that it does not incentivise them to stay out of the labour market.

00:22:37 Mary McCaughey
So, when I hear you, the sort of often quite simplistic approach of ‘|introduce more and better childcare and all will be well’, it's much greater than that and demands a kind of much more comprehensive approach.

00:22:52 Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė
Exactly. I mean, there are different sides to it. Of course, having accessible and good childcare is key for both women and men to participate. But there are so many smaller elements that we can start addressing.
                
00:23:04 Mary McCaughey
But also that need to be in place for this action to function effectively. So, Jorge, do you have any good news for us about the prospects for improving all of this into the next generation?

00:23:14 Jorge Cabrita
Well, I think that, first of all, at the European level at least, there's a number of initiatives there and we mentioned already three of them here: the directives on work-life balance and pay transparency, the European Pillar of Social Rights, those are things which indicate that there's a concern, right? There's an interest in changing things to make change happen.

00:23:35 Mary McCaughey
Well, part of that is the gender equality strategy.

00:23:37 Jorge Cabrita
Exactly. But we have to also address other things such as, for example, something that we would like to mention here today, which is gender stereotypes. The fact that we still have men and women entering the labour market, as we mentioned at the beginning, in different sectors, in different occupations, we have to break that kind of cycle and we have to start from the very beginning, I would say, through education, for example, to raise people's awareness that jobs have no gender. Men and women can do any kind of job with the technology available. There's no gendered approach to jobs. That's one starting point. The other one I would like to underline as well is the cost of opportunity of this difference in the unpaid working time. When women are spending these hours on average more than men…

00:24:26 Mary McCaughey
Eight weeks per year, you said, in unpaid work.

00:23:29 Jorge Cabrita
Yes, if we take the average, that would be it roughly. When they are doing that unpaid work, they are not doing other things. Those other things could be their participation in, let's say, political activism or taking up volunteering work that could increase their skills and competences which, in turn, would give them more chances to have better career progress…

00:24:50 Mary McCaughey
And would be a benefit to society and the economy as a whole.

00:23:51 Jorge Cabrita
Of course. So, there's a number of things there that we can still address. But the prospects are good. I mean, recently, for example, we are talking about the four-day week. This rearranging of our working lives in such a way that instead of spending five days a week at work, you reduce working time to four days and people have more time for their private sphere, for the other things that they do in life, including entertainment and sports and volunteering and also spending time with their family members, etc. So, there's an interest to challenge these things the way things are at the moment.

00:25:29 Mary McCaughey
Absolutely. At the end of all of these Eurofound Talks series, we ask our experts to talk to me in three, and essentially to pretend that I am the policymaker and I can fix everything over the coming year. So, were that to be the case, what would be your top? We've covered a lot of issues here and you put a lot of pinpointing, a lot of possibilities for how we could change and improve things, but if you only had three. Who wants to go first?
                
00:25:55 Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė
I probably would start. First, bring men into care work and childcare. I think the work-life directive is a good way forward. It introduces two weeks of parental leave, paternity leave for fathers around childbirth, and then two months of non-transferable parental leave. I think these are very good first steps which have the potential to address gender norms, stereotypes, thinking who should be the main carer in a family. If we could extend that and actually have longer non-transferable periods for fathers, maybe little by little, in our minds, the norms would shift and men would take more responsibility for their children.
                
00:26:41 Mary McCaughey
Jorge.

00:26:42 Jorge Cabrita
Another aspect would be, I would say, to bring the discussion to the workplace level, which we mentioned here several times today. The idea would be to raise the awareness of managers when dealing with their staff in order to give an example first of all. So, when it comes to the use of family leave, for example, they would set the example to their staff. Then, nowadays we talk about compassionate management, to be more compassionate to their staff and understanding that people are more than their jobs and that they can listen and try to adjust work and the way work is organised to people's needs in a better way. That costs nothing. It's just a matter of attitude and behaviour. I don't know to what extent policymakers can change this, but they can certainly start the ball rolling in that direction.

00:27:32 Mary McCaughey
It’s funny, it's quite a cultural thing as well, though, isn't it, because it's embedded so much particularly, I would argue, with women, that compassion has to be felt for women managers themselves to take that step, that they have the courage to be that template for others and that's not always easy when you are contextualising it within a gender-biased society.
                
00:27:52 Viginta Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė
We need to remove gender bias in taxation, although the majority of the Member States don't have financial incentives or so-called marriage bonuses in their tax systems. But then, there are countries where they still exist and then, as I mentioned, it incentivises second earners to stay out of the labour market and that really has financial consequences. Even the Parliament, in 2019, called for removing joint taxation and moving to individual taxation so that we don't perpetuate gender stereotypes and we don't contribute to this unequal paid/unpaid work sharing. So, personal income taxation should be designed in such a way that it actually encourages more equal sharing of paid/unpaid work, more equal sharing of income pension rights, so women and men can thrive in a gender-equal economy.
                
00:28:47 Mary McCaughey
Thank you all. Extremely interesting discussion today. We could have gone on for at least another hour, if not more. Thank you so much, Viginta. Thank you so much, Jorge. This is another edition of our Eurofound Talks and this one builds on the most recent one we had with Barbara, which looked at job quality. We would like you to visit our website where you can see a data story, particularly on adverse social behaviour which affects women more than men in the workplace. But, of course, the big report on working conditions in the time of COVID-19, implications for the future, looks at every aspect of working conditions and not just the gender dimension. I would encourage you to read that and download it from our website. Also, of course, to continue to follow us on social media channels, on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and access us at any stage for any information you should need on this or any other issue. Until next time, when Eurofound talks to you.

(outro)