THE EQUALITY STAKES: ARE WE WINNING OR LOSING?

WORDS: MARY O’CONNOR

Have we lost the plot?
Sitting in my car on a wet evening in Dublin, stuck in never-ending traffic, the thought becomes as insistent as the rain pouring down. I’ve just listened to a radio interview with David Coleman, the presenter of the TV programme “Families in Trouble”, in which he said, if I am paraphrasing him correctly, that ideally one parent should stay at home to look after small children, but that nowadays this is a luxury — yes, he used the word luxury - most of us cannot afford! So we just have to manage as best we can in our current circumstances, and try to make as much time as possible in our busy schedules for the kids. Staying at home to look after our children, something my mother and grandmother took completely for granted, has become too much to aspire to in our bright new post-Celtic-tiger world. Where are we heading?

At the recent Siptu National Women’s Forum in Killarney Esther Lynch, legislation and social affairs officer with Ictu, called on women to tackle the child bar in the work place in the same way they tackled the marriage bar. She is reported to have said “the myth that women are doing well is dangerous”. Could she be right?

I’m of an age, and I’m not that old being still on the right side of 60, to have had personal experience of the marriage bar in the civil service, when women had to give up work once they got married. You weren’t even asked if you minded — it was just bye-bye, no matter how good you were or how vital the work you were doing was. It sounds incredible now, but that is how it was in the early seventies. I got married — at what was then considered to be the ripe old age of 24 — when they removed the marriage bar, because we could not afford to do without my income, and I was among the first of the women in the government department I worked for to take maternity leave, all 12 weeks of it, 6 of which had to be taken before the baby was born! There is no doubt things have changed, but to paraphrase that clichéd political slogan, while a lot has been achieved there is still a lot more to do.
What concerns me, though, is whether we are going in the right direction.

As Frances Ruane pointed out (WMB February/March 2007) because of pressure in the labour market employers have begun to accommodate women much more than they did in the past. But are they really? I see my daughters and their friends struggling with the same issues that I did; how to juggle families and careers without running themselves ragged.

It does not look like it is any easier to me — I just see them putting off having babies into their mid- and late- thirties when for some of them, unfortunately, it may be too late. I see them working ten- and twelve- hour days and weekends, and while they are operating very successfully in the workplace they are, as Frances Ruane put it, “women who have to operate in a world whose parameters have been defined by men”.

It was in this context that I recently reread Understanding Human Nature, a book written by Alfred Adler, which I first encountered over a decade ago, but has always made a lot of sense to me. Alfred Adler was born in Vienna in 1870, and with Freud and Jung, he is regarded as one of the fathers of modern psychotherapy, although he eventually parted company with Freud, forming The Society for Individual Psychology in 1912.

According to Adler two tendencies dominate all psychological activities, what he called gemeinschaftsgefuhl, usually translated as social feeling or community feeling, and the individual striving for power and significance. A society’s character, just like an individual’s, is determined by the balance between these two elements. I don’t imagine that anyone would disagree with Adler’s premise that our society overvalues the individual striving for power and this, in his view, has introduced false values into the normal division of labour - a phrase which probably didn’t have the connotations then as it does now, imbued as it has become with totalitarian and socialist ideology.

Adler maintained that dividing up the work is an essential part of social and
communal life. We can’t all do the same things, thankfully, and we have different capacities and talents, but we can all contribute to the effective running of our community. We talk about equal pay for work of equal value — not about people getting paid the same because they do the same work — although how the work is valued, and by whom, is an interesting question, and a topic for another day.

Problems arise when we overvalue and undervalue certain contributions, and where people compete rather than co-operate.

A very obvious area that requires a division of work is the area of child-bearing and child-rearing; only women can do the first – it’s not our fault that men can’t – and they are generally more adapted to the second, especially in the early stages of a child’s life. However, in a world where the parameters have been set by men, the hugely significant and important work of child-bearing and child-rearing is grossly undervalued. Why? Even at its most utilitarian where will that educated and productive workforce of the future come from if women don’t do this work? But more importantly it would appear that women themselves are not convinced that their role as child-bearers and mothers is equally important, if not more important, than the work they do outside the home – what used to be called man’s work and which they now have proved they can do with such aplomb.

So are we, in our striving for equal power with men in a man’s world, making things even worse for ourselves?

Perhaps we need to start valuing what we do, including our woman’s work, more, and assert that what we do in this area is vital to the well-being of society, even if the society we live in does not currently acknowledge this. Otherwise I’m afraid we could end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And then, maybe, we should look at how we can start redefining those parameters — so they suit women as well as men.