Unequal Pay: Who Can Afford to Look After the Children

Men and women: who looks after the children?

Report on three joint seminars

November 2002

Not for publication before: 00.01am Wednesday 13 November 2002

In the spring of 2002, The Fawcett Society, the Equal Opportunities Commission and Fathers Direct organised three seminars on the common theme, Men and women: who looks after the children:

1. Unequal pay: who can afford to look after the children?
2. Social exclusion: when dad joins in the caring, can the family step out of poverty?
3. Unequal parenting benefits: squaring the short-term needs of mothers with the long-term need to encourage active fatherhood.

This paper records some of the main observations and conclusions from these three seminars. It concludes with some proposals for action based on the main findings.

Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Trade & Industry, participated in the first seminar. Other participants, about 40 at each seminar, included policy makers, academics and NGOs

For the first time, champions of women’s equality and advocates of active fatherhood have come together to forge new policy proposals that recognise the interdependence of equality at home and at work.

1. Unequal pay: who can afford to look after the children?

Thursday 23 May 2002

The workplace has not adapted to changes in family life

Families come in all shapes and sizes, and there is no longer a single pattern for how families organise work, home and caring responsibilities. In the workplace, shift working and atypical work are becoming more common and a quarter of the workforce works part-time. The majority of mothers of pre-schoolers now do paid work and the increase is fuelled by mothers from two-parent families. This means that there is a different kind of man in the workforce: fathers whose partners are not at home looking after the children but are also at work. But workplaces continue to operate on the assumption that men have someone in the background who will take on the family caring – it rewards those who work long hours, through extra pay and/or through promotion prospects.

Low paid men face particular problems, because the only way to earn sufficient income is to work very long hours. Higher paid men tend to have access to greater flexibility, though long hours of (unpaid) work is an issue for these men too.

Data, particularly longitudinal data, on the impact of different work/family strategies on parents, children and productivity would be valuable.

Childcare and domestic work is now an issue for fathers as well as mothers

A new alliance is forming between the women’s movement, the new fatherhood movement and advocates of equal opportunities, as represented by the three hosts of this seminar series. Caring for children and domestic work need to be seen as issues for fathers as well as mothers. Children do best with the involvement of both parents – whether those parents live together or apart. Work culture with its emphasis on "presenteeism" is causing men to miss out on their families and their aspirations to participate in the lives of their children are growing; meanwhile one of the key unfulfilled aspirations of mothers is being employed, at least part-time. It is in the interests of women seeking equal opportunities in the workplace and public life, to encourage men to take a bigger share in the home. This issue will only be resolved if it is politicised and taken out of the realm of the private concern of individual families.

For fathers, the demands of paid work are the main reason for not undertaking more direct care of children. Because of the importance of their breadwinning role, parental leave will only be viable for fathers if it is fully paid. However, fathers take far less leave than mothers even in countries where parental leave is well paid – cultural expectations continue to exert strong pressures on men, and employers continue to expect that men will have someone else in the background to take responsibility for family care.

The development of an affordable and comprehensive infrastructure of childcare services would increase the potential for parents to share care between themselves. There is evidence from European studies that the amount of time fathers spend with their children increases where children attend formal childcare settings.

Similarly, more availability of part-time work and greater work flexibility in traditionally ally male jobs and in higher skilled jobs would increase the opportunities for parents to share roles.

The birth of a baby is a key opportunity to inform new parents about the wide variety of ways that parents share paid work, domestic work and care and to promote to new parents the opportunities of sharing work and care.

Unequal pay generates greater inequality when children are born

Better leave arrangements and improved childcare services are only part of the equation. Britain has one of the biggest gender pay gaps in Europe – women working full-time earn 18.5% less per hour than men; women working part-time earn 41% less per hour than men.

The pay gap has a significant impact on family decisions about who does the caring and who earns the income, particularly in low-income families. As women generally earn less than men, it makes economic sense for the mother rather than the father to take time out of work or shorten their hours to care for their children and manage the home. The father on the other hand is under pressure to work longer hours or seek promotion to compensate for the loss of the mother's earnings. Once the mother has become expert at handling the child and takes the lead in domestic work, it is hard to break the emerging roles of mother as unpaid worker and father as breadwinner.

By the time a second child is born, the gap between women's earning potential and men's has widened - women face an even bigger pay gap and men face a time gap – this becomes a cycle that is difficult to break out of.

However, where women earn more, the gender pay gap begins to close, and the dynamics of the cycle begins to change. On average, fathers earn two thirds of family income. However, where mothers do paid work full-time their contributions become more equal - fathers contribute 55% and mothers 45% of family income. In one in five couples where each partner does paid work over 16 hours a week, women earn more than their partners. US research indicates that where mothers earn more than their partners, fathers are more likely to undertake personal care of the child.

Reducing the pay gap for women would release men from the pressure to do paid work for longer hours, and enable them to be more closely involved with the care of their children. Policies to tackle the gender pay gap, through company level gender pay audits, for example, are a crucial step in the process of liberating men to become active carers of their children.

Two core beliefs that underpin unequal pay will need to be addressed. These are:

• the low value of caring work, both paid and unpaid;
• men’s role is the family breadwinner.

The voice of children is important

Children want parents to be less stressed. Stress is the result of the growing discrepancy between the changing way families are organised and the lack of equivalent change in the workplace.

We do little to bring the voice of children into the debate about gender roles and work/family balance. We know little about children’s attitudes to parental work patterns, impacts on children of work/life flexibility and children’s attitudes to gender roles.

Even though girls are outperforming boys in education, girls still express aspirations to look after children whilst boys do not. Little is done to foster aspirations of both boys and girls to share the roles of looking after children and earning money.

2. Social exclusion: when dad joins in the caring, can the family step out of poverty?

Wednesday 12 June 2002

Gender inequality is preventing us from eliminating poverty. Gender equality should recognise both women’s and men’s needs, and how these interact. Usually women are at a disadvantage, but sometimes a special focus is needed on men and boys. Department for International Development, (1998), Breaking the barrier, Issues Paper

Equality is about both sexes being able to fulfil their potential. It is not a battle between the sexes - that view is part of the problem. Julie Mellor, Chairwoman, Equal Opportunities Commission, The Guardian, 16 January 2001

Socially excluded fathers

Women, especially mothers with dependent children, face higher levels of poverty than men. But current statistics on poverty do not help us understand how many fathers live in poverty since they do not distinguish between men and fathers.

Fathers on low incomes face multiple barriers to involvement in the lives of their children: long working hours so that they can earn enough; inflexible working hours; increasing job insecurity particularly in post-industrial areas; workplaces requiring of men full-time continuous employment without concessions for family; social networks focussed on economic activity; a sense of failure at earning a low income resulting in lack of confidence in their role as father.

Unemployed fathers may be looking after their children, particularly if their partners are working. But because a man’s role is defined as breadwinning and the lack of support to fathers in the community, they often feel themselves to be a ‘failed provider’ rather than an ‘involved carer’. They do not access support networks and services.

State programmes tackling social exclusion largely fail to support men as carers of children. They focus on men’s narrow economic potential and the need to prevent their anti-social behaviour. The welfare to work programme has a strong element of compulsion for men who are not regarded as primary carers, and this can lead to further dislocation from their families.

In the US, pilot work has been undertaken that links support as a father to employment programmes. The aim of the programmes is to enhance men’s confidence as fathers, which in turn leads to increased motivation to earn money for the family. No such pilots have been tested in UK, for example, through New Deal.

Supporting the relationship of children with separated fathers

Two million parents are separated from their children through family breakdown, though only about 10% of children in separated families have no contact with the non-resident parent.

Poorer fathers are more likely to be non-resident and in less contact with their children. They are more likely to be isolated and depressed, in poor housing and probably coping with little support from family services. Conflict or tension over child support payments can lead to reduced contact. These create further problems with involvement in the lives of their children - poor housing, lack of toys, and lack of caring skills. There are no benefits or support services for most of these fathers, because they are not “primary carers”. In other countries, there is an assumption that separated parents will share care in some way and benefits are divided in order to support the relationship of the child(ren) with both parents, without undermining the viability of the benefits for each parent individually.

More available fathers should mean less need for paid childcare. US research shows that non-resident fathers who are more involved with their children pay more child support. The US Child Support Agency is involved in programmes to encourage father-child relationships.

We do not know if greater involvement by fathers in caring increases the earnings women bring into the family. We do know that where parents share the care of children more equally after separation, it helps women re-partner more quickly and this may help lift the child out of poverty. We do not know the impact of contact with their children on the rate at which men re-partner.

Fathers in the criminal justice system

Imprisonment separates 130,000 children from their fathers and 12,000 children from their mothers. Wider use of community penalties would help mothers and fathers maintain relationships with their children and partners. Visiting facilities for children to see their parents are deteriorating as prisons continue to become more over-crowded and parents are sent to more distant locations for their sentence (this is a particular issue for female prisoners who, with so few women’s prisons, are often imprisoned far from home). Only half of fathers in prison see their children.

Current Government policy on reducing re-offending focuses mainly on male offenders as future employees. There are few imaginative, well-resourced and properly evaluated programmes targeting offenders as carers, despite the exceptionally high proportion of young offenders who are fathers (25%, 6 times higher than the national average for the age group) and despite the clear association between a strong father-child relationship and the reduction of offending behaviour. The biggest predictor of criminal behaviour is a father who is or has been in prison.

Imprisoned fathers’ aspirations to be ‘good fathers’ can be very high, but this is not matched by opportunities, resources and skills. Lack of ability is often interpreted as lack of responsibility – Government policy towards fathers in prison is to make them “take more responsibility for their children’s care” (White Paper, Justice for All, July 2002).

Work with fathers in the criminal justice system is developing, but this is frequently undermined by the lack of support in the community following release. Also there is a lack of support to the mother-father relationship, critical to the child-father relationship. Support to fathers in prison is rarely coordinated with support to the mother in the community.

Family services fail to reach fathers

State and non-state policies and services for families and children have been overwhelmingly targeted at, and designed for, women, often unwittingly excluding the growing number of involved fathers and other male carers from their services. Despite a wide range of initiatives emerging from the grass-roots and from projects initiated by small and innovative funders (e.g. Home Office Family Policy Unit, Sure Start Plus working with teenage parents), there is neither the leadership at the top to set appropriate targets for fostering men, as well as women, as carers, nor is there significant investment in the spread of knowledge and skills among practitioners working directly with children and families, to ensure that family and child services are inclusive of fathers and other male carers. And having failed to reach fathers, all too often family services and policy makers then place the responsibility for this on the fathers themselves: they are classified as “hard to reach”, despite the existence of numerous successful projects that have disproved this.

This applies in particular to maternity services, a prime opportunity to interact with parents, when they are physically present and both more receptive to information and support than at any other time. Aspirations for genuine sharing care are particularly high at this time and not yet undermined by the social and economic pressures that follow the birth. In US, a programme involving midwives addressing fathers resulted in an increase in paternity establishment from 18% to 60% among low-income unmarried couples, with paternity establishment leading automatically to registration of the fathers for child-support maintenance. And yet there is no universal provision of information and support to first-time fathers in UK. Maternity services have developed as a health service delivered to women, yet also manage the process of delivering information and support on the transition to parenthood, support that is needed by both parents.

A gender audit of family services would identify the extent to which the child-father relationship is supported. This would involve monitoring spending, delivery and outcomes for their effects on gender inequalities.

3. Unequal parenting benefits: squaring the short-term needs of mothers with the long-term need to encourage active fatherhood

Wednesday 10 July 2002

Leave entitlements in UK

The UK has very unequal leave entitlements for women and men, and insufficient connection between leave entitlements and childcare services. The UK has the longest maternity leave in Europe[1], paid at a relatively low level of income replacement[2]. The UK's parental leave scheme is unpaid, the least flexible and the shortest permitted under European legislation. The introduction of paid paternity leave from April 2003[3] is a very welcome development, but still leaves fathers with very little leave entitlement compared to mothers. The UK lags behind Europe in the extent to which it provides affordable quality childcare.