Unequal household responsibilities holding local women back

Accomplished US executive and veteran of several board positions Dr Mary Dwyer said that the biggest stumbling block that is hindering the professional advancement and achievement of Maltese career-women is the unequal distribution of responsibilities in the household.

Discussing the issue of quotas, Dwyer said that while it is unlikely that more women can start being asked to join boards until female representation on boards increases, she maintained that the problem Maltese career-women face is a more fundamental one.

"The real issue in Malta is that women are finding themselves taking on disproportionate responsibility in the home," Dwyer insisted.

She argued that the result of the disproportionate balance of household and families duties is that women work less hours than men, and their professional development is slower.

Dwyer said that women aspiring to reach board-level positions need to be backed up by a certain professional achievement in order to become eligible for such appointments.

 This, she said, cannot happen locally as long as Maltese women keep taking on this disproportionate share of home responsibilities.

She was speaking during a talk held at the Chamber of Commerce, which was also attended by US Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley.

Dwyer also expressed herself in favour of the controversial quotas "as a means to reach certain participation rates," which she noted might be especially necessary in certain cultures where working women face additional cultural hurdles.

She added that once the quotas ensure a "critical mass of representation" they could be removed once the achieved level of female representation would be able to perpetuate itself.

"Quotas help with volume. They might be the way to go until a country reaches the critical mass necessary to ensure the spontaneous perpetuation of female representation," she remarked.

Dwyer also noted that local cultural factors such as religion and education, which contribute towards the perception that Maltese women belong in the home, could be having an "accumulative disadvantage" affect that further impairs their professional potential.

During her address Dwyer also discussed the difficulties women face to get appointed to company boards, which she described as "insular" and "self-perpetuating".

She also pointed to figures showing that even in more gender-egalitarian North European countries such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland, female representation is considerably lower than the actual female representation within a given society as a whole.

Dwyer also argued that that board-level appointments require a certain career status, adding that factors which inhibited the development of one's career status would invariably mean that access to certain decision-making positions would be denied.

She pointed to 2006 data that found that the presence of women in top management positions in a particular country is directly linked to the share of hours they work as compared to men.

According to the study, Nordic countries such as Sweden, Bulgaria, Latvia, and Finland were found to have both a high proportion of women in top management as well as a high proportion of total hours worked by women.

However Malta ranked at the very bottom in both the proportion of women in top management, as well as the share of total hours worked by women.

Dwyer argued that because of this, part-time work is a very negative factor with regards to one's prospects for moving up the career ladder, and said that according to research, males are very unlikely to work part-time at any point in their lives.

Conversely, women were found to be much more likely to work part-time between their 30s and into their late 40s, a factor Dwyer remarked was likely linked to women's biological clock and childbearing ages.

She also remarked that the proportion of boards chaired by women is even slimmer, pointing out that this is still the case today even in the US and egalitarian North-European member states.

The talk was also attended by a number of local professionals both male and female, who discussed their respective experiences working on boards and in other decision-making positions.