In recent years, the "mother's post" model in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province is being continuously promoted in the province.
On August 16, the General Office of the Guangdong Provincial Government issued the Notice on Optimizing and Adjusting Policies and Measures to Stabilize Employment to Promote Development and Benefit People's Livelihood, which proposed to encourage employers to actively set up "mother's posts" for women with children, explore and promote the construction of provincial "mother's posts" employment bases, and implement appropriate incentives and subsidies.
As early as April, the Department of Human Resources and Social Security of Guangdong Province also issued the "Implementation Opinions on Implementing the "Mother's Post" Employment Model to Promote Women's Employment (Draft for Comments)", proposing to widely develop the "mother's post" in the province.
The "mother's post" is: "encouraged and guided by the government, developed and set up by enterprises and other employing entities, to absorb women under the legal working age who have the obligation to support children under the age of 12 to work, working hours and management modes are relatively flexible, and it is convenient to balance work and childcare."
In addition, "Mama Gang" has appeared elsewhere. For example, in the past few years, some enterprises - Hubei Wuhan Jiashi Garment Co., Ltd. and Sichuan Yifeng Protective Clothing Co., Ltd. - took the initiative to implement this employment model. In the past two years, in addition to Guangdong, the Women's Federation and Human Resources and Social Security Departments in Shijingshan District of Beijing, Qimen County in Anhui Province, and Hanjiang District in Putian City, Fujian Province have also launched similar programs. This reflects the general demand for employment among women who have already given birth.
The "mother's post" model uses flexible work and flexible management to see the plight of women who have children, and is a new employment model that promotes "family-work" balance. At the same time, it needs to be noted that the "mother post" also has certain regrets, which may have unintended policy consequences.
For example, some netizens pointed out after the report: It is not easy for mothers to find a job, precisely because they are stumbled by excessive parenting responsibilities. The existence of "mother's post" may deepen society's recognition of the traditional gender division of labor, believing that "bringing children is only a mother's business".
Some netizens believe that the establishment of "mother posts" may invisibly increase the employment costs of female employees and aggravate employment discrimination.
In other words, while the policy of "mother's employment" is tilted towards women's employment, it may cause a unilateral strengthening of "motherhood" (the requirement for "fatherhood" is relatively weakened), which is not conducive to achieving gender equality in childcare responsibilities - this defect may greatly weaken its practical effect of encouraging women to have children.
For other families, men also have a need to balance childcare and work, and need corresponding public policy support. According to reports, He Lingchuan, head of the employment and entrepreneurship section of the Zhongshan Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, said that we are also preparing to optimize the "mother post" policy in July this year, mainly for the scope of setting up posts, from the original for mothers taking care of children under the age of 12 to expand the scope to fathers.
In public policies that balance "family and work", avoiding gender issues can better promote the common growth of both sexes and build a "nurturing-friendly" society.
However, the gendered division of family and work roles between "male protagonists and female protagonists" does exist, which is reflected in the following three types of data:
(1) Comparison of the labor force participation rate of men and women. Figure 1 below shows that China's female labor force participation rate is lower than that of men, with a difference of about 11-15 percentage points. In the 20 years from 1990 to 2010, with the rapid economic growth and the marketization of the labor system, the gap between the female labor force participation rate and the male labor force increased (the female/male labor force participation ratio decreased); From 2010 to 2019, the gap between women's labor force participation and men's began to turn around; In the past three years, the gap between the two has fluctuated.
Figure 1: Comparison of women's and men's labor force participation rates in China (Source: World Bank) This article is tabulated by Zhou Yanling
(2) Comparison of male and female salaries. According to data from a series of reports on gender pay gaps in the workplace in China, women's salaries in China have fluctuated around 78% of men's salaries in recent years (Figure 2 below). From the above data, in the five years from 2016 to 2021 (2017 data not available), the smallest pay gap between men and women was 81.6% in 2019 (urban female/male average pay ratio), and the largest gap was 77% in 2016 and 2021. The report also reveals that 55%-70% of the pay gap over the years can be explained by individual human capital factors, while 30%-45% is unexplained, which can be understood as gender differences or discrimination.
Figure 2: Comparison of average wages of women and men in urban China (Source: Report on Gender Pay Gap in the Chinese Workplace published by a recruitment platform)
(3) Comparison of men's and women's working hours for housework and caregiving. In 2008 and 2018, the National Bureau of Statistics conducted two national surveys on the use of national time, and the time spent on housework, accompanying family members and educating children in the two surveys was summarized as "housework and childcare work time". Figure 3 below shows that in 2008 and 2018, women's domestic and care work hours were 2.84 times and 2.67 times higher than those of men.
Figure 3: Comparison of Chinese women's and men's domestic work and labor time investment (Source: National Bureau of Statistics, 2008 Time Use Survey Data Compilation, 2018 National Time Use Survey Bulletin)
The above data show that in the field of occupational and economic representation "outside", male participation rate is higher and economic status (income) is higher, while in the field of family, which represents "inside", women's participation is higher than that of men. Women's family responsibilities (especially childbirth) have become the reason for gender discrimination (hiring discrimination, unequal pay for equal work, and difficulties in promotion) in the workplace, and even an important reason for women themselves to withdraw from employment.
Of course, "raising children is mainly a mother's business" has a complex social conceptual basis and other institutional backgrounds. What the "Mom's Job" can do is to promote a balance between women's employment and balancing family and childcare. However, gender equality in the division of labor in the family is one of the puzzle pieces to promote the common growth of both sexes and build a "nurturing-friendly" society.
For example, in Europe, where the birth policy has a better effect on social fertility, Sweden, Germany, and Italy, their maternity leave policies generally attach importance to childcare leave, including longer or equivalent childcare leave than maternity leave, requiring both men and women to take childcare leave, and even encouraging men to take childcare leave, and equal childcare bonuses can be issued for men and women with the same parental leave.
Singapore, which is also in the East Asian cultural circle, has a similar policy to promote the employment of parenting parents through flexible working models, and employees who benefit from this policy do not specify gender. Since 2013, Singapore enterprises offering flexible working arrangements to their employees can apply to the Government for Work-Life Harmony Allowance to cover related expenses.
Therefore, the "mother's post" can try to uphold the concept of gender equality and change it to "parent post" to further expand the coverage of the policy. Promote equal opportunities for both sexes in employment and childcare, jointly pursue a balance between work and family, and enhance the confidence of the whole family in childcare.
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