Women’s participation in the labor force is insufficient! – blame the men

In an economy that is SO desperately short of labor for the jobs currently available, there is a lot of publicity given to the statistic that in Sri Lanka, women’s participation in the labor force is less than for comparable economies.

We know that in general, women carry a disproportionate share of the burden of bringing up a family, which leads to additional pressures both in terms of doing oodles of unpaid work in the house to take care of the family, and the pressure to keep down a job, and contribute to the household finances.

How many men have told women that once they get married to them, they should give up their career to bring up the children? Sometimes, a woman may give up a job or vocation in which she is earning more than the spouse in order to bring up her, children, ONLY because the spouse does not take his share of family duties as a given, and insists that she gives up her ambition.

So given all this, when we expect women to enter the workforce and in the case of those working, in order to retain them in the workforce, we need an attitudinal change especially on the part of the husband, when it comes to sharing in the housework and sharing parenting responsibilities. Without this basic need, it is unfair to expect women’s participation to increase.

Ask any HR manager of a garment factory, what his problem is! He will immediately tell you that the bulk of his labor force, especially when the factory employs women, who are boarded and not live in the vicinity, is that they are working to collect money for their wedding, and as soon as they get married they are most likely to leave the employment and in today’s context it is becoming exceedingly difficult for them to find replacements to take their place.

The number of vacancies in the Garment sector is increasing exponentially due to this and many are forced to close and relocate to countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam and now Myanmar due to this shortage. We cannot increase wage rates in order to retain them, as they compete with other countries, and export prices have to be competitive in order to sell to their third country customers. It is in areas of environmental sensitivity that companies can have a competitive edge and hold on to a high wage labor force, if they have some unique product characteristic that is of marketing value to their customer.

WE must also be cognizant of the cost of education and the waste of that cost if that HR is not put to productive use, as far as an economy is concerned. Sri Lanka has a double whammy problem of training doctors in the public sector free of charge. It is both the fact that a high proportion seek greener pastures overseas, forsaking the country that sacrificed much to give them a valuable education, but also of some female doctors who give up medicine upon marriage and the birth of their children, with few going back to practice, years later, once they become empty nesters. It just does not happen.

These are very real economic costs of female education and I may sound like a sexist here, but the Country must be able to accommodate, the needs of women who have this pressure and provide that which is needed to retain them in the workforce, to which they are trained, and not let them go easily.

Of course our childcare arrangements are not sufficiently sophisticated to allow day care facilities in all workplaces and child minding after school, as schools end at 1.30pm in order that women are able to participate fully in the work force for the benefit of their family to rise up in economic and social terms, and only then to benefit the economy, which merely follows when this objective is achieved.

Now there are significantly more women going to State Universities over men. As it costs them no tuition fees, the cost of their education is not of concern to them, so if they do not make use of their education for the long term, but merely use it as leverage in getting a spouse only, that too is a waste of state resources.

I propose a loan scheme, interest free, not only to the private sector, as has just been proposed, but also to the public sector, so that a quality education is received by all, when the Universities have the necessary resources to give it, people will then only follow courses that they expect to benefit from. Presently they merely enter University just because they obtained entrance and in many cases not because they wish to follow that course of study to work thereafter. No one appears to be addressing these issues, as they are political hot potatoes, politicians wish to ignore, at their peril, or more rather the peril being the Country’s as a whole, which suffers due to this system outdated thinking.

Why not turn all the concepts on their head, and teach children from the pre-school stage, that men and women are equally capable of doing any job and not create stereotypes as is done at present in many fields. I know great progress has been made already, and more needs to be made, but once these barriers (in the mind- see my last blog entry) are gradually discarded, we will not need to have quotas for women in politics.

It is anathema anyway to have quotas and many men more suitable to be represented, now find they have had to make way for women with NO political base in the community, that can distort civic minded ness. A HOT TOPIC now!  

We are simply as usual pointing out the problem with no one determined to solve this problem, both for the benefit of the women, sometimes by empowering them, and in other cases changing the mindset of people. Either way, unless you want an influx of foreign labor, this has to be addressed without delay, the economy is about to grind to a halt and all areas of labor productivity including the above topic, all need to be addressed and solutions implemented.