- INSEE published this Friday a study on the relationships between professional and family life.
- Women with family responsibilities tend to be less employed than men in the same situation.
- To balance things out, some are asking for example an extension of paternity leave.
"No need to make too long a speech / it changes everything inside, it changes everything around". With his song Sarbacane , Francis Cabrel reminds us how becoming a parent is a huge upheaval for everyday life. This is confirmed - in a less lyrical tone - by an INSEE study published this Friday. Nearly 20,000 people (salaried or whose last job was salaried employment) aged 25 to 49, and with "family responsibilities" *, were asked in 2018 about their work-life balance.
The main observation: the impact is not at all the same for women or for men. When men have family responsibilities, they are employed in 91% of the cases, compared to 82% if they do not have a family responsibility. Among women, it is the opposite: only 76% of women who have to take care of children are in employment, while those who do not have this constraint work at 84%. This observation is valid whatever the socio-professional category, the situation of the spouse, and even the age or the number of children. How to explain such a difference ?
More difficult adjustments for less qualified women
Asked by 20 Minutes , INSEE provides a cautious answer. Concerning men, the institute puts forward three hypotheses: "First, parenthood could have a positive effect on employment: being a father would make men more productive on the job market or would be valued on the job market . Then men would wait until they were professionally established to have a child. Finally, the role of a third factor, health problems for example, which would play both on being employed and having a child. "
For women, too, "the study does not allow us to conclude," says INSEE. Again, several hypotheses are put forward: “the fact that women are out of work when they have family responsibilities can reflect difficulties in reconciling professional and family life, whether they are on the job side (inflexible working conditions, low wages) or childcare arrangements (but the study is not limited to parents of young children)) or result from parents' decisions. "
Illustration: among women, the effect of family responsibilities is particularly marked among workers. "Only 54% of workers who have family responsibilities are employed, compared to 74% of those who do not" notes INSEE. For women managers, the difference is much less marked (90% in jobs with responsibilities, 94% without). This difference between socio-professional categories stems from the fact that workers or employees generally have fewer possibilities of adjusting their hours than managers. Many therefore have no choice but to stop working when a child arrives.
A burden on women
The differences between men and women do not stop there. When we look only at those who have to balance work and family responsibilities, we see that it is women who make the most adjustments. In fact, only 3% of male managers declare that the main consequence of the family "burden" is a reduction in their working time. Among women managers, this proportion is almost 7 times higher: 20% of them declare that they have to work less to care for children, often by working part-time.
Even more revealing: INSEE also asked employees if having a spouse by their side made it possible to better manage family responsibilities. Among single men, the effect is clear: they are much more numerous than those in a couple to declare consequences on their professional life. On the other hand, "there is no significant effect for women" notes INSEE. This means that even as a couple, it is the woman who bears the most family responsibilities.
These differences are all the more detrimental since women, like men, experience exactly the same difficulties in reconciling professional and family life. "The most cited difficulties concern time (41% overall), whether it is the length of working days, unpredictable, fluctuating or staggered schedules, or even home-work journeys" note the authors of the study. In other words, and to paraphrase Florence Foresti, there is no "park gene" in women who would predestine them to better cope with the constraints generated by children. To correct this imbalance, many are claiming, for example, an extension of paternity leave, currently set at 11 calendar days. "If you increase paternity leave, you make women less alone in the face of discrimination linked to pregnancy, since men are also required to be absent from business", explains France Inter Céline Lazorthes, founder of Leetchi.
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* INSEE defines "family responsibilities" as "living with one or more children under the age of 15 (his own or that of his spouse) or regularly looking after one or more children under the age of 15 years who do not live with you ”.
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