Women and Poverty (1989) - Combat Poverty Agency

first and last. This difference is crucial, both on the part of
workers themselves and for the·way they are treated.
Women's family responsibilities impinge on their work in
many ways. First, employed mothers can have less time
available for the job - to do overtime to participate in
educational courses outside of work, even'to devote the time
necessary to develop social contacts and networks - so
important in many jobs today. Work in the home is still
mainly a woman's responsibility whether she is employed or
not. Husbands of employed women spend only about 4 more
hours a week on housework than men whose wives are fulltime
in the home - 16 as against 12 hours a week.(55) So, if a
woman goes out to work, she usually still retains the
responsibility for home and family. and the very heavy
workloads associated with both. The average employed
married woman in Ireland ·puts in a 70 hour week between
home and job, compared with a 60 hour week on average for
men.(56) The typical working week. for the woman in the
home is about 68 hours.
Women's employment careers are also interrupted for childbearing
and child-rearing. At best, they are out of their jobs
for a few years. This may not seem alot but women are often
away from their jobs during the time that is most important
for career advancement, the late twenties, early thirties. So,
their family responsibilities are a major· source of
disadvantage to women in the workplace, given the present
structure ofwork in our society. .
.,
Women areEmployed for Fewer Hours than Men
According to the 1987 LaboUr Force Survey, women spend
an average of 38 hours a week on the job while the average
man works a 47 hour week. This explains some of the
difference in earnings. Another factor is women's fairly high
involvement in part-time work. Almost one in five women
work~ works part-ti!De, ~sually paid less and in poorer
conditions than full-time Jobs. Women held 78% of the
96,800 part-time jobs in Ireland in 1987; In fact, this kind of
work is becoming more and more important for women. In
contrast, just 2% of men work in apart-time capacity, usually
young and single men. Two industries predominate for part-
time work: professional services (ie education, health, legal
services, etc); and a group consisting of distributive trades,
insurance, finance and business services.(57) Most (63%)
part-time women workers are married, so it is mainly women
involved in rearing families, or those who have already done
so, who work on a part-time basis. Whether women work
part-time by choice or not is far from certain. One thing we
can be sure of: part-time work has many disadvantages that
may heighten women's risk ofpoverty in the long run.
.. Part-time jobs are paid at a lower rate - £1 to £2 an hour is
not uncommon. Part-time workers are among the worst paid
in the labour force and women part-timers earn least of all.
This stems from a number of facts such as: many part-timers
work in industries which are traditionally poorly paid; parttimers
are mainly concentrated in manual occupations which
are not defined as skilled, and they are in the lower grades;
part-timers do not as a rule receive overtime payments;. their
hours are often limited and rates ofpay. are not covered by
legislation.(58)
As well as the low earnings, the expansion of part-time
work has other negative consequences. The ·low number of
hours worked excludes.many workers from legislative
protection. You have to work at least eighteen hours a week
to. be covered for illness, redundancy, pension, maternity
leave. On the basis of the Labour Force Survey .of 1987,
nearly 30,000 people· worked· less than eighteen hours. a
week, 23,000 of whom were women. Employers' costs are
substantially reduced when workers are not covered by
legislative protection:· their PRSI ,contribution is lower,
among other things. So, there' is an incentive for employers
to push their workers' hours below the statutory minimum:
small wonder, then, that the hours'worked by part-timers are .
decreasing... : !. i . '. .' '.
Another disadvantage of part-time work is that it· rarely
offers any opportunities· for career advancement and
promotion, developing new skills or training. In addition,
working conditions are often very, poor in part-time jobs: