Childcare was one of the key issues discussed during the conference on work and family-life reconciliation organized last week by the Women's Labor and Employment Initiative (KEİG) at İstanbul Technical University.As I mentioned in a previous article, the policies presented by economists and experts from six different countries -- France, Spain, Sweden, Mexico, South Korea and the Netherlands -- differed widely, but all focused on providing better services to make it easier for women to get paid employment. In Sweden, childcare is publicly funded, but services are supplied by the municipalities, the audience was told. Children of working parents are not only entitled to day services; after-school and holiday care are also part of the package. Because being socialized early is now considered a child's right and an important element of early education, even children of stay-at-home parents benefit from 15 hours a week of nursery care.
In the Netherlands, childcare services are private, but the state still bears the largest share of the cost, the rest being divided between employers and the parents. In France, childcare is also partly subsidized and various formulas, collective or individual, are on offer. Some 40 percent of children under the age of 3 are looked after by childminders, who are allowed to care for up to four children at a time, or in crèches. But whether childcare is directly or indirectly subsidized by the authorities, a proper legislative framework is needed to guarantee the quality of care.
Turkey lags far behind other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries in terms of female labor force participation. This does not mean that Turkish women are averse to paid employment: While only one in four are currently in the labor force, twice as many have at one point in their lives held a job. Many left because they could not combine work with the 38 hours a week Turkish women spend on average looking after their family, according to economist İpek İlkkaracan.
Available childcare services are woefully inadequate. Sociologist Yıldız Ecevit of the Middle East Technical University showed that only 4.1 percent of working women relied on institutionalized childcare. Often a working mother will juggle all the tasks herself or with the help of her mother-in-law. Ten percent of female workers also transfer part of the household burden onto the shoulders of their older female children.
As demonstrated by the examples of South Korea and Spain, where important policy changes were introduced to promote women's employment, with enough political will, countries can turn the tide within a few years. In South Korea, for instance, only 200,000 children benefited from childcare in 1995; by 2007, this number had more than quintupled. But the need to reconcile work and family life needs to be recognized by the authorities before it can be addressed. Yıldız Ecevit pointed out, for instance, that despite a law that, until recently, required companies to provide childcare if they employed more than 150 female workers (why female only?), no one had bothered to collect data to see if it was implemented. Access to childcare also varies enormously across the country: 43 percent of Turkey's kindergarten (ana sınıfı) teachers are in İstanbul.
The informative conference organized by the KEİG should have attracted employers, bureaucrats and politicians but, as is often the case when gender issues are discussed, attendance was limited. Former State Minister Güldal Akşit, who heads the parliamentary commission on gender equality was, however, present. Hopefully she will relay some of the findings to her colleagues in Ankara.
As social policy expert Ito Peng of Toronto University pointed out after presenting her study of the South Korean model, there is a “virtuous cycle between social and economic developments” and investment in social care is a new engine of economic growth. As Turkey looks for new ways to boost its economy, this is an aspect it needs to consider.
