By TIOL News Service

PARIS, MAR 07, 2017: THE OECD’s Gender study of Germany has revealed that OECD countries are increasingly recognizing that gender equality at home is crucial for achieving gender equality in the workplace – which, aside from an ethical imperative, has important implications for economic growth. This despite women around the world still spending far more hours on unpaid childcare and much less likely to be in the labour market than men.

Many factors have supported rising female employment in OECD countries in recent decades, but one key factor is evolving attitudes around men's and women's roles. Men and women across the OECD are increasingly accepting of mothers working when children are young, especially once they enter compulsory school. Norms are also changing around which parent should care for very young children. On average across OECD countries more than 25% of people now believe that parental leave should be shared evenly between mothers and fathers, and this rises to around or above 40% in France, Germany and the Nordic countries. Several countries have also seen an increase in fathers actually taking parental leave. Germany, for instance, has seen the share of children with a father that used parental leave increase from 20.8% in 2008 to 34.2% in 2014. In Korea, the male share of parental leave users has increased from 1.5% in 2007 to 8.5% in 2016.

Yet, despite these positive trends, many parents still report difficulties in balancing their work and family roles. Reflecting the difficulty of combining full-time job with childrearing, women across OECD countries are far more likely than men to work part-time. On average across OECD countries, around one-in-four working mothers work fewer than thirty hours per week.

The report offers various recommendations to promote equal partnerships across OECD countries, including:

++ Encourage (and financially incentivize) more fathers to take up parental leave, and monitor fathers’ uptake of leave. Getting fathers to take leave is good for dads' relationships with their children and is important for getting women back into paid work.

++ Increase investments in, and ensure broader access to, early childhood education and care for young children. Across OECD countries, childcare costs remain a barrier to parents' participation in the labour market. This is especially true for less-educated or lower-skilled mothers, whose wages often do not offset the cost of childcare.

++ Develop workplace family-policy measures that include options for both parents with young children to work reduced hours for a specific period of time – but make sure that workers have the right to return to full-time work.

++ Tax-benefit systems can provide incentives or disincentives for second earners in couple families.