What is the big reason behind young women's failure in career progression and goal achievement? Many gender studies focus on this question, and explore both economic and mental health issues.
Aside from this, I would also like to add a follow-up question -- what is the big reason behind older women’s relentless daily duty in their later lives these days?
These two questions are always more or less linked with childcare in Bangladesh.
Women -- mothers of children and grandmothers of children -- are the main pillars in this society to provide childcare.
However, I believe that we need to rethink this intergenerational nexus if we want to build a long-term sustainable society.
Where are the others?
Women are providing full service of childcare with minimum help from fathers, men, society, and the state in general.
However, at least to me, it looks like society is obsessed with producing more children.
To make matters worse, not only do we want children, we blame women if they are not reproducing.
If any woman decides to be childfree, we all constantly push her to have a child. If they have one, we keep pushing for another one.
If a woman is just married, all our conversations always round up into the direction of pregnancy.
If we all want women to have children, blame them for not having one as early as possible, and do not mind pushing them to the boundary of a mental health crisis under our constant bullying, then why don’t we take childcare as a public good and service?
Why don’t we take the responsibility from the mothers and grandmothers so that their lives are not made more difficult to raise a child?
Children are not only a responsibility of the mother who gives birth as children are the future of the society too. Creating good citizens is a part of a country’s main goal. It is certainly part of a state’s responsibilities.
To me, it looks like childcare should be treated as a public good. Public good, as it means in economics, deserves a public investment.
It’s about time for some investment in daycare
Even though we have had a growing number of women in the active labour force for some decades, access to affordable childcare services is far from reality in Bangladesh.
Women are the backbone of many industries these days and yet, there is almost no visible sign in designing daycare centres for children.
Indeed, how many daycare centres do we have in Bangladesh? I tried to trace this information from websites and could not find more than a couple, and that are all concentrated in Dhaka.
Some facilities are available in multinational companies. Recently, the Faculty of Social Science in Dhaka University opened one daycare centre in the campus.
These are great news, but are mostly designed for the richer part of Dhaka, for the urban middle class and higher class families.
The price of these services is not affordable for lower middle class and poorer women, who probably need it most.
Too many women are sacrificing their careers
Many women either need to totally leave the job or do not even get a chance to start a career because of their need to take care of the child. When women get ready to start the career again, then they are already late in skills and professional development.
This not only hurts women’s potential in building their careers, this also has a very detrimental impact on their self identity. Moreover, this also hurts children as it means lower income for the household, and of course, having unhappy mothers.
This issue is going to be a big economic barrier in the near future when families will find it harder and harder to sustain with one person’s income.
Some women are still managing. How do women who have an active career survive in this situation? There are couple of options for women currently:
First, grandmothers -- particularly the women’s mothers -- are taking the responsibility.
They want to help their daughters' careers. This generation of women suffered their whole lives, and so they do not want their daughters to lose economic independence. As a result, they support as long as needed -- even when the number of children keeps growing.
I know cases where women in their 70s are taking care of four or five kids of their two daughters. As a result, many older women do not get rest in their later lives. They suffer from different chronic diseases and anxiety.
Men normally retire after 65; women in our society have no retirement age.
Second, housemaids. Temporary and permanent housemaids provide the service. Many mothers depend on helping hands to raise kids.
Once again though, these options are mainly for urban middle class and upper class women. Poorer women even send their kids to madrasas in search of childcare.
Due to the lack of adequate childcare services, many women take the children with them for work if they have permission.
Issues that have been raised here are important for long-term gender equality and family happiness. Some dimensions include:
- Undue labour from grandmothers: Old women are paying the actual price and carrying the burden without any health or financial benefit.
- Unprepared housemaids: House helpers have been a great source of help in childcare for many years in Bangladesh. Still, these are girls without any formal training and knowledge about childcare.
- Children suffering from speech dysfunction: This may also happen due to the relationship with unprepared caretakers along with a childhood that was far from ideal in terms of socialization.
What can be done
Given that our female labour force is rising, we need to understand that childcare is a public good. Childcare service helps society by creating healthy and respectful individuals.
It also helps to create a new job market for many men and women. I believe that we can solve this issue in couple of ways:
- The government should encourage industries to establish childcare services. This could be a promising development sector for many men and women too.
- Training centres to train people who want to learn about childcare. We can produce many professional nannies in that way. This can be a new service industry for many job seekers. Early years are very important in the child development process, and so we need to be careful about the provider of childcare services.
- Affordable childcare service on the work site or near the work areas can be an important benefit package for the parents working in the industries. Access to childcare service on the site will help parents to work without any constant concern. This will also help women's mental health and anxiety issues.
- Perhaps most importantly, we need to train our men to be active and involved fathers. Media can play a big role in teaching men that childcare is not a woman’s job. Many of us grew up without any involvement from our fathers. Men need to understand investing money in children is not the only parental duty they have. An active father always improves the child’s life.
Spatial locations of childcare services need to be analyzed through research around the demand estimation of childcare services. One thing is clear: Only a clear agenda and long-term planning can solve the current issues we have with childcare, where most if not all the burden falls upon women.
Aparna Howlader is Assistant Professor of Economics, Chatham University, Pittsburgh, United States.