Women’s confederation’s fury at minister’s ‘stay-at-home’ comments

Finance Minister Tonio Fenech has angered the MCWO after expressing at a pre-budget consultation conference this week his admiration of women – like his wife – who stay at home to take care of the kids.

The comment jarred with government’s claims that it was creating more fiscal incentives for childcare centres so that more women can go to work, when just 38% are actually gainfully employed, the lowest in the EU.

And it also attracted the anger of the Confederation of Women’s Organisations, whose PRO said she was disappointed with Fenech‘s comments about mothers who are in paid employment and women who choose to stay at home.

“We refer to comments like ‘I admire those many mothers who choose to stay at home’, implying that a mother who contributes financially to the family is to be admired less,” Kate Bonello Sullivan said. “Or: ‘let’s be careful, if we don’t raise our children ourselves we’ll have a society that isn’t well fostered itself,” she said, quoting the minister.

“Mothers in paid employment contribute towards the economy by paying tax and national insurance contributions, but this does not mean that they neglect their children in any way, and if anything they should be admired more, not less, for managing to combine work and care,” the MCWO spokesperson said.

Bonello Sullilvan said that not all mothers could be compared to the minister’s wife. “Not all mothers in Malta have the same choices as the minister’s wife who, he claimed, chose to stay at home in order to bring up her own children. Some mothers do not have this choice and work is the only option for them in order to earn a decent living.”

“It was interesting to note that the minister and his wife are perplexed at how difficult, if not impossible, it is for a Maltese mother to work. Whilst we are pleased that the minister acknowledged the problems mothers face we ask what, if anything, is being done to make things easier for them.”

Female participation rate in the labour market has persisted in remaining the lowest in the EU at 38% and far from the 2020 targets which aim to raise female employment rates to 75%. This is in spite of fiscal and other incentives that the government has offered to attract more women to the labour market.

But the MCWO said that while for many years government policy on this issue has been to increase women in the labour market, “conflicting messages to women and to society in general are very confusing and may cause unnecessary guilt and misconceptions to all concerned.”

“We would also like bring to the attention of the minister the fact that mothers who are choosing good quality childcare, love and nurture their children as much as mothers who do not entrust them to childcare,” Bonello Sullivan said.

She added that the minister pointed out the difficulty in ferrying the children to extra-curricular activities and that games, football, ballet and doctrine lessons should be incorporated during school hours.

“We couldn’t agree more – why does school have to finish so early? Why has government been reluctant to do anything about the school opening hours in spite of a clear incompatibility between a typical work day and school?”