An extra workload combined with additional caregiving duties during lockdowns has created new challenges for working parents in Poland, two new reports have shown. Maintaining an effective work-life balance has proved especially difficult for mothers, who shoulder the majority of household chores.
Almost six out of ten working mothers and half of working fathers say that juggling work and parental duties became more challenging during the pandemic, finds a report, “Women on the Job Market 2021” by Hays Poland, a recruitment company.
“For numerous working mothers, the pandemic is a time of exhaustion and constant pressure, which diminished professional satisfaction and impacts on effectiveness,” Aleksandra Tyszkiewicz, client engagement director at Hays Poland, told Rzeczpospolita. This could hinder women’s career development and chances of promotion, she added.
A separate survey, “People at Work 2021: A Global Workforce View”, by ADP also found that maintaining a healthy work-life balance has become one of the biggest challenges during the pandemic for working parents, alongside caring for their health and managing stress.
One in three parents in Poland (36% of women and 33% of men) admitted needing to find a compromise between professional and family duties due to the pandemic. A similar proportion said that supervisors had not provided enough flexibility.
A third also said that they had taken on additional work commitments, while almost half (45%) reported doing unpaid overtime (on average 5.5 extra hours per week). Although women did less of this (4.5 extra hours a week), they more often reported needing to take a back seat professionally and taking on more household chores.
According to a European Commission report on gender equality, “women have been shouldering the lion’s share of the increase in unpaid care and household work during the pandemic”, with lockdowns only heightening “the previous imbalances in that respect”.
The report found that, on average, women in the EU were spending 62 hours per week caring for children, and men only 36 hours. The share of housework handled by women was also greater, though less disproportionate, with women spending 23 hours per week on cleaning and washing and men 15 hours.
“Surveys carried out during the pandemic showed that 29% of working women with small children found it hard to concentrate on their job because of family responsibilities compared to 16% of working men in the same situation,” found the report.
Significantly, women were more likely to cut down on the number of working hours or to quit employment altogether in order to provide childcare.
The authors, however, also noticed some “reshuffling of the allocation of care responsibilities within households during lockdown with an increase in fathers’ involvement in childcare.”
Similar conclusions were drawn by experts at PwC, authors of the Women In Work Index, an annual ranking of the representation and welfare of women in the workplace in 33 OECD countries.
The index finds that Poland has a gender pay gap of 5%, well below the @OECD average pic.twitter.com/l7KXX4e5Yz
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) March 6, 2019
“The ramifications of the pandemic will be heavier for women than men,” they found, and advised governments to introduce formal policies to tackle this issue.
“The positive trend securing equal opportunities for women on the job market was disrupted by the pandemic and that is why we need a structural approach to effectively mitigate the negative impact,” said Cezary Żelaźnicki, a partner at PwC Polska.
Poland took 11th position in PwC’s report, which noted that the country had a low unemployment rate among women, a relatively small gender pay gap, as well as a significant ratio of women working full-time.
Main image credit: Standsome/Pixabay
Agnieszka Wądołowska is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She has previously worked for Gazeta.pl and Tokfm.pl and contributed to Gazeta Wyborcza, Wysokie Obcasy, Duży Format, Midrasz and Kultura Liberalna
