Assisting working mothers - Features - Al-Ahram Weekly

Al-Ahram Weekly

04-02-2025

Plans are afoot to help working mothers build their careers while also taking care of their families, writes Mai Samih
According to statistics issued in 2024 by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), women make up 15.9 per cent of the work force in Egypt.
However, women working in domestic jobs or care services are still too often neither protected by the law nor given rights, among them women working as nurses, babysitters, and carers for the elderly.
Today, the government and NGOs working in the field are working together to give this segment of society their rights in the workplace and the support they need for their families while they are working.
The Ministry of Social Solidarity and Ministry of Labour formed a legislative committee responsible for preparing a draft Domestic Workers Law last week that aims to provide protection for this category of workers, legalise their status, integrate them into the formal labour force, help them with training and qualifications, and grant them licences for practicing a profession.
It also allows them to work with employment agencies and business owners on the basis of proper employment contracts, a ministry press release said.
The law aims to preserve the rights and benefits granted to domestic workers under other laws, or any collective agreements issued in their regard, and to codify new mechanisms to protect them in terms of enhancing their occupational safety and health in the workplace.
It features model employment contracts that include the rights and duties imposed on both parties in accordance with national and international labour standards, and it plans the launch of an electronic platform that includes linking supply and demand for labour and the provision of information about the rights and duties of domestic workers.
As part of moves to regulate particularly women working in the caring professions, Minister of Social Solidarity Maya Morsi launched the Ministry's Care Economy Initiative this month. Egypt's 2014 constitution, which emphasises the protection of the rights of the elderly, children, and people with disabilities, refers in Article 83 to the state's commitment to providing healthcare and social and cultural care for these segments of the population, and the ministry is preparing a draft law for homecare providers in addition to amendments to the wider labour law.
Morsi said that a joint study conducted by the Ministry of Solidarity and UN Women had presented opportunities to expand investment in the childcare and early education sector in Egypt over the short term where some 2.2 million additional places are required over the next two to three years.
The value of the investments required is approximately LE18 billion, estimated to provide 459,000 job opportunities in the long term (10 years). Over this period, additional places in early education are estimated to be nine million, with a required investment value of approximately LE283 billion, the report said.
NEEDS OF WORKING MOTHERS: As part of a dialogue organised by the New Woman Foundation (NWF), a NGO, in Cairo, NGO representatives focusing on women's rights gathered with other interested parties to brainstorm ways of providing care for the family members of working women while they are earning their livelihoods as well as methods of protecting them in the workplace.
The main focus was on women who work in households like maids or babysitters or care assistants for the elderly. Director of the Women, Work, and Economic Rights programme at the NWF Mai Saleh described the problems facing such women in the workplace and the efforts exerted by the foundation to meet these.
'We see the care economy from three main angles,' Saleh said. 'First, there is the fact that it is part of the national economy just like the solidarity economy, the green economy, and the blue economy (related to fishing and navigation), and it is also an essential sector of the international economy.'
'Second, the care economy is a largely female sector, as a huge percentage of those working in it internationally are women, something that is also true of other sectors such as clothing and tourism. Third, the more available care services are for women, the more women as a whole are able to enter the workforce,' she said.
The NWF has been involved in multiple societal dialogue sessions tackling issues like protection for women in the workplace. The discussions of the care economy and the status of women in it are a logical outcome of these.
'We need to see things from a different perspective in Egypt,' Saleh said. 'For example, the children of a mother who works as a nurse in the care economy for some 16 hours a day are going to need care in their mother's absence. In some cases, she may work in more than one hospital to make ends meet.'
'We are concerned with such people at the NWF, particularly women who in fact have two jobs: one in the workplace to earn a living and another at home in the shape of unpaid domestic labour.' Even those who work professionally in care services need to care for their families as well, she said.
Examples of workers in sectors that need professional care services for their families are health workers, early childhood care workers, social care workers, special needs care workers, and elderly care workers.
There are some five times as many women working in these sectors as men. They represent 11 per cent of the total workforce and are worth $11 trillion to the international economy. The care economy represents 381 million jobs worldwide.
Women often work in such sectors because of societal attitudes that hold that such work assists them in looking after their families. Many women may also qualify as teachers to work particularly in state schools.
However, all too often such work is comparatively low status and underpaid. According to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), in 2021 Egypt ranked 129th out of the 156 countries in its Global Gender Gap Index that measures the gap in life chances for men and women.
Egypt ranked 146th out of 156 countries in women's economic participation and opportunities, the USAID Index said. Only 20 per cent of Egypt's working-age women are participating in the economy, and for this reason USAID has been teaming up with the government to help to change things for women.
In 2022, USAID launched a $39 million Women's Economic and Social Empowerment Programme to increase women's access to economic opportunities in Egypt and remove barriers to their participation in the economy. It has been supporting education for girls for decades, notably by establishing non-traditional schools and providing scholarships for more than 185,000 girls and helping to change community attitudes towards them.
Due to such support, there are now more than 58,000 qualified female teachers, principals, and employees in Egypt's technical secondary schools. USAID has also helped over 5,400 young women access jobs following graduation from technical and vocational schools, a fact sheet said.
Saleh said that in 2021 a Global Care Alliance had been launched modelled on a 1972 initiative in India that provided help for working women, especially those working in private businesses, with the aim of providing care for their children and the elderly members of their families.
There may be a lack of the financial resources needed to provide care for the elderly and children in the family of a working woman as well as a lack of paid leave for working women to care for family members. International norms exist in both areas, but while the law may allow paid leave for working women, there may still be problems in implementing it. Services may be available, but working women may not be able to access them or may not be satisfied with them, Saleh said.
According to statistics issued by Egypt's Labour Market Panel Survey in 2023, it is because women need more care services for their families that there is still a gender disparity in terms of employment, with the unemployment rate for women being much higher than for men (12.8 per cent for women versus 4.8 per cent for men in 2023).
The report recommends that policies should support women to get back to work by creating an enabling environment for them to participate in the workforce. This includes reducing and redistributing care work, promoting flexible work arrangements, and addressing social norms that discourage women's labour market participation.
'We are currently witnessing a challenge to make the care sector a more recognised part of the national economy,' Saleh said, adding that research had found that a working woman will typically do six hours unpaid work at home in addition to her job. This is work that should be recognised and paid for.
Men should also be helped to become carers. New fathers should be given seven days of paid leave to take care of a newborn baby, so that the concept of joint responsibility prevails like in other countries.
'The Ministry of Social Solidarity has also developed 46 women's services centres to provide care for the children of working women, including meals. The centres are called Al-Bayt Al-Masry [Egyptian home], and the aim is to help to increase the labour force participation of women to 35 per cent,' Saleh said.
'We are aiming to increase the awareness of society, provide women with services, change ideas about working women, help women to enter the formal economy, and of course fight against domestic violence.'
RIGHTS OF WORKING MOTHERS: Activist Aya Mounir, the founder of the NGO the Super Woman Initiative, described campaigns organised to help working women.
The first campaign, Nazifa (Clean) in 2021, aimed to support single mothers (divorced women or those filing for divorce), working in domestic services, while the second Lo la shughl omi (Were it not for my mother's work) focuses on the idea that the work of women is not something secondary but is essential to protect families from falling apart.
'We received testimonies from many young people who said that if it had not been for the work of their mothers, they would not have been able to succeed in their education or attain a decent standard of living. The campaigns made us think of how working mothers actually do two jobs at once — one outside their homes and the other inside their homes and that the second is not counted,' Mounir said.
'The Nazifa campaign found that the segment that works the most was composed of women working in other people's homes, as they do the same work in their own homes as well after their outside work has ended. This work includes cleaning, cooking, or caring for the children or the elderly, and it can take up the same number of hours as a job.'
'Even so, it has not been included in the legislation, and this is a way of devaluing such work.'
'As a result, we organised another campaign, Lo la shughl omi. We worked on the idea that a housewife needs to provide care for her family and if she is a working woman also to work outside the home,' Mounir said.
'We usually name our campaigns after the name of one of the women in them. So, Nazifa is named after a woman who works in other people's homes for money and works in her home for free,' she said, adding that they partnered with the Nun Foundation for this campaign.
'Our aims include focusing on women working in households for money and producing research about such female workers.' In the first part of the campaign, the idea was to use social media and interview women working in other people's homes about their work. The second part included a social-media campaign about household workers to make people more aware of the barriers these can women face and their status in society.
They looked at the reasons behind these barriers by talking to the women and looked at various cultural, religious, and media perspectives on their work. They have thus far organised three cultural salons and two social-media campaigns.
'In one of the campaigns, we asked people 'what if the roles changed and men were given the work women do?' We found there was a lot of sarcasm on social media about that, but at the same time there were those who acknowledged how hard women often work,' Mounir said.
'We also discussed how advertisements, especially those about detergents and various household products, only target women, and we talked about some films and serials that discuss this issue of roles changing. We also discussed the hours women work, often more than men, and their ability to do multitasking.'
VOICING TROUBLES: According to a Better Work Egypt report titled 'An Industry and Compliance Review' from 2022, seven out of 61 factories looked at did not train women workers and one company refused to interview any married, pregnant, or nursing woman applying for jobs.
It found that two factories employed less than 10 per cent women, and it cited another that did not pay women for their breastfeeding breaks. Some 12 per cent of factories failed to address safety and health risks for pregnant and nursing workers. One out of four factories did not provide its female employees with a nursery for their children. The report recommended that measures should be taken to eliminate such risks and that the factories should increase the number of females in any given training programme.
Journalist and founder of the Moanas Salem initiative that is concerned with women's causes Asmaa Fathi talked about the initiative Mish zanbi ana om (It's not my fault I'm a mother), which tries to solve the problems mothers can encounter balancing the world of work with having children.
'We first started to work with journalists and discussed the problems they face in the workplace. We did not expect to find that women were being punished at work just because they became mothers. But we found that giving birth for female journalists could become a sort of stigma for them,' Fathi said.
They interviewed 50 female journalists who told them about the problems they faced after giving birth to their children.
For instance, there are gaps between the salaries of working mothers who have just returned from maternity leave and other employees, with the mothers typically earning less, especially in the private sector. 'We heard the testimonies of six women who have been hiding their pregnancies until the seventh month, and two of them were photojournalists. Others were forced to take night shifts after a month and a half of delivering their babies or else they would only have half their salary.'
They interviewed 30 other working mothers and found that most of them experienced feelings of guilt at not doing enough for their children because of the pressures of work. In some cases, some women might even have negative feelings towards their children, as they might feel they are letting their employers down.
'When private enterprises think of laying off employees, they first think of women,' Fathi said, adding that they may think that women are not the main breadwinners, which is not always true. 'In addition to this, evening nurseries are very costly for mothers, who may end up paying a large sum of money that may exceed their salaries to provide their children with somewhere safe to stay while they are at work.'
Fathi's initiative also organised another campaign, 'I am a mother and successful at work,' which discovered that working women face many challenges at work, like stereotypes about what the right jobs for women are. Some of those surveyed said that women should only work as nurses.
According to Fathi, women are still constantly sent to the 'naughty corner' for being mothers and trying to work at the same time.
'Women are constantly fighting to prove that they can be successful. We must think of methods of breaking the stereotypes of working women. Working women should be given support and help in fulfilling themselves and having satisfying careers,' she concluded.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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