Career - Family - Equal Opportunities - Kuchařová, Věra; Jurajda, Štěpán; Münich, Daniel; Machovcová, Kateřina; Ettlerová, Sylva; Nešporová, Olga; Svobodová, Kamila; Machovcová, Kateřina (Gender Studies, o. p. s, 2007)
Dear reader, The following pages provide the results of various studies concerning the position of women and men in the Czech labour market. The analyses were carried out as a part of the EU Equal project "Fifty - fifty: Equal Opportunities for Women and Men" coordinated by Gender Studies, o.p.s, and co-financed by the EU European Social Fund and the Czech Republic state budget. Each study focuses on a topic that had received very modest coverage in earlier research or had not been explored at all. The first paper is a summary of qualitative and quantitative studies carried out by the Research Institute for Labour and Social Affairs team headed by Věra Kuchařová. The team's objective was to find out the possibilities parents have in juggling childcare and work responsibilities and the potential constraints or sources of discrimination that can make the parents' situation difficult. They looked at the issue from both the mothers' perspective and that of the employers.
The main focus was on finding out to what extent the parents draw their sick child leave and claim their maternity/parental leave entitlement, which are the basic measures enabling parents to balance their personal and professional lives. One of the main findings is the fact that the facilities allowing people to balance their personal and professional lives are used much less in the Czech Republic than in the vast majority of western countries. In the Czech Republic, the range of the flexible work arrangement possibilities used is narrower and can usually be summed up in three options: reduced working hours, part-time work and flexible working hours. However, they are usually not offered systematically, they do not fall within internal company guidelines and are used solely on an individual agreement basis. In the Czech Republic, it is still mostly women who take parental leave to provide care for children and ensure other forms of full-time childcare.
It is rather exceptional to see a father on parental leave, with men representing about 1% of all persons drawing the parental benefit. The reason can be financial (as men have statistically higher salaries), but it can also lie in the unsupportive attitude on the part of the employers who expect that the working hours arrangement facilities should be primarily used by women. [...]
Keywords: Gender Studies; National Economy; Labor relations; Social development; Social differentiation; Human Resources in Economy; Socio-Economic Research