Polish Women Face Barriers to Joining Workforce, IBS Finds

More than one-third of Polish women aged 25-49 who aren’t participating in the labor force would like to take on paid work but aren’t seeking jobs because they can’t find childcare, flexible hours or cost-effective transport, a study from the Institute for Structural Research shows. As many as 80% of Polish women aged 25-49 are active in the labor force, similar to the European Union average. The Institute’s report Increasing female labor force participation in Poland shows that the country has great potential to increase this rate because, in many demographics,  the percentage is lower than the EU average. Today 37 percent of Polish women aged 25-49 who aren’t in the labor force say they’d like to work, compared with 28 percent in the EU.
“Looking at just one indicator of employment you can get the impression that Poland’s not very different from the rest of Europe,” said Iga Magda, the author of the study. “But if we take a closer look at the data, it turns out that the situation is varied, and the picture definitely isn’t so rosy. While women with higher education, who have one child or none, work much more often in Poland than in other countries, relatively few with secondary or lower education take up paid work.”
The IBS study shows that the Polish labor market is unfriendly for parents of small children: Just 12% of Polish women working outside the home can decide their own hours, while the figure for the entire EU is 40%. Additionally, certain aspects of the tax and benefit system push Polish women out of the labor market by making it unprofitable to take on low-paid work.
 “With proper social policy, even people who aren’t considering it today could take up work; our calculations show that in total, as many as 700,000 women could join the labor market. That would have a positive effect on the economy, on families’ prosperity and on the individual situation of these women,” Magda added.

(WBJ)