Wonder women

Equal opportunities in the European workplace may be more of an ideal than reality, but member states are taking different approaches to correct the imbalance. While Norway actively encourages women to apply for jobs, Poland is tempting them to stay at home with its baby bonus, despite the fact that it has the lowest employment rate of women in the EU. They may be better educated and live longer, but women are less valued than men in the workplace, meaning Poland may be neglecting its most valuable natural resource.

Katarzyna Zajdel-Kurowska, chief economist at Citibank Handlowy, is every feminist's ideal. Successful in her professional life and a happy mother of a three-year-old, she is the only female chief economist in Poland. Zajdel-Kurowska says she never thought her gender could prevent her from achieving what she wanted to professionally, and says the so-called glass ceiling was never an issue. So did she have to try harder than men?

"Maybe, at first, when I was a student at the department of economics and majored in quantitative methods. It is a very analytical field and I had to prove to my colleagues that the analytical mind is not solely the domain of men. Then, when I started to work, my colleagues didn't take me very seriously so I had to show them that I am where I am for a reason," Zajdel-Kurowska remembers.

Those early days have not left her with any bitterness. "I think I'm very lucky. I owe a lot to my company. I was appointed chief economist a couple of months after I came back from my maternity leave. I stayed at home for six months, I used all the time away from work I could possibly use and there was no pressure from the employer to be back earlier," Zajdel-Kurowska says.

The best and the rest

Despite the changing labor market and the evolving situation of women in Poland, statistically speaking Zajdel-Kurowska is still an exception.

The employment rate of females in Poland is one of the lowest among all EU member states - only Greece, Italy and Malta have lower female employment levels. It's ironic that after 50 years of communist rule stressing the equality of sexes, especially in the sphere of labor, Poland is once again at the bottom of the EU rankings.

One could say that women simply share the tough lot of men in a country with a 17.9-percent unemployment rate, but the problem is not that simple. Women are, on average, better educated than men and more likely to speak foreign languages, yet they still earn some 18 percent less than men. Surprisingly, the better educated a woman is, the bigger the pay gap - women with a higher education can expect the disparity to reach a staggering 47 percent.

"The reason for women being treated differently in the labor market is the dual role they play. Their family life takes precedence over their professional activity," says Irena Kotowska from the Institute of Statistics and Demography of the Warsaw School of Economics. "Women have to deal with the cultural conflict on the one hand - they traditionally share their time between home chores and professional activities - and structural conflict on the other. Our institutions are not adjusted to the fact that women have to juggle these two spheres of life."

Tough to employ

That dual role makes women higher-risk employees for companies. The labor code guarantees mothers 16 weeks of maternity leave, and together with a number of other possible complications, hiring a woman can mean additional costs for many employers. Women are fully aware of that fact and this is one of the reasons they are not remunerated as well as they could or should be.

"When I had a closer look at the employment structure and remunerations in my company I realized that women in managerial positions indeed earn less than men with the same qualifications. [This is because] they simply ask for less at the very beginning. As an employer and a businessman I cannot say: ask for more, woman! They deserve more and should value themselves more," explains Henryk Orfinger, co-owner of Dr Irena Eris Cosmetics Laboratory.

The dual role of women also turns all discussions on female professional activity towards demographic and birth-rate issues. With Poland's shrinking working-age population, the government is desperate to encourage couples to have children. It recently passed legislation that will see women paid zł.1,000 for each child they bear - the 'baby bonus' has been ridiculed by many and is not expected to do much about the falling birth rate.

"The baby bonus is a joke. A one-off payment of such an amount cannot convince anyone to have more children. What women would welcome are long-term, systemic changes that would facilitate their going back to work after maternity leave. Opening up company kindergartens or more flexibility on the employers' side would be much more useful," Zajdel-Kurowska says.

Family planning

The government is at pains to facilitate would-be mothers. "Parliament is currently discussing the prolongation of maternity leave to up to 52 weeks. Politicians also demand employment guarantees for mothers after they return. PiS wants to make it impossible to fire them for the next three years, LPR for 2.5 years and SLD for a year," says Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska, Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Labor. "In the current difficult economic situation, this solution is going to turn against women. Employers will simply stop employing them."

The equality of women is far down the list of the current government's priorities. The office of the government's representative for gender equality, formerly occupied by ethics lecturer Magdalena Środa, was removed from the Prime Minister's chancellery. Equality issues are now the responsibility of an Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Labor. The change of focus speaks volumes.

"The governing party is trapped in a myth that if they cut women from the labor market, sexual education and the possibility of abortion, then women will sit at home and produce one child after the other. Is that really what we want?" Środa asks. "Times are changing. The mother that stays at home and doesn't catch up with technological changes but sits there knitting socks for the entire family stops being an authority for her children."

Northern exposure

While in conservative Poland the population has fallen by half a million in the last six years, the birth rate remains relatively stable in liberal Scandinavia, where neither the church nor marriage are major social factors and abortion is legal and a matter of women's choice. For many years now, Scandinavian countries have implemented an active policy to promote gender equality.

Since the early 1980s Norway has had quotas for the number of women in its parliament, and for the past 15 years all job advertisements have had to contain the phrase: "Women are welcome to apply." This year the government is going to earmark EUR 1.3 (zł.5.1) million to support female entrepreneurship. In Finland, each entrepreneur employing more than 30 people has to implement an equality scheme containing concrete instruments aimed at assuring the equality of the sexes within the company.

"Economic growth and success is to a large extent dependent upon using both the potential of men and women and it has been proven by research that gender equality makes enterprises more efficient and competitive," says Anu Sajavaara from the Confederation of Finnish Industries.

The EU's Lisbon strategy sets a target for female employment to reach 60 percent by 2010, and with the falling number of working-age people and decreasing birth rates, there's a pressing need for human-resource reserves. Poland will need to address that problem.

"They live longer and they are better educated than men. Ignoring the female potential in the economy is simply a waste," Kotowska concludes.