Work-life balance essential for an equal career development
Today the Eurocadres Congress debated the need for work-life balance to achieve equal career development for all. Women especially are in danger of falling behind in their careers, salaries and pensions to uneven demands of care-taking responsibilities.
The Congress adopted a resolution highlighting increased responsibilities and how technological advance blur the boundaries between private and working life.
If women continue to be ignored and under-represented in male-dominated boards of directors and put at a disadvantage in the labour market, it will have a direct impact on European financial performance and global economic competitiveness, as half of the population is not being taken into account on equal terms as the other half.
At the same time, one of the reasons why female professionals have fewer prospects becoming managers or CEOs, is that it is still thought that women will inevitably have to take on caring responsibilities for children and elderly relatives at home. To try to overcome this stereotype, many female professionals therefore give up on maternity and family life.
Eurocadres is fully committed to improving the ways to manage work-life balance and calls for urgent action to be taken so that governments, employer organisations and trade unions, as well as any other labour market institutions, act together on work-life balance policies.
Within the framework of the European pillar of social rights the Commission has launched a package of social measures including the initiative to support work life balance for working parents and carers, aimed at balancing gross differences among European countries, including a proposal for strengthening and increasing the rights related to parental leave, and more specifically, paternity leave – as that is a good way to even out the unbalanced gender division of home responsibilities.
Read the whole resolution here.