What are the conclusions of the report „Family Care and Work”?
Polish women and Poles are overburdened with combining work with care. This problem affects two-thirds of the working population, especially women. Every sixth employee must limit their professional activity due to caring for their relatives – children or adults. The Responsible Business Forum sees a chance to reverse negative trends in greater involvement of men. Contrary to stereotypes, their role as caring is accepted by the vast majority of society.
According to a survey conducted by the Responsible Business Forum in February this year, 52% of adult Poles combine work with caring for children and / or adult relatives. In the first case, the main role is much more often played by women. This is different in the care of dependent adults, where the burden is more evenly distributed between both sexes. The burden of care – both for children and adult dependent persons – rests in Poland on the family.
The scale of the challenges related to care has a big impact on the position on the labor market. 16.4% of employees work part-time due to caring duties. And of the economically inactive in Poland, almost a third are people who do not take up employment due to their caring duties.
The problem of an ageing society is recognized by employees and employers
Polish society is one of the fastest ageing in the EU. An urgent challenge is a long-term, strategic approach to supporting people combining work with caring for adults – e.g. parents. No wonder that 53% of Polish women believe that the solution that should be implemented systemically, as resulting from the Labor Code, is to offer significant support to people combining work with caring responsibilities for adults.
The problems faced by employees caring for adult dependents are also noticed by employers. Only one in five of them considers the legal solutions supporting the care of adults to be sufficient in Poland so far. For comparison, in the case of childcare, this percentage reaches nearly 60 percent.
In practice, one of the key problems is the discrepancy between the solutions preferred by people working and providing family care and the solutions offered by employers. Many employees are not satisfied with how caregivers are supported in their workplace.
Employers see the need to systematically encourage men to perform caring roles, but they need knowledge and help in financing the support of caregiver workers and carers. The intuition of employers corresponds to the socio-cultural trends in Poland, related to the increasing openness of Polish women and Poles to the inclusion of men in care and the partnership sharing of care between women and men.
The vast majority of working Poles, as many as 80% of respondents, believe that men should be involved in caring for children and adults to the same extent as women. The results of the FOB study show a change in the perception of traditional social roles. It is an opportunity not only for partner sharing of care in the family, which would have a positive impact on the activity and professional development of women, but also a space to develop men’s interest in working in the care services sector (currently excessively feminized).
The FOB report shows that men are almost as often as women declaring that they are the main caregivers of dependent people. They are less likely to care for themselves (26% compared to 37% of women). Women are more likely to take care of children than men. They are also more likely to play a major role in this care (53% of women compared to 22% of men) or even the only caregivers (22% vs. 12% among men). Thus, men are three times more likely to be an independent caregiver of an adult than is the case when taking care of children. Women are almost 2.5 times more likely than men to be the primary caregiver of a child.
The Responsible Business Forum survey was carried out in February 2022 in cooperation with ARC Rynek i Opinia Sp. z o.o. and Krzysztof Kutwa, a researcher and socio-economic analyst associated with the Polish Economic Institute and the University of Warsaw.
Projekt otrzymał dofinansowanie z Norwegii poprzez Fundusze Norweskie 2014-2021, w ramach programu „Dialog społeczny – godna praca”.