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TO WA R D G E N D E R E Q UA L I T Y I N E A S T A S I A A N D T H E PAC I F I C
presented in chapter 3 suggests that having children affects women’s economic opportunities in all countries in the region, although the effects are greatest in urban areas where informal support networks are the most limited.8 A lack of child care can affect multiple dimensions of economic opportunities, including labor force participation, the type of job conducted, and gender wage gaps. For example, in Vietnam, a lack of child care has been found to be an important factor that pushes mothers from formal to informal employment (Heymann 2004). In China and Mongolia, reductions in the provision of subsidized child care led to a reduction in female labor force participation in urban areas (Chi and Li 2007; World Bank 2011a). Policies to promote better access to affordable child care should target those women whose needs are the greatest and who have limited alternative access to child-care facilities. Community child-care centers, particularly those targeted at low-income neighborhoods, have been found to increase maternal employment in a number of countries across the world. Although evidence from the East Asia and Pacific region is limited, evidence from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Latin America and Caribbean region suggests that the impact of increasing access to child care on female labor force participation and hours worked varies with, among other things, the availability of alternative caring arrangements and characteristics of families (Attanasio et al. 2004; Blau and Currie 2006; Lefebvre, Merrigan, and Verstraete 2009; Paes de Barros et al. 2010). Targeting child care toward the needs of mothers is likely to increase its uptake. Programs that have identified and targeted groups with particular needs can increase women’s labor force participation while addressing persistent inequalities. In Vietnam, the Community-Based Early C hildhood Care and Development project aims to improve child outcomes, with a focus on ethnic minorities and migrant workers (ADB 2010). Migrant workers often have lower access to familial support
and informal child-care arrangements, and hence have a substantial need for affordable child-care assistance. In Brazil, publicly provided child care lacked flexibility and had limited facility hours, which limited the impact of child care on women’s earnings (Deutsch 1998). Public policy may also need to tackle negative perceptions about the use of child care. Location-specific social norms may initially limit women’s use of child-care services. Comparative analysis of women’s labor force participation in Japan and Taiwan, China, noted that disapproval of mothers that rely on alternative child-care arrangements is frequent in Japan, with women being less reluctant to leave young children in the care of others (particularly relatives) in Taiwan, China. In Korea, a study suggested that three-quarters of men and women believe that a preschool-age child will suffer if his or her mother works (Yun-Suk and Ki-Soo 2005). Instituting parental leave policies Parental leave policies may improve gender parity in economic opportunities by enabling and promoting a more equitable division of child-rearing responsibilities between men and women and by allowing women to have the same opportunities as men for advancing their careers. The success of parental leave policies in achieving these goals depends on their design. Poorly designed or incomplete parental care policies can make hiring women, relative to men, more expensive for employers, leading to discrimination or reduced job opportunities for women, while exacerbating or emphasizing gender divisions of labor in the household. The factors that affect the success of parental leave include who pays for the leave—the employer, the employee, or the government; whether a country has provisions for both paternity leave and maternity leave, or covers only maternity leave; and what fraction of wages is received by beneficiaries. Parental benefits in the region vary considerably by the number of days given, the