If I were to ever teach empathy or self-awareness to a class, Azura Abas’ recent opinion column titled “It is Okay to Be a Working Mum” would be made compulsory reading.
Essentially, her article posits that multiple benefits await mums who work outside of the home, such as personal financial stability and long-term positive academic and behavioural impact on their children, citing studies conducted by professors at Harvard Business School and the University of Michigan as validation for working mums to continue doing what they do in the interests of their children.
All good things, to be sure.
After all, it’s best to plan for shocks, including illnesses, divorce and even spousal death.
For stay-at-home mums (SAHMs), she has some bad news for us: we face financial constraints. That is, unless you or I have “over RM1 million stashed in some unit trusts somewhere”.
It gets worse: we are also apparently doing our children a huge disservice.
By staying at home, we are also robbing them of the opportunity to obtain “higher scores on language, reading and math achievement tests”, while simultaneously eroding our “daughters’ likelihood of assuming supervisory roles” and “earning higher salaries” in future.
Fellow SAHMs, I know we are good at multitasking, but did we thoroughly wreck our children’s chances in life just to become “ladies of leisure”? Shame on us!
Never mind that the research this author cites was commissioned by the Gender Initiative, a movement to advance women’s involvement in the workplace.
Never mind that a meta analysis by Lucas-Thompson et al of 69 other studies has found inconclusive evidence as to whether it is more beneficial to be a working mother or a stay-at-home one.
Apparently, the fact that there are stay-at-home mothers is problematic to everyone except for stay-at-home mothers themselves.
Here’s the nuanced reality: given our societal structure, families choose to do what works for them.
In a utopian world, all mothers and fathers would be free to choose between working or staying at home.
Actually, the most ideal situation would be one where money magically appears, yet both parents are equally and fully present throughout a child’s formative years — but I digress.
The question is: given the status quo, are all Malaysian women able to freely choose between working full-time or staying home?
What remains glaringly absent in the author’s article is a respect for the physical, emotional, intellectual and social demands of domestic work and caregiving, especially in the case of stay-at-home parents.
To assuage her own “mum guilt” for working, the author grossly devalued the labour put in by stay-at-home parents, the majority of whom are women.
There is nothing leisurely about being a stay-at-home parent.
A 2018 report by the International Labour Organisation found that 8.9 billion hours are spent in unpaid care work in Asia and the Pacific alone.
This is staggering, especially when considering that this is equivalent to 1.1 billion people working a full eight hours without pay every day.
From a global perspective, if informal caregiving work were to be paid, it would amount to nine per cent of total gross domestic product!
This does not even factor in the mental load and stress carried by SAHMs. As such, dismissing the value of labour going into running a household and its family members is not only short-sighted, but ill-informed as well.
It goes without saying that plenty of systemic issues affect women’s participation in the Malaysian labour force, the most prevalent of which are the affordability of high-quality childcare and structures and policies supporting mothers transitioning back to the workforce.
Until all our leaders — both men and women — communities, institutions and industries collectively place a premium on early childhood development as a means of building the foundations of a strong society, women will continue to bear the brunt of unpaid care work.
We will also continue to pay the professional and personal penalties of allegedly lowering our economic worth, which includes being judged by others instead of being seen as contributors to the development of society.
Harsh? Such is the nuanced reality the author has missed.
Mum guilt is real — plenty of mums I know attest to this.
Stay home, and you’re considered to have “wasted your education”, as a friend confided recently.
Work, and you’re considered selfish for prioritising professional desires over your family.
Having experienced both sides of the coin, the lesson I’ve drawn is that challenges abound either way. It’s okay to be a working mum. It’s also okay to be a stay-at-home mum.
What should never be okay is to unfairly judge other women for the decisions they were forced to make due to the circumstances they found themselves in.
Women already have the odds stacked against them — why not choose to empathise with and lift each other up instead?
Wan Farihah Ahmad Fahmy
Kuala Lumpur