Developments in reconciling family and work, which owed so much to women's insistence, will dominate the start of the next millennium, but what was needed was a formal masculine response, Prof Anthony Clare has said.
Speaking yesterday at a conference on "Families and Work", the consultant psychiatrist and broadcaster said the world of work had been seen as predominantly a masculine domain and the world of the home as that of women. In coming back together, he hoped the result would not be the dominance of one or the other.
Developments such as flexitime, leave and career breaks owed much to an analysis of the feminist dimension of the 1960s and 1970s to which there had been no formal masculine response. There had been no masculine analysis as to where men were.
Industry and other social areas had been debated and discussed, but the family had none of that attention. Until recently there had been no formal identification in the public domain and discourse, he said.
The conflict of wrestling with work and family and reconciling private and public life could not be divorced from gender relationships.
Prof Clare said he saw in his work many parents under stress because of the dual role. Parents saw child care being infringed because they had to work, but not by choice. It was crucial that there was protection of choice so that people were freer to balance work and the family.
In the early crucial years of family life, people learned many of the attributes that would help in later working life: loyalty, consistency, how to relate to peers, common sense. Ms Maire Halpin of the Bank of Ireland, Ms Maureen Caulfield, VHI, and Ms Freida Murray of the ESB, said their companies had all introduced career breaks, flexitime, job sharing, leave for family commitments and part-time working, as well as other options. The Bank of Ireland and ESB also had creches in Dublin.
The conference, at the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions in Loughlinstown, Co Dublin, was co-funded by the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs and the European Commission.