The Shared Care podcast is part of the CAREdiZO campaign for gender equality in caregiving and the workplace. In the fourth episode, Valentin Atanasov is a guest. Listen to the conversation here https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jL68J9xMjOAQEhCMZ9Po8?si=E5pdr6KcRyC4YlbI1Wd_xg
Transcript - epizod 4
Here we are in the new episode of the podcast Shared Care. In it, we discuss gender equality in care responsibilities at home. The podcast is part of the CAREdiZO project, through which we give more voice to the problems that arise from the uneven distribution of care work. In this episode, we will talk about care and its value in society. Of course, we also have a suitable specialist with whom we will explore the topic. This is the psychologist and journalist Valentin Atanasov.
Welcome! Care is everyday life, we can see it everywhere around us, but do we fully understand its essence? What does it really mean to care? How would you describe care? Is it an emotional act, an obligation or a social responsibility?
Hello to you and your listeners. Thank you for the invitation to discuss a truly important and extensive topic that does not have one, two, or three answers. What does it really mean to care? It means to love, to give of ourselves. Because the word care, translated into Bulgarian, means love. Care is an emotional act that consumes us both physically, emotionally, and mentally. Care is the highest manifestation of love for our neighbor, for the person next to us, for the suffering, the helpless. So we can describe care as both an obligation and a social responsibility. A responsibility that until the 1970s was given only to women. She was to be the person who raised, who cared. And the father was pushed, as I like to say, into a corner somewhere. He worked long hours to bring home money to provide for his family.
That is, care is a responsibility of society, an obligation that we assume as citizens in society.
Let us now comment on the gender bias in providing care. From the statistics that we collected during our project, it turns out that in our country there is still a large imbalance between the sexes in housework. For example, cooking, cleaning, maintaining the home and garden, also raising and educating children is the main concern of women. Why is care most often associated with women? What are the reasons for the formation of such expectations in society?
We are raised from a young age what is a woman's job and what is a man's job. This division exists in us and is passed on, if you will, from generation to generation. A woman should raise the children, a woman should do the housework, a woman should shop, a woman should definitely clean, and if a man decides to clean the house without her, this is considered something exceptional. If a woman does it, it is something normal. If a man does it, it is something that deserves praise, it deserves to be talked about, to be highlighted. It is the same thing, and a man is always given more value if he does it. If a mother takes the child out, it is in the order of things. If the husband pushes the stroller, it is "wow." And people always note it, comment on it, emphasize it, and in this way the man receives greater appreciation and feels more significant for something that is quite normal for him to do.
So society only creates these double standards in terms of assessments of care. This is an interesting fact, especially since research in Bulgaria shows that over 3 quarters of people, men and women, believe that children, for example, are primarily the woman's responsibility, not men's. Or that men have the financial responsibility for supporting their family, in confirmation of your words.
Okay, and what is the burden of this unfair distribution of roles?
When a woman takes care of her family, she suffers a lot of deprivation. She gives up her career. She can't always stay until the end of the working day, because she gets called from school or the hospital and is constantly expecting something to happen. She neglects herself. She neglects her rest, we can even say so, because exhausted from work, she goes home and another working day begins for her. If she has children, this working day continues even when they fall asleep, and she continues to take care of them, preparing them for the next day. If we assume that they are sick, she stays by their bedside until they wake up, listening to whether they are breathing, because I have such a case in my practice, in my communication with ladies. When they come to me, afraid that something bad might happen to their child who is sick. This fear, this stress accumulates. Or another mother who tells me, I carry my child in my arms all night, because when I put him to bed, he starts coughing and wakes up. Here is such care, which, however, no one seems to appreciate, and care that is not paid for. And that is why in America they have taken the trouble to calculate how much this work costs when we take care of a sick person. And if you value it, you get to the staggering sum of 375 billion dollars a year. So care is not free at all, even though no one pays for it. We pay the price of many deprivations, sometimes even the price of our social contacts and personal health. That is why, in my opinion, it is necessary to change the thinking of society and to increasingly include fathers in care, in what ways - the easiest way is to start teaching adolescents from school that there is no such thing as a woman's job. To teach people mutual respect, consideration, and also at the legislative level, perhaps to arrange things with father's paternity leave. There are probably many things that you and I can think of right now or not, there are really many things that can be done so that this moment of care is shared. Now I am thinking of an incorrect form of the word. It does not have a plural. It exists only in the singular - care.
This is precisely why the CAREdiZO project works towards understanding the value of care and guiding various representatives of society, for example employers or people involved in personnel selection, to understand what representatives of their companies do when they provide care in their home and to appreciate it. Within the project, in the subsequent stages, we will have discussion groups, workshops and trainings, in which we hope that the participants will be able to develop policies that they themselves need, to introduce such policies in their companies, in their organizations and through them to make care more valued. Because in fact, care in the home is care that the whole society brings its positives. They are useful for everyone, not just for the individual.
Do you know what hurts me the most? When I hear a sentence, she doesn't work anything, she is in maternity. Or - she takes care of the grown-up children. Many women have to quit their jobs and stay at home to devote themselves to their families, because we don't recognize that this is work that is paid not to us at the moment in any way, but to the society in which we live, taking care of ourselves. We educate, we guide, motivate, cultivate young people.
You talked earlier about society's attitudes towards care, when it is provided by men or women. For example, people often say, look, this woman didn't wash the windows of her house. How can we change the attitudes in society regarding men's and women's work?
You probably expect me to tell you that it takes several generations, many years, a long period of time for us to mature, to learn, to educate ourselves, to read thick books. I'm not going to say any of the above! Because attitudes change like that. I don't know if our listeners are hearing, I just snapped my fingers. So fast! I joke with my clients that attitudes change when you say it out loud. And then things change. The attitude "men shouldn't take care of raising children, it's women's work" can lead to bad things. Because it has been proven that the exact opposite attitude "men should take care of children" can lead to their well-being. Better physical, health condition, in mental terms they should be confident, established, leaders, preferred, loved, in economic terms they should be able to cope with absolutely everything that comes before them as a challenge. So changing the attitude as quickly as possible, immediately, leads to good results, useful results for the entire society and for us personally.
Let's talk about how the burden of uneven distribution of caregiving at home affects the professional development, the career of caregivers. Often this kills the professional development of women - too many responsibilities at home and her frequent absences from work. Therefore, when a person wants to pay attention to their career, the family suffers. In Bulgaria, we also have to use the help of the elderly people around us, loved ones, acquaintances, so that we do not suffer professionally. No one wants their employee to be absent from work for too long. However, by allowing their subordinates to be absent to take care of the future generation, we also take care of our business. And not to say that there is no workforce, but to educate ourselves through our parents, because you never know - in life it may happen that the compromises we made with our subordinate regarding his family have worked in our favor, because we have a well-bred, educated, young person who returns and continues to work what his father did. We really provide ourselves with a workforce.
Care is a basic European right. It is enshrined in human rights. It should not be measured by how many children you have, what your marital status is, whether you are a single father or a single mother. Everyone who provides care has the desire to feel this care themselves, because, I repeat, this is a basic human right. Wherever we are, at whatever stage of life, in whatever place we are, to receive timely care. It is good to take care of our parents, our mother, our father, our elderly parents, because in this way we unfold, develop our human potential.
We develop within ourselves what we carry from the beginning - kindness.
Let me also continue your thought that when we care, we also win, we win by accumulating empathy skills. Empathy is extremely necessary in modern life, both professional and personal. We also accumulate self-esteem that we have responsibility for something, that we can take responsibility for something. And I am sure that employers, in general, people who care for human resources would appreciate the taking of responsibility, the ability to take responsibility from such people who are caring. Or the fact that they can distribute their time, be able to distribute their tasks because they have become more organized. All of these are valuable qualities, benefits that caregivers have accumulated and that society itself should appreciate.
The direction is very interesting - let's talk, if we haven't talked so far, about the benefits of caring. Apparently they are not financial. All that you said, we can add the useful - we learn to communicate. We learn to be human. And a word that I had not heard for a long time and it is not part of my vocabulary, but only a few days ago I heard in my office "to ground ourselves", "to land ourselves". Caring teaches us humility, and at the same time it teaches us to fight, i.e. reaching a very different humility, not the one that is related to reconciliation, but the one that is related to fighting in a gentle way, with a gentle tone, with etiquette, to stand up. I realize that in caring this fight for others is very easy. A person would have a harder time taking care of themselves, would fight for themselves, but when you fight for the survival of someone else, a small child, a sick child, a sick adult, when you fight for their survival to the point of sacrifice, you really acquire such a fighting spirit in a critical moment to defend yourself. Employers should not be afraid of such a quality that people can defend themselves, because it is never straight-forward, only in the direction of defending myself. It always works as an accumulated quality in many areas. I defend corporate interests, I defend my boss, I defend the organization, I defend... At a time when we are facing many trials, so this fighting spirit and before it, what I said, and the way to communicate more easily with people and empathy, I return to this beautiful word, which we pass to each other a little like a game of tennis, and now the ball is in my court - to be able to put yourself in the other person's place.
Do representatives of society, of business, and if you will, politicians realize that this work, invisible work, invisible labor is so important that it must be taken into account, even when there are some economic losses for the moment.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
We are currently calling it invisible labor, but we were talking a little while ago that the caregiver becomes a very good manager. He skillfully plans his program, his schedule, and manages to combine many things. He certainly does not fall behind in his work, he certainly catches up from home remotely. But now, by specifically calling it invisible labor, we can attach to it everything that concerns labor. Management, marketing, but really everything that concerns invisible labor and labor as a process, we can also refer to care. That is, labor educates, care also. Labor beautifies a person, care also. What is better than caring? This in society turns you into a person from whom we can learn and whom we can admire. Men, women, adults, and even children if you want, when they take care of children, because in school, where I was until lunch today and where I have been for dozens of years, we always talk about how classmates help classmates, take care of classmates. The truth is that what we do makes us more beautiful, in every way.
A wonderful conclusion to our topic about care!
Thanks once again to Valentin Atanasov for including us in this episode of the podcast "Shared Care". Let us say once again that
The podcast was created by the National Business Development Network under the project CAREdiZO - CARE Driven Innovation for Gender mainstreaming in Home, Micro-Enterprises & Micro-CSOs, funded by the European Union within the framework of the "Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values " - CERV programme.
All listeners are welcome back again in the next episode of "Shared Care".
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European or the Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the awarding authority can be held responsible for them.