Prague, April 11 (CTK) – Women are not represented enough in the management of firms and state institutions and more should be done to help harmonise professional and family careers, according to the annual report on gender equality that will be presented to the Czech government.
The seventeen ministers of the present coalition government of Bohuslav Sobotka include only three women (labour, education, regional development), the 2015 report says, adding that 25 out of 103 deputy ministers were women.
Women headed 18 percent of the Czech diplomatic missions abroad.
Compared with 2014, the numbers of women among deputy ministers and ambassadors slightly fell, the report writes.
Women occupied 10.4 percent of seats in the management of publicly traded companies. In the European Union, only Greece, Cyprus, Estonia and Malta had lower shares of women among the top managers. The highest shares of women were in the countries that introduced quotas for women (36 percent in France, 33 percent in Sweden).
The Czech Government Council for Human Rights recommended that state-run companies release information on the representations of men and women on their managements. It proposed to set the lower limit for the representation of men/women at 40 percent by law.
Compared with Western countries, the employment rate is very low for women in their thirties and this mostly concerns mothers with small children, the report writes.
Women remain unemployed for a long time more often than men in the Czech Republic: 3.2 percent of women and 2.2 percent of men were unemployed for a long time.
On average, Czech men and women earn 29,858 and 23,421 crowns a month, respectively. The salary inequality remained more or less unchanged, according to the report, with the pay difference increasing from 21.5 percent in 2014 to 21.6 percent in 2015.
Due to this, women also get lower pensions than men and they are threatened with poverty in old age more often than men.
Though several measures were adopted, harmonisation of work and family remains a problem in the country: kindergartens are full, home care for old people and jobs with flexible working hours are not available enough, parents with babies do not receive sufficient support, household chores are underestimated, men are not involved in the care for the household and children enough and men do not always pay child maintenance to the caring mothers, the report writes.
It says there are many forms of flexible employment, but they were applied in the Czech Republic far less frequently than in other EU countries.
The Czech Republic is one of the five EU countries where fathers do not go on holiday after their babies are born. In other countries fathers may go on holiday for 1-64 working days, and the EU average is 12.5 days of this special holiday, the report says.
Last year, the Czech Labour and Social Affairs Ministry proposed a bill that introduces a one-week holiday for fathers after their children are born.
The report says there are too many female teachers in Czech schools. Men represent 0.5 percent of kindergarten teachers and 15.5 percent of primary school teachers. However, one third of directors of primary schools are men, it said.
($1=23.771 crowns)
