Social Security statistics confirm the lack of family co-responsibility and how the burden of care still falls overwhelmingly on women. 85% of leave to care for a child or other family member requested in the first quarter of the year corresponded to women. Social Security processed 11,741 leaves of absence in that period and only 1,762 were requests from men. And, despite the fact that in the first three months of 2024 fewer leaves of absence have been requested than in the same period in 2023, the proportion of women and men who request them remains unchanged.
The feminization of care leave is, moreover, widespread throughout Spain. Ceuta (71%) and the Canary Islands (76%) are the regions with the lowest percentage of leave taken by women. And Murcia (90%), La Rioja (88%) and Castile and Leon (88%), the most feminized.
But this is not the only employment indicator that reflects the poor progress of co-responsibility in care and that it is women who still give up work and professional careers when the need arises to take care of minors, people elderly or other dependents in the family. According to data provided by the Active Population Survey, of the 383,500 employed people who worked part-time in 2022 in order to have more time to take care of children, the sick, the elderly or people with disabilities, 92.5% were women.
The analysis carried out by the INE on these data makes it clear that a high percentage of those who worked part-time in 2022 worked there involuntarily, because they could not find a full-time job, and this reality was somewhat more common among men (55%) than among women (49.4%). However, among those who chose it, the alleged reason for doing so differs significantly by gender: they mainly cite caring for children, the sick or the elderly, and they say they work part-time to bet on training, to follow teaching courses.
The statistics also continue to show the different impact that having children has on the professional careers of men and women. The employment rate of women aged between 25 and 49 with children was 70.4% in 2022, compared to 75.6% of peers without children, while the opposite is true for men : having children seems to be an incentive to work and the employment rate among those who have children is approximately 90%, 11.5 percentage points more than those who do not have children.
