International Women’s Day is on March 8, and the Yorkton Film Festival’s OPEN Cinema program commemorated the event by screening The Motherload, a documentary about the challenges facing mothers in the workplace as well as discussing what they saw as issues for parents within the Yorkton area.
Kimberly Merriam, media studies and psychology teacher at the Yorkton Regional High School was one of the presenters of the program. She says the goal is to discuss what challenges are facing working mothers in the workplace, such as why a working mother makes approximately 10 to 20 per cent less than her childless equivalent.
“As a society, women are still shouldering the majority of the care giving role as well as the career sacrifices to make it all happen.”
The documentary itself was made in response to an article by Anne-Marie Slaughter entitled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” explains Merriam, which was written when Slaughter turned down a major foreign policy position in order to be closer to her family.
“The point of the documentary is to make it a more humanitarian issue as opposed to a women’s issue. To raise a human being, it takes humans contributing, it doesn’t necessarily fall on a gender. Men are very good at having care-giving roles as well.”
The evidence of the struggles facing women in the workplace are found in the statistics.
“What we’re finding that in the past 10 years, there has been no movement in Canada for women in higher status positions, they still only take up nine per cent of the influential government positions. In law school, fifty percent of classes are women studying law, but when you look at the law firm partnerships, only something like 15 per cent of law partners are women. It’s telling you that we are getting education and we are getting in the door, but it’s a challenge and it’s a struggle,” Merriam says.
Part of the goal is to find ways to instill the responsibility of care giving onto young men, Merriam says. She says men need to be encouraged to take on a care giving role, and find a way to make it more socially acceptable.
“There’s still a stigma with men taking paternity leave. It’s getting better, but men are still reluctant to take paternity leave. Interestingly enough in Quebec many men take paternity leave, because they have something called ‘daddy days,’ and 76 per cent of men will take those.”
Merriam says that their goal is to facilitate discussion in the hopes of finding out the issues facing parents in the workplace both on a local level and at a broader scale.
