The "school of the great vacation" ended on Thursday.
The fact that the education system is not synchronized with the economy is well known and recognized, and also the frustrating solution: one of the parents will give up working hours or juggle even more than usual between the desire to give the children a favorable environment and the need to work and earn a living.
It will almost always be the mother.
We love to raise our children, educate them, nurture them, absorb their wholeness and happiness.
We work to make a living, to bring out our creative and productive parts, and that we are good citizens who support the state with our tax dollars.
These things are true for fathers and mothers alike, but for the most part it is the mothers who will face the choice again and again between children and livelihood, between children and professional development, between children or anything that is not children.
This is not the place to discuss the differences between women and men, women's desire to invest in children versus men's desire to invest in another project or questions of interests and wage gaps.
I'm talking about something more basic: the system is built in a way that forces women who are interested and want to work, to stay at home.
How is it possible otherwise, when for five weeks the children are without an educational framework, and the average worker in the economy does not have a balance between vacation days and work days?
How is it possible otherwise when the school day ends at 14:00, and every additional frame is both low in content and requires additional costs?
It's simple: every family will calculate whether it pays for them to pay for the afternoon or give up working hours, usually for those who earn less anyway.
Because the median salary in Israel is less than 7,000 shekels (according to MSAB data) and the price of lunch varies between at least 500 and 1,000 shekels, it seems that for hundreds of thousands of families - this option is simply too expensive.
According to Taub Center data, the employment rate of women in Israel currently stands at 75% (84% among non-Orthodox Jewish women);
Among working parents, the scope of maternal employment is 23 hours a week on average, compared to 36 hours among men;
In most households, women are "secondary breadwinners";
And all this while women are still licking their wounds from the dangers of the corona unemployment: in 18 out of 19 employment sectors in Israel, the proportion of women who filed a claim for unemployment benefits is higher than the proportion of men in the same sector;
The situation of single-parent women is even more bleak.
"I realized," said an ambitious, talented and diligent friend who works part-time so that she doesn't have to give up the hours when the children are at home on the one hand, and meaningful and lucrative work on the other hand, "that it doesn't work: either my boss will be satisfied, or the children Mine will be satisfied. This is the choice."
In an economy that needs productive workers, in a country that talks about equality and insists on holding the reins on the education system (when, of course, Yaffe Ben David is already hinting that we are not guaranteed September 1 either) - the barriers that prevent mothers from working, developing professionally and making a decent living must be removed once and for all.
were we wrong
We will fix it!
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