jerusalem | Like most Israeli mothers, Laura Kam Issacharoff, the co-director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Israel office, has spent most of her working life searching for someone to care for her children while she’s pursued her career and helped support her family.
Issacharoff could have placed her children in a mischpachton, where nannies care for several infants for a hefty fee.
However, “I didn’t feel comfortable with that option,” she says. “I didn’t want to drag the kids out of the house and expose them to other children at the age of 3 or 6 months.”
By her own calculations, Issacharoff has been through 13 years of nannies and baby sitters. Although her children are now older Issacharoff still felt unsettled by the recent arrest of several nannies accused of abusing their young charges. In one case, suspicious parents secretly videotaped their nanny hitting and dropping their young twins.
The spate of alleged child-abuse cases, which the Israeli media have dubbed “Nannygate,” has thrown a spotlight on many problems faced by working mothers, such as the short school day unique to Israel.
“Statistics show that women often do not work full time when their children are small,” says Talia Livni, the president of Na’amat Israel, which runs a network of preschools. “You see the high cost of day care, the problem with the work day getting longer and longer. You see men staying at work till 7 p.m. while women rush out at 3:30 to pick up the kids from day care. The women who do work late have to pay for a baby sitter. It’s the women who suffer.”
According to the Israel Women’s Network, just 40 percent of mothers with children under the age of 4 work full time, compared to 67 percent of childless women. Only 17 percent of the mothers work part time, while the remainder (43 percent) aren’t working at all.
Sixty-four percent of employed Israeli women work in notoriously low-paying sectors: as teachers, caregivers for children and the elderly, secretaries and saleswomen. Unlike the United States, where child care is a small tax deduction and where mothers get some relief when their 6-year-olds return home from school at 3 or 4 p.m., in Israel the majority of children attend school until 1 p.m. — this despite the Long School Day law passed by the Knesset, but rarely implemented.
Knesset Member Yael Dayan attributes the huge wage gap between men and women with comparable qualifications in comparable jobs to inadequate child-care resources. In 2004, the average woman’s monthly pretax salary was about $1,200, compared with about $1,985 for the average man.
“Not only do we earn 40 percent less than men but our chances at advancement are next to nil,” Dayan says, noting that the majority of women work for the state.
“Child care still isn’t tax deductible in Israel, even though we’ve been trying for 30 years to pass a law to make it a tax deduction.” Even if it were, Dayan says bleakly, “many women don’t earn enough to pay taxes, so they wouldn’t benefit from a tax break anyway.”
She acknowledges that child care is relatively plentiful in Israel thanks to networks of well-run mishpachtonim and preschools run by women’s organizations like Naamat and Wizo. But “availability doesn’t mean anything if you can’t pay for it,” she says.
When a woman can’t afford child care, “she can’t do her schooling or advance in her career. If you have to take off two to three years when raising a young child, then you’re already behind when you go back to the workplace. … The women never catch up and it’s depressing.”
The only real solution, Dayan says, is the establishment of “state-subsidized day-care centers of the type we see in Scandinavia, where the parents don’t pay at all. There the state cares for children from preschool through high school.”
Livni also would like to prohibit, through legislation or an agreement with various labor unions, meetings held after 4 p.m. “Many of the important organizational decisions are made at night, when women can’t be there. All the mingling is done after hours, putting women at a disadvantage.”
And Na’amat is lobbying for free day care for all children from the age of 6 months on up, something unlikely to transpire at a time when the government has slashed child allowances to families with more than two children and benefits to all segments of the population.
Na’amat would also like to see workplaces establish on-site child care and contribute generously toward the cost. Such arrangements are almost nonexistent in Israel.
“The state simply does not acknowledge the importance of child care,” Livni says. “Yes, it subsidizes the real poor but not young, middle-class families just starting out. Child care is too expensive for these families at this time in their lives.”