During her last interview for a government job, one of the panelists looked at her job resume and asked one final question.
This was the moment that would define her future, although, in the eyes of her panelists, her future had been decided a decade before.
“You have two kids?” the panelist asked.
Christine Montoya, at 42, was not shy about talking about her son and daughter.
Justin Tyler and Reese, 11 and 10, respectively, were full of life and their healthy smiles reflected their mother’s work as a dentist.
Montoya applied for a job at the dental department under the Department of Health.
It was just the start of 2018, still fresh with the promise of a new year, and she was confident about her nearly two-decade experience in the profession.
She, however, didn’t get the job.
“I was told that I wasn’t fit to be part of DOH because I have two kids, and they require their employee to be there on Saturdays. I couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t insist anymore. But if I could work there, I would have retirement benefits which could also help my kids,” she said.
Missing out on “crucial career milestones”
Montoya’s experience is not unusual, unfortunately.
According to a recent survey, more than half of Filipino women feel that they missed out on career opportunities after having children, an issue partly due to workplace policies that are unresponsive to the needs of women.
Online hiring firm Monster Philippines released a survey last week in time for Mothers’ Day.
The survey covered over 2,600 respondents across the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia. It aimed to identify challenges women and mothers face in the workplace.
The feeling of missing out may have been partly due to “levels of discrimination in the workplace,” the company said in a statement.
The survey showed that 21 percent of women said they had been labeled “too emotional,” and 19 percent don’t feel they were taken seriously in the workplace.
Discrimination can strike at any time.
Even early in job interviews, the survey pointed out that 18 percent of women said they had been questioned about their desire or plans to have children.
It is not clear if men are asked the same.
Montoya, a single mother, took a break from work in 2006 to focus on rearing her kids. Looking back, she said she couldn’t help but feel bad that her peers had gone ahead with their respective careers.
She wouldn’t have traded her career for her kids. But why does it have to be an ultimatum?
While 55 percent of Filipino women say they felt anxious about leaving their infants at home, 63 percent return to work. When they do, only 28 percent said their companies offered benefits such as medical benefits and compensation, adjusted work schedules (28 percent), lactation rooms at the workplace (9 percent) and child daycare centers at work (5 percent).
Ideal world
In an ideal world, Montoya said a mother should be able to extend her maternal leave, especially since mothers don’t always recover as fast from giving birth, an experience many described as a “near-death experience”.
Here in the Philippines, new mothers only have 60 days of paid leave if they had a vaginal delivery, and 78 if they delivered via cesarean section. This is the shortest maternal paid leave in Southeast Asia, paling against peers that offer over a hundred days of paid leave.
“In an ideal world, there would be a bit more understanding and financial support for the mother and child. When she goes back to work, I hope there’s a chance that she could bring her child to the workplace, that there would be a breastfeeding area, and even a daycare center,” she said.
The numbers in the survey reflect this.
Respondents suggested solutions such as flexible work arrangements tailored to the mothers’ needs (37 percent), efficient communication with mothers about leave policies (17 percent), and a transition period consisting of reduced workload (16 percent).
Despite this, Filipinas use their flexible working options more than their counterparts in Singapore and Malaysia, according to Abhijeet Mukherjee, CEO of Monster.com for Asia and Pacific and Gulf.
The survey showed that 61 percent of respondents could use flexible working hours under their current jobs, although this flexibility did not include working from home, which 44 percent of women could not do.
Mukherjee said “there is still room for improvement to better support and manage the workloads for working mothers.”
This is reflected by the fact that over 50 percent of working Filipina women surveyed feel that they miss out on crucial career milestones after having children, Mukherjee said.
‘In the eyes of employers’
Montoya wanted to be a dentist ever since she was a child. She said her former dentist so inspired her that she followed the same career path when she got older.
Meanwhile, her daughter, Reese, wants to be a writer.
She doesn’t think the work environment will change, even when her daughter decides to be a mother herself one day.
“In my opinion, our country takes a lot of time to move on with the times. Maybe, when the time comes that she would have a child of her own, maybe things would still be like this more or less. If ever, maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as my experience, but still not as acceptable,” she said.
Montoya said she had been reminding her 10-year old daughter to think about starting her own business when she grows up.
She doesn’t tell her daughter, of course, that the reason behind this is control.
She said being your own boss means having more chances to avoid sexist encounters that would just disappoint you. She recalls overhearing a boss say that, next time, they should just hire someone single instead.
“In the eyes of employers, being a mother is an imperfection. I hope that changes,” she said.