Mothers in the Ring: Family or Profession?

For many women, parental leave means abandoning the labour market for a lengthy period. Many lose touch with their field. Their level of qualification declines, as does their chance of full reintegration, a situation that is in part due to the inflexibility of the Czech labour market. Some women therefore put motherhood off, decide to have fewer children or don’t have any at all. There are models that claim to know how to enable the woman or both parents to decide themselves how to combine professional and parental needs and ideas, depending on what is possible for individual families. What form do those models take, how successful have they been abroad, what are their drawbacks, are they beneficial to parents alone or also to children, and what are their chances of working in the Czech environment? These issues will be the focus of our discussion about combining family and professional life.

Guests: MP Markéta Pekarová Adamová, Jana Spekhorstová of the Czech branch of the European Union of Women, Marie Oujezdská, director of the National Centre for the Family, economist Filip Pertold of the think tank IDEA at CERGE-EI.

The debate will be chaired by Jaroslav Poláček, an analyst with the TOPAZ political institute.

Organised by the Václav Havel Library in cooperation with TOPAZ.