Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank both of our witnesses for coming in. I have followed their work in different ways and am delighted to have them here. I am very much enjoying listening to them. I want to ask two things. The first is about care in the home. We have seen this issue particularly throughout the Covid pandemic but, let us face it, it has always existed. There was a really good report published at EU level about this issue. It analysed, on a pan-European basis, which women got back to work most easily and so on. It is not just an Irish issue or a Covid issue. It is a European issue and a men-and-women issue. I am interested in how we can explain to any organisation, not specifically Microsoft, the additional work that women do according to all of the reports and statistics we are familiar with and what that actually means in practical terms. In the context of rebalancing that quickly for people today without having to raise a whole new generation of people, do the witnesses have any thoughts as to how corporations or any other organisations can explain or tackle that for the men and women? It is a core part of the inequality challenge we face.

My second question is slightly contrary. I do not know what the answer to this is, but there is a balance to be struck between women spending their time trying to get ahead, do their jobs successfully and simply move on to the next stage and continue to progress, and spending their time remedying the gender inequality problem. For example, both of the witnesses are taking time out of their professional academic lives in order to be here to do this. We give our time to researchers to tell them what it is like to be a woman in politics. There are so many examples. We are very happy to do it because the very last thing we want to do is to pull up the ladder and to not provide assistance to researchers who are coming behind us in different ways. However, it strikes me that very few of my male colleagues have the same asks made of their time. Each of these engagements takes an hour or whatever it happens to be. That is just one example. Two things happen. One is the taking of your time, time that could otherwise be spent simply doing the job in order to retain it or progress in it. The second is the continuing othering involved in having the gender issue continually pointed out in a way that only happens to one gender. Again, I say this question is slightly contrary because, for as long as that continues to happen, you continue to make things different but you also continue to take from the time available to actually do the job. I am interested in the witnesses' perspectives on that because they are clearly also doing the same.