Professor Mary Murphy:

I suppose I should come in as an educator. We should never underestimate the degree to which our current breadwinner system and our welfare, tax and education systems orientate a culture of female care. Understanding how the present culture is constructed and maintained is important. Some of the rules we talked about concerning eligibility systems for pensions reinforce in people's heads gendered differences in relation to the household, employment and the role of care. We should not be surprised that we get the culture we get because we set out to make it in some respects. That is why looking at the Constitution is important. All those roles, norms and values permeate through our culture, education, churches, GAA or whatever and how we construct them.

If we look at what other societies have been trying to do, much of the time it is trying to find other policy tools to reorientate the culture, such as forcing the loss of parental leave in the family if it is not shared equally between the male and the female, as a start. That only works if it is accompanied by other measures to try to change employers' attitudes to facilitating men to take care leave in the workplace. It is the same with the idea of the four-day working week, which has much gender equality potential but tends not to be pushed in that context. There are campaigns for a four-day week that are about working less to live more, but then there is a gender equality aspect that is kind of stitched on. It could be about working less to care more. Often the joined-up thinking is not there about how some good policy changes can be used to change culture.

On education, we talk a lot about integrating into our education system more focus on sustainability as a cultural shift so that our children and young people are orientated towards climate change. We do not have that conversation about care but could if we chose to. We are not quite there yet in terms of looking for the cultural value change.

In the song "The Town I Loved So Well", there is a line "While their men on the dole played [the women's] role" and they "laughed through the smoke and the smell". That song really annoys me sometimes but there is a deeply embedded expectation of roles.

Some academic research is interesting on cultural shifts that happen when there is a major recession of big cultural change like the pandemic. They are trying to see if one or two years of a shift in care roles brought about by a structural shift embed. Some research shows it does not or that there are class differences in how it embeds. When linked with more education and other shifts in culture, it changes and the shift in the care roles begins to be embedded in household practice when things return to normal. Other research shows, particularly in working-class situations, that there was a reversion to the normalisation of gender roles when the structural shift went back to normal.