At a time when there is a tendency to simplify the childcare debate, a geography professor has offered some welcome complexity.
Geography is no longer what it was - oxbow rivers and capitals of countries - it has been transformed by scholars, mostly feminists, who have reformed the study of how men, women and children inhabit the landscape, and access power, time, knowledge, land, labour and love.
Linda McDowell, geography professor at Oxford, has published research on how women organise and access childcare in cities of the global economy.
What it tells us is that women's lives are mired in complication. They don't make simple, willed choices between home and work, career or care.
Their choices are constrained and contradictory.
She registers a growing polarisation between highly qualified women in 'careers' and low-qualified women in 'jobs'. And although it is matched by a similar differential between men, what unites women, whatever their class, is that they still undertake almost the entire emotional economy of care.
Research shows that children still have little impact on men's 'work-life balance', and even less on the institutions' expectations of their employees, not to mention themselves as employers. That problem is acute in the rich, macho, and influential private finance sector.
The research reveals just how complicated and often crisis-ridden women's everyday lives are. At the top end, employers are reluctant to release parents on parental leave, flexitime, or even pregnancy. At the bottom end, women are often too poor to pay for prohibitively expensive childcare provision. And childcare workers are among the poorest.
Some women workers are so badly paid that they have to do two jobs. Others just can't put in the hours to earn a living wage. All of this may be seen sometimes in one locality, where gentrified dwellings sit next door to hard-pressed inner city estates. The childcare needs of the families in them, however, may be remarkably similar - and at the same time much more complicated and varied than has been imagined by policymakers.
Professor McDowell resists coming out with a policy formula, but her story about the everyday life of city folk is a caution. We need more of everything, round the clock, but most of all we need a political debate, and institutional response, that resonates with real life.
* See story, page 6
