Women who are caregivers shouldn't suffer economically, says Glendon

Published: 2005-03-08

UNITED NATIONS (CNS) -- Mary Ann Glendon, head of the Vatican delegation to a meeting of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, said March 7 that women face an unresolved problem of "harmonizing" their "aspirations for fuller participation in social and economic life with their roles in family life." Women can resolve the problem, but not without "radical changes in society," she said. Glendon, a Harvard law professor and president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, said no society had yet found a satisfactory way to apply the "equality principle" to the situation of "mothers and others who give priority to caregiving roles." To do this, she said, policy-makers would have to pay closer attention "to women's own accounts of what is important to them, rather than to special interest groups that purport to speak for women but often do not have women's interests at heart."

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