-Shoes on Saturday the 19th?
The chat of a school group from the center of Barcelona faces the difficult task of finding a date for the annual meeting in the countryside. That day in March 2022 seemed perfect. Then, one of the mothers who are members of the group warns: "I can't that day, I take the City Hall exam." After her, another one joins: me too. And another, and another. Four mothers out of a total of 24. No father. The anecdote has little statistical value, but it is significant because it fits with a rising employment profile, that of a woman around 40 years of age who, after having worked in a private company, seeks refuge in the public sector in search of stability, schedules and conditions more compatible with conciliation. And also in some cases fleeing from sexist dynamics that still prevail in the business world.
One of those four women from the chat who appeared last year for the access tests to the City Council job market, a massive appointment that brought together more than 8,000 people at the Fira de Gran Via facilities. She is Anna (she prefers not to give her full name), a 38-year-old lawyer by training and with three children between the ages of 3 and 8. After graduating in Law, Anna started working in a law firm and later jumped to the legal office of one of the so-called Big Four, the four auditing and consulting companies that dominate the market, famous for the extremely high salaries of their managers and the draconian working hours of its employees. Everything was going well until her first child was born and she requested a minimum working day reduction, barely 11%. That small difference changed everything for her at the company. “My promotion is over, my salary is frozen. In team meetings, a call list was made and I was placed below the intern. I no longer counted for anything. This causes you great insecurity and a feeling of frustration. He had fought his whole life to be there and he was actually being more efficient than ever, without heating up the chair.
The disappointment led him to try a call from the Generalitat and later to look for another job in a bank subsidiary. Any job that could arise from the City Council bag that he applied for last year would be temporary and less well paid than his current occupation, but the idea of the public sector appeals to him for other reasons. “I could see my children more and do other things that interest me. In addition, in the public sector you do not have the uncertainty of whether your company is going to be acquired by another group and you will be left without a job”.
The oppositions that have been called (more than 27,000 vacancies in public employment will be opened in 2023 alone) in the last two years, much more numerous due to the pandemic break, confirm this profile of the new opponent with a higher age and, almost always , women. The OpositaTest portal, one of the many that offers online exams to prepare all kinds of exams for the Administration, each year conducts a survey among its users, which are almost a million, and extracts a robot portrait of the opponent. In the one they published in February 2022, 82% of the respondents were women and the average age of the user rose from 34 to 39 years compared to the previous year. The opponents between 36 and 50 years old are already 31%, while those under 25, the usual profile of a student who joins a university career with the opposition, are only 14% of the total.
"A very common profile is that of people who have been in the private sector but have not found stability or a job that they can make compatible with their personal life," says Jacobo Fariña, spokesman for the portal, citing the case of Verónica Estevan, a A 47-year-old graduate in Labor Relations who has obtained a position in the Ministry of Finance after working as a telephone operator and vending machine at a gas station. “I spent three years taking care of my sick mother, until she died, and that created a place for me on the resume. From there and with more than 40 they don't call you for interviews ”, explains Estevan. She is preparing her third opposition in three years because she wants to make up for lost time and improve her position within the Administration. “If I had entered at 20 years old I could have done it little by little, but now I don't have time to waste,” she says.
Not having to explain what working life they have led or what circumstances it is due to is something that also attracts many women to the public sector.
Lola Martínez, 52, worked for more than twenty years as a hairdresser in Linares, Jaén, until she had to quit at 37 due to respiratory problems caused by beauty products, so serious that she was granted partial disability. “Being a housewife and spending all day cleaning and taking care of the children, with a husband from the country, made me feel horrible. I only had a school degree but I started taking INEM courses. In the end, a brother-in-law convinced me to prepare an opposition. I went to an academy and they told me about legal aid, which is something I had never heard of before. It is the assistant of the court, who is in charge of summoning and preparing the hearing room… I did not even know it existed”. After two calls, in Andalusia and Catalonia, she obtained a position and now works in the Ciutat de la Justícia. “I like my job and I am pleased to have achieved it. Independence, tranquility. I feel better than in my whole life. Now my children are older, they are 30 and 26 years old, but it would have been good for me to have such an occupation when they were children. I had a very bad time. I think my asthma problems came from there, from anxiety and stress."
Pilar Carrasquer, director of the Institut d'Estudis del Traball de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and research sociologist at QUIT, the Center d'Estudis Sociològics de la Vida Quotidiana and el Treball, points out that many of the women who are now accessing civil service are largely the daughters of the 2008 crisis. "They entered the market coinciding with the crisis and have been cheating." She also believes that women see the civil service as a "refuge" for stability but also for time management and working conditions. “Many could earn more money in the private sector, but they are looking for guarantees. In addition, the income is transparent. You know from the outset what tests they will do to you, what value they will have ”.
What does this phenomenon say about the labor market? "Fundamentally, it speaks of the shortcomings of the private sector, which is not giving options to develop all areas of life." The sociologist also points out that it is mainly women, due to the way in which they have been socialized and the expectations that still fall on them, who take into account the eventuality of unforeseen events and the idea that, at some point in their lives, they will end up taking care of someone “above or below” (ie children or parents), even long before it happens. “In the masculine stories care does not appear and in the feminine ones it does. They generally do not imagine themselves as caregivers even though they end up being one”, says Carrasquer.
Although those who access the public sector value the transparency of the system, that does not mean that the Administration is free of gender gaps. From the Association of Women in the Public Sector they denounce that only 30% of management positions are held by women and that the leadership in many of the bodies does not reflect how feminized the public function is. The case of the Judiciary is often cited, which already concentrates 70% of approved in the latest promotions, but whose leadership is still dominated by men. Even so, women are the majority in the so-called "hard oppositions", those of the higher bodies of the Administration - more than 7,500 women applied for the Management of the State Civil Administration, compared to 3,624 men last year -, except those related to STEM.
Many of those who come to the administration with previous backgrounds and higher education are people who are filling the gaps that exist in Secondary Education with internships. This is the case of Marga Cahner, a 43-year-old psychologist from Badalona who has become a counselor in a public institute after a career in the social sector and after having three children in a row, two of them twins. "Being able to free when the children are free is a plus," she admits. Mónica Infante's work trip was more peculiar. A biologist, a knee injury took her away from her job as caretaker for Marineland's dolphins. “I found myself at 43 years old thinking: what do I do now, if I am super specialized? I visited a laboratory where there could be a space but in only one hour I was overwhelmed, if I had been working in the sun for 20 years, I did not see myself locked up there”. She took the Master's degree in distance teaching and accessed a place at a Vocational Training Institute in Vall d'Hebron through the difficult-to-cover position pool. "Now I dedicate myself to another class of animals," she says. At the end of the month, she earns less money than she did before, but she considers that she earns more if she counts it by the hour. “In a marine zoo, there are no schedules. I spent 20 hours a day waiting on my cell phone, what now seems like a luxury to me”. Infante believes that teachers with a past provide another perspective to their students, but, now that he is preparing for competitive examinations to consolidate his place in June, he regrets: "it is not the same to do it at forty-something with many family responsibilities than at 22, when they are waiting for you in house with the plate on the table”.
