The Malta Chamber Health & Wellness Committee, chaired by Atlas Healthcare Managing Director Catherine Calleja, held a hybrid conference entitled “𝗗𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗣𝗮𝘆𝘀”.

The conference boasted an illustrious list of speakers, which included Dr Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament who delivered a video address, a keynote speech from Dr Anna Borg, Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta and Chairperson of the Malta Women’s Lobby, who presented evidence-based findings on the impact of gender diversity on corporate decision-making, and influential members of the political, economic, and social spheres who shared their perspectives on these issues.

In Catherine Calleja’s introduction to the conference, she stated that Malta still faced significant challenges in the area of Gender Equality and this was one of the 17 sustainable development goals which Malta had signed up to in the 𝟮𝟬𝟯𝟬 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗮 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗦𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁. She welcomed a number of election candidates to the conference and stressed the importance of increasing the 2020 reported level of 13.4% of seats in parliament occupied by women to one more representative of Maltese voters.

Speakers agreed that one of the factors which could increase Maltese women’s participation in the labour market was having more burden sharing across genders and across employers of both genders. Ms Calleja commended the efforts by the state in the areas of the provision of free childcare and the payment of maternity contributions but said that unless organisations were committed to understand bias and work to free both women and men from gender based assumptions, both genders would continue to be constrained by unrealistic expectations. This was a wellness issue both for workers who would continue to be prevented from integrating work and home lives and for organisations who were prevented from developing talent irrespective of gender. The addresses were followed by a panel discussion and highly engaging Q&A session.

The Malta Chamber Health & Wellness Committee’s policy document on burden-sharing in a gender context may be found here: https://lnkd.in/eDsvm6K