ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the government's reluctant role in helping women, together with their dependents and partners, overcome the conflict between responsibilities at home and equal status in the work force. Work and family have been separate areas of official concern; add woman to the scheme, and she is assigned to family, private world. Although women have been in work sphere for generations, official conception has persisted that they do not belong there, that it is some sort of social or economic pathology that put them there: they have to work and would have chosen not to work if they had had someone to support them and their children adequately. Employment difficulties caused by pregnancy and childbirth pertain exclusively to women workers, thus making maternity leave a central issue for rights of women workers. The issues that arise under the subject of work and family such as work status, family leave, and child care have been in policy arena for decades.
