What do Hong Kong working mums want? Bosses who offer flexible work arrangements, childcare support
- City leader John Lee wants to get women back to work, but observers ask: who will look after the children?
- Some bosses don’t believe employees’ childcare worries should be their responsibility, survey shows
Oraz Maira gave up travelling around the world after 10 years as a flight attendant and took a ground role at Hong Kong International Airport so she could look after her two young children.
But overnight shifts made it hard for her. She changed jobs and a post as an assistant station manager for an airline has helped her juggle her roles as a mother and a working woman.
“I want to stay in the industry because I do not want my experience and multilingual skills to go to waste,” Maira, 40, a Kazakhstan national who speaks Russian, Cantonese and English and has lived in Hong Kong since 2010, said.
What has helped her most is the subsidised childcare programme offered by the Airport Authority to all employees.
Staff can send their children to three designated schools in Tung Chung, where they receive after-school care and tuition for HK$10 (US$1.28) a day per child.
Maira’s older child, a boy aged eight, is in a programme that provides tuition at a childcare centre in Tung Chung and that means she does not have to check on his homework when she gets home.
“I can spend more quality time with the children at night if I do not have to take care of the homework,” Maira, whose husband travels often for work, said.
