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.

In his policy address last October, city leader John Lee Ka-chiu outlined plans to encourage more women to rejoin the workforce and help plug staffing gaps in the city. But social service NGOs, lawmakers and women such as Maira said a lot depended on the childcare support available.

“Childcare is a vital issue in deciding whether a woman can reintegrate into society and have a career,” Nixie Lam Lam, a lawmaker who became a mother for the first time last year, said. “It also determines how much more labour we can release.”

She said mothers struggled to choose between caring for their baby or pursuing their careers. The reality in the workplace was that women who took a few years off for child-raising ended up as low-skilled labour, even if they had done semi-professional jobs earlier.

She said workplaces needed to be more family friendly, and suggested that companies should allocate funding to provide childcare services either on-site or at day care centres.

Siu Kam-hang, the authority’s assistant general manager of public affairs and community relations, said on financial and operational levels, it was not hard to get three NGOs together to provide childcare to more than 100 children of airport staff this year.

“We hope to demonstrate to other companies that employees indeed benefit from family-friendly measures and encourage them to do something similar,” he said.

Peace Wong Wo-ping, the chief officer for policy research and advocacy at the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, said childcare packages were not often listed among employee benefits at city firms.

He said some employers were more open to approving days off or flexible working hours for women staff to accommodate their children’s schedules, but this was not policy in most companies.

“I have heard of firms which tried to adopt a more personalised work arrangement for employee’s demands, but they do not approach the issue specially to cater to working-mums’ needs,” Wong added.

Dr Henry Ho Chun-yip, an assistant professor at the Education University’s education and human development faculty, said small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) faced resource constraints in funding family-friendly policies.

He added it would be more cost-effective for them to increase the number of annual leave days and let employees take time off to attend to family matters.

He suggested that the government look at the provision of subsidies or centralised work-family support services to SMEs.

Ho’s team released a survey on family friendly employment practices last year and found major gaps between the expectations of employers and staff.

More than 70 per cent of working mothers surveyed wanted support such as special leave, a five-day work week and flexible working schedules, and more than 60 per cent wanted parent-specific policies like having lactation rooms and leave to care for children who were ill.

But some employers or managers polled thought it was not an employers’ responsibility to provide staff with support for childcare, or for relatives who were elderly or had disabilities.

Unionist lawmaker Kwok Wai-keung, a deputy director of the Federation of Trade Unions’ women’s affairs committee, said many SMEs might not have the resources to provide what women employees wanted.

“Providing day care service is a big help to working mothers,” he said. “It is also a good way to encourage more women to enter the workforce after having babies.”

Kwok said the government could establish day care centres if companies could not set up on-site facilities and employers could give allowances to staff who were mothers to send their children to them.

“It might increase the costs for employers, but given the labour shortage, labour costs might not necessarily go up a lot if the measure encourages more women to join the workforce,” he said.

Janus Lau Yuen-yee, director of the women affairs committee of the Federation of Hong Kong and Kowloon Labour Unions, backed Kwok’s views and appealed to the government to expand its pilot school-based after-school care programme.

The scheme, announced by Lee in the last policy address, targeting underprivileged families was expected to benefit about 3,000 children.

It is being organised in primary schools in districts with more children in the target group, including Kowloon City, Yau Tsim Mong, Sham Shui Po, Kwun Tong, Kwai Tsing, Tsuen Wan and Yuen Long.

“It offers a quick fix – parents feel more comfortable if their children are taken care of in schools,” Lau said. “Activities are organised and there may also be tutorials to help brush up the children’s academic performance.”

Additional reporting by Ng Kang-chung.