Manama: Bahrain's education minister has attributed the "sharp" shortage of women teachers in several schools to the law that gives them two breastfeeding hours daily.
Public schools in Bahrain are not mixed and only women teachers are allowed to teach in all girls' establishments.
However, the limited number of trained women substitutes has often caused problems for schools with a high number of breastfeeding mothers.
"The number of women teachers who benefit from this law reached 3,400 by the end of 2009, a fact that puts tremendous pressure on the schools and the ministry," Majed Al Nuaimi, told the upper chamber on Monday.
The situation is most dramatic in large schools where the high number of teachers who leave classes makes their replacement a demanding task for the administration and the ministry, he said.
The law which applies to all government sector employees was enacted by the parliament to help breastfeeding mothers look after their babies and help them compromise between their role as mothers and as professionals.
However, schools have complained that substitutes were not easy to find, forcing them to increase workloads on other teachers.
"We lose around 1,200,000 hours annually as a result of the two hours taken by female teachers as their breastfeeding right. This has inevitably affected the performance of schools and students," Al Nuaimi said.
An experiment to have women teachers teach young boys until the fifth grade had been successfully implemented. However, women teachers have invariably refused to teach boys in the sixth grade and beyond.
