Do maternity rights damage women’s careers?
July 16, 2008
Recently it’s been all over the news that Nicola Brewer, Chief Executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has voiced her opinion that maternity and family friendly reforms have actually damaged women’s career prospects, because they reinforce the traditional model of women being the primary carer for their children rather than the father. Brewer argued, in a newspaper interview, that many employers are now avoiding employing women of childbearing age because of the risk that they may take up to a year’s maternity leave and/or exercise their right to request flexible working (even though fathers have this right as well). A while back, Sir Alan Sugar made similar comments about the negative effects of discrimination law on female candidates.
Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC has hit back at Brewer’s comments, saying that the situation with the ‘myth’ that women’s job prospects are damaged by family friendly rights should be resolved in the future if families are able to transfer part of the maternity leave entitlement to the father, allowing equal time off for each parent. Barber said that ideally flexible working rights should be extended to all workers so that it is not a particular group that is affected by reluctant employers. I’m not so sure though. I think that the issue of employers assuming that employing women of a certain age will bring a bagful of people management headaches is down to much more than just the rights available to women. There’s the issue that women on the whole are paid less than men, which means that even if men are in the future able to take extended parental leave when their partner has a baby, it’s likely that the mother will still take all the leave as she will probably be the lower earner, and not many families can afford to drop the bigger wage. I’ve already agreed with my partner that when we start a family, if the maternity leave rights are available for men (which they probably will be by the time we have children) then whoever is the lower earner will take the leave. Until there’s more equality in pay, I don’t think rights for men or women will have the effect of completely resolving the issue over employers’ assumptions. But this is a vicious cycle because the fact that women take career breaks to have a family contributes in itself to the equal pay issue!
What’s your opinion on this subject?
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