ninme

The Times - Bringing up Baby
The law on maternity leave is trying to be modern, and failing

Yet the real world intrudes. As we reported on Monday and as Nicola Brewer, then chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), noted yesterday, it is an inconvenient truth that women are being turned down for jobs and promotions because of the cost and hassle of their maternity rights. Worse, as those rights are extended to include 12 months’ paid maternity leave, up from nine, the risk grows that laws framed to erode gender stereotypes will end up entrenching them instead.

Important social reform is colliding with prejudice and what some employers take to be their short-term financial imperatives. Ms Brewer deserves praise for pointing this out. She did so in a speech launching a consultation aimed at modernising a workplace “stuck somewhere in the 1950s”, even though, as she acknowledged, her remarks could be taken as an attack on hard-won maternity rights.

They are not. On the contrary, she has indicated that the EHRC’s preferred remedy is not to cut mothers’ rights but to increase fathers’; to “level up” in favour of the British men whose two week’s statutory paid paternity leave is the shortest in Europe. There are powerful arguments for maximising both parents’ time with their young children. There are counterarguments, too, including one based on a study of American university professors who, if male, chose overwhelmingly to use any extra paternity leave to write books, leaving childcare to their partners. But not all men are as single-minded, or as selfish. …

For all the same reasons, the best employment policies will also help men to be good fathers. There is a simple way of doing this: rename the second six months of mothers’ maternity leave “parental leave”, to be shared as partners’ wish. Experience elsewhere in Europe suggests uptake by fathers would be significant. Not all women can be superwomen, or want to be. Not all men want to bring home the bacon all the time. The law should reflect this.

So one of Peter’s coworkers is off on paternity leave right now. A few days before the man’s wife desperately moved up her delivery date, I was chatting with a few other coworkers at a picnic. Since this is a relatively new company with very casually assigned rules, and since the gentleman in question is the first one to procreate while working at the company, I said, “Well what I’m interested to see is how much paternity leave he gets.” So one of the other employees said, “Well there’s the yuh-dut-dut-dut (some acronym).” And I said, “The what?” And he said, in a rather pugnacious, know-your-rights sort of way, “The yuh-dut-dut-dut. You’re guaranteed twelve weeks unpaid leave in the state of Washington and you’re guaranteed to have your job back at the end of it.”

And I thought, how is that helpful? I was talking about what sort of paid leave would be generously allowed to a new father (2nd time round), so it misses the mark in that respect, but who can afford 12 weeks unpaid leave? Either you can, in which case you’re well-off enough that you don’t need the State of Washington guaranteeing it for you, and if you’re that well off you probably have the sort of job where you can’t afford to disappear for 3 months anyway for other reasons, or if you can, you’d just quit your job and take a sabbatical, or else you can’t afford 12 weeks of not getting paid.