December 15, 2009

A recent provocative article in Mail Online by British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, raises a loaded question: are mother's rights making women unemployable? She asks, "while a slew of government policies are aimed at helping working women achieve a more satisfactory existence, are they not losing sight of the real workplace picture?"

Mothers in the UK are given much greater financial support and leeway with their maternity leave than mothers in the United States. Shulman shares, the "majority of pregnant women I know take close to a year off, during which they are entitled to statutory maternity pay for up to 39 weeks. They return with the expectation and right to have their old job back after 52 weeks."  Statistics like this are enough to make an American working mom (like me) green with envy.  According to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, in America, "nearly 24% of the best employers for working mothers provide four or fewer weeks of paid maternity leave, and 52% provide six weeks or less. So clearly, women on maternity leave in America have much less to worry about when it comes to losing their job to younger employees in a lower pay bracket.  We go back to work so soon after giving birth, and work so hard with very little maternity support, that it just isn't the same issue for us as it is for working moms in the UK.  Women returning to the work force after giving birth in the U.S. are barely away from their desks long enough for the voicemail button to light up.

After reading Shulman's concerns for women in the UK to retain their hard won rights in the workplace, I can't help but sympathize to some extent with her argument that working moms who demand too much time away from their jobs might be causing a backlash against working women in general, and may be furthering the prejudice that "females may become too inconvenient and awkward to employ and find themselves legislated back into the home".

Shulman questions the unrealistic notions of women returning to work after maternity leave saying, they "don't want exactly their old job back. They want the same role but molded into a time frame that suits family life better. They want to investigate four-day weeks, flexitime, jobshares, and they often then have another baby and are entitled to take another year off."

And she admits that questioning the flexibility of a mother's rights is "barely acceptable," but it does raise the uncomfortable issue that on the whole, an extended maternity leave may end up jeopardizing a woman's role in the workplace on an individual and on a national level.  I wish we had this issue to debate in the U.S.!  Unfortunately, we are so far over on the other side of the spectrum, in this country, with many working moms expected to return to their desks within days of giving birth. A happy medium definitely needs to be reached so women may prosper and be supported both while on the job and while taking much needed and deserved time off to be a mother.

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Join the conversation ( 4 )

• MAC HADDEN 2 years 5 months and 8 days ago

  

  Maternity leave is a real cost of doing business. If an employer does not, or can not pay for it, then the laws of economics require that they do not hire women who will miss work due to pregnancy. As much as the government wants to legislate economics, the fundamental rule of at-will employment will always give employers the right to hire who ever they want to hire. The end result is what you see in the U.K., and that it a very real negative impact on the desirability of hiring a woman.

• Jake Aryeh Marcus 2 years 5 months and 10 days ago

  

  As long as U.S. women are paid 20% less than men http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom2008.pdf , our jobs are probably relatively secure, even if we have the gall to reproduce.

• Kate Vickers 2 years 5 months and 10 days ago

  

  I am very fortunate to live and work in Canada where Parental Leave legislation is in place. Most Canadian women opt to take 52 weeks leave from work after having a baby (17 weeks maternity leave + 35 weeks parental leave). This is paid through our Employment Insurance program, which you must pay into prior to your leave in order to qualify for. We don't get a lot of money from the EI program, but at least it's something. For me, it was a lot less than what I make while working. My husband and I are about to have our third child and my husband will be taking 7 weeks parental leave this time. Since I am self-employed, I will be taking unpaid leave for a yet undetermined amount of time. With our first two kids I took the full year off (I wasn't self-employed yet). This system works well for most Canadian parents. I'm not sure how it's possible to go back to work within days of having a baby, especially if you had a difficult birth, a challenging baby and/or you have more than one small child. I would think that this would cause a lot of stress on both the mother and the child. It also makes breast feeding pretty difficult. I don't feel that the Canadian system has made me, or any other women less employable (especially since it's illegal to discriminate against us). I do think that it has maybe caused some of us to miss out on opportunities that we would have had if we were in the office for that year, instead of at home. On the other hand, how productive can you be when you are not able to get any rest and are not able to have any time to recover from childbirth? Maybe those opportunities would have been lost anyway.

• Amy Brunetto Phillips 2 years 5 months and 10 days ago

  

  I am a first time mother to a 4.5 month old and while I must admit that I wish there were more hours in the day, I think going back to work after my maternity leave (3 months) was the best thing for both my daughter and me. I missed the challenges of my professional life while I was away and in some sense missed an important part of myself. My daughter is in an excellent daycare facility and interacts with other children her same age all day, something that I could never give her at home. The caregivers there are solely responsible for nurturing the children and are not thinking about the laundry that needs to be done or the dinner that need to be made. Personally, I don’t think that staying home for an entire year after her birth would have been best for my family.