How benefits harm mothers

News |

Nicola Brewer, the new chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has made the claim that Britain’s generous maternity benefits may be harming women’s role in the workplace.

Under new legislation women in the UK will soon be able to take 12 months paid maternity leave.

However, Mrs Brewer has expressed concern that the new legislation could make employers think twice before offering women jobs or promotion.

Referring to improvements in maternity leave rights, she said: “The increasing leave entitlement for women seems hard to argue against, but I think it presents us with an inconvenient truth.

Has public policy on maternity leave made too many assumptions about the choices families will make, and as a result entrenched the stereotype that it is women who do the caring?”

She agreed that it was a “controversial” issue and might be “taken as an attack on a new right that many women enjoy”.

But, she said, it should be asked whether “the extension from six months to nine months in paid maternity leave (and the planned extension to a year) entrenched the position of women as the primary carer and therefore the parent who pays the career ‘penalty’ for having a child?”

Currently, women can take statutory maternity leave for up to 52 weeks, with statutory maternity pay for up to 39 weeks.

If entitled to it, a woman can receive 90% of their average weekly earnings for the first six weeks, then up to £117.18 for the remaining 33 weeks.

The last 13 weeks, if taken, are unpaid.

Conditions must be met, such as the woman having had 26 weeks of continuous employment with the same company before going on leave.

Men currently have the right to two weeks paternity leave and Ms Brewer argued that the disparity between mother and father suggested it created  an “unequal sharing of caring”.

Mrs Brewer argued that establishing paid parental leave shared by mothers and fathers depending on the family circumstances could be one solution.

 ”Shouldn’t dads at least have the right to some paternity leave paid at 90% of their salary?”, she said.

Unions have not not welcomed the terms of the debate.

Speaking in The Guardian newspaper, TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “The idea that extending family-friendly rights would somehow hurt women’s job prospects is a myth commonly peddled by employers who don’t want to employ women of child-bearing age or give male staff time off to spend with their children.”

Businessman Sir Alan Sugar has recently said that many employers discarded CVs of women of child-bearing age.