Sexist policies - lack of childcare currently meaning mothers can't return to work

[quote Lostatsea1988]@whatnow41 apologies but I need to ask. Why did you take mat leave if you were the higher earner? Why did you have a second child knowing the impact it would have on your career? Having had such a poor experience with your first child, why didn't your husband take leave for the second baby? I can understand a bit of foolish rose-tinted optimism with a first baby but you seem to have made family planning choices with your husband which you knew would hold you back. I would be interested to understand this better.[/quote]
I had planned to take 6 months off, and a new role was waiting for me on my return. My pregnancy had been kind of rough and I had planned to work until 38 wks. I couldn't carry on and stopped at 37 wks, and gave birth on my first day of mat leave. Without outing myself, I became disabled due to what happened next. I needed the full 12 months off in order to adjust to being a disabled person as well as a new mum.

Having had infertility treatment and IVF, there was never a choice to be made about a 2nd child, and certainly not one made around finances and my career. When I became pregnant naturally, we truly felt as though everything would work out fine in the end. Both physically and financially. As women we don't just put our careers on hold, we put our bodies on the line to have children too.

I came through the second pregnancy without further injury but my existing condition had been made worse and I'd been unable to take medication while pregnant. I again needed the full 12 months in order to rebuild myself physically and get back on my feet (literally). In my situation, disability discrimination has definitely paid a part in the impact on my career, especially as I'm visibly disabled (using crutches or a wheelchair when necessary).

Shared parental leave wasn't an option when we had our kids, but I still don't see many men taking it in our workplace. What I do see is the raised eyebrows and surprised discussions about the few men who have, it's disappointing.

Good point Molten, I think you might be right (especially re unemployment figures) sadly this theory may fall down when they lose significant numbers of experienced workers in certain female-dominated sectors

But it’s true that a woman who works outside the home usually ends up with the burden of the mental load and physical/emotional labour too. That’s gender stereotypes in action and it starts from babyhood, with boys and girls socialised very differently and failures in organisational skills/cleaning etc excused with „boys will be boys“ etc etc. It will take generations to fix this and current mothers of boy children would have to act against their own interests by training their offspring to forego the benefit of what is going to be a lot of unpaid labour from their female partners. It’s entirely rational behaviour on their part to perpetuate the current system.

When something is such a blatant oversight, you have to start wondering if it's actually intentional.

Let's be honest, there was a reason that women were forced out of employment into becoming SAHMs in the 1950s, because it solved two problems at once.

If the government is not prioritising childcare it's because they don't see it as a critical enabler to get the economy going. Tories are cold hearted pragmatists, if you give them a solution in which economic units (families) take a personal hit AND one person steps out of the workforce whilst being excluded from unemployment figures AND being ineligible for both childcare benefit and unemployment benefits, then the fact that the majority impacted are women is going to be a footnote. Hell, with some Tories it'd be seen as a benefit.

It's why they've refused to give guidelines to employers. At the moment, they're asking firms to be "considerate" so that individual employers have to decide whether to take the hit, and if not they get blamed by their employees. If they proposed anything specific they'd have to support companies to provide it in some way which means yet more money.

Some of us don't have a husband and the majority of single parent households are headed by women. Any policy that disadvantages single parents is indirectly a sexist policy.

My children are secondary school age and I'm well aware that if this had happened even 2 or 3 years ago I'd have been completely fucked over for lack of childcare. As it is my children have been doing very little school work as I am not at home to supervise and enforce. My 10 year old has been in the care of his 16 yr old sister.

@fascinated

Agree - sort at structural and not the individual level. You’ll also make it it better for males too.

Also need to sort the ‘dangerous’ jobs males do as well, as mentioned, so there’s proper sick pay and more employment rights and flexible working (not impacted at all in say the construction industry, which has high rates of Industrial accidents and also mental health/suicidality).

I've also been cross-examined on it on MN before when I said I was a big fan of shared parental leave and the poster was delighted when I admitted that I'd given up breastfeeding to go back to work because then she could tell me sanctimoniously how she could never have done something so selfish.

Given the extent to which this does happen maybe it’s time we started asking , or admitting, if there is some kind of innate maternal urge that affects only (most) natal females?

I do think that actually, women are just as, if not more, hostile to a more equal division of labour than men, on average. We did shared parental leave and quite a few men I knew told me they had wanted to do it but their partners 'wouldn't let them'. I sort of assumed this was self-serving bollocks, but it turned out that a lot of women were really against the idea, to the point that they seemed angry that we were doing it and did indeed say that they'd never give up 'their leave' in that way. What I found interesting, both in real life and MN, is that there was generally lots of talk about how hard mat leave is, how much easier it is for the man because he just goes and sits at work and drinks coffee, etc - but as soon as you mention shared parental leave a lot of women start talking about how 'they earned' their mat leave through pregnancy/birth etc and they tend to make it very clear that they would resent it enormously if they were at work and their partner was at home. I'm sure in lots of cases that's because they suspect the partner would still expect them to do the bulk of the domestic stuff too, but I found it really striking - and, as I say, quite shocking how many women seemed cross at me for doing it, as if us splitting the leave was taking something away from them.

....any favours by denying it? Is what I meant. Was interrupted by my children.

[quote Lostatsea1988]@whatnow41 apologies but I need to ask. Why did you take mat leave if you were the higher earner? Why did you have a second child knowing the impact it would have on your career? Having had such a poor experience with your first child, why didn't your husband take leave for the second baby? I can understand a bit of foolish rose-tinted optimism with a first baby but you seem to have made family planning choices with your husband which you knew would hold you back. I would be interested to understand this better.[/quote]
Given the extent to which this does happen maybe it’s time we started asking , or admitting, if there is some kind of innate maternal urge that affects only (most) natal females? I’m all for doing away with gender, in terms of stereotypes, but if biology affects us in this way I am not sure we do ourselves or those women who desperately long for children any favours ?

@whatnow41 apologies but I need to ask. Why did you take mat leave if you were the higher earner? Why did you have a second child knowing the impact it would have on your career? Having had such a poor experience with your first child, why didn't your husband take leave for the second baby? I can understand a bit of foolish rose-tinted optimism with a first baby but you seem to have made family planning choices with your husband which you knew would hold you back. I would be interested to understand this better.

Society also requires men to do the most dangerous jobs that cause their higher rate of injury too...

Does it? Society drove women out of mines, society prevented women from joining the army and police force, and restricted their roles in them. Society also produced H&S legislation, risk assessments and safety equipment (largely designed for men as CCP illustrates) which has made jobs much, much safer. Society requires someone to do jobs which are dangerous, and we've made strides to mitigate that risk where we can. Deaths at work have fallen by 75% over the last 40 years - currently at 0.5/100,000 - roughly similar to members of the public killed due to work-related activities. (things like falling from a height, or having things fall on them)

Maternal death rates are currently at 7/100k (fallen by about 25% over the last 40 years).

Construction and agriculture are required, they have been made more safe, but every person who does any job has been grown by a woman - it's a fundamental need that women have children, in a way that raising a herd of cows isn't.

It is difficult, but if the childcare was there... we could fully work. I have made up some of the hours working every weekend and getting my DH to use annual leave (he has keyworkered throughout and used no holiday this year) in the summer holidays so I can work long days to make up some lost hours, I’m currently in deficit in hours to the tune of 2 weeks since June but by the end of summer it will hopefully be down to 1. We still have no wrap around in September but have (hopefully) found a nanny for this. It’s cost us a lot of money and all of our holiday but I should have fulfilled my commitment to my boss by the end of the year, and she has been really good about it. But some employers sadly aren’t and goodness knows how single parents manage .

The government throughout the pandemic have blustered about employers doing the decent thing when it comes to staff having childcare problems rather than anything more firm or protective for employees*
This
Without legal protection against dismissal a lot of employers will sooner or later want a full day's work from employees and have scant regard to childcare issues etc
I think the tipping point will come in September
Highly doubt a Tory government will bring in any protection
And how would it work from employers' perspective,if there is work not getting done are they supposed to hire someone else snd continue to pay the original employee
And get rid of the new person when the original person wants to come back
I need a full staff back in September so we can hit the ground running and try and protect the business for the sake of all staff (some of whom have worked through out )

I’m surprised this thread has become all about women’s choices and the gender pay gap in general terms, when I understood the OP was posting about the effect of coronavirus on the withdrawal and unavailability of existing childcare on which people (predominantly women) have been relying on for years. It is a separate and specific issue of our times. We can debate the hows and whys that women are usually the main carers and therefore more harshly affected by it, but we’re not going to completely restructure the jobs market in a day, and this issue is biting now.

The government throughout the pandemic have blustered about employers doing the decent thing when it comes to staff having childcare problems rather than anything more firm or protective for employees. When all the redundancies bite, it will be parents who will be first for the chop, when performance assessments and appraisals come around, it will be the parent who had to take a conference call during a toddler tantrum who will be marked down as unprofessional. And all the “go to work, don’t go to work, work from home, don’t work from home, go to work” stuff from Boris seems to forget that it’s not as simple for so many as just donning a mask and catching a bus in to the office. As if office workers and their Starbucks lunches can singlehandedly save the economy when very many of us are still stuck in a semi-lockdown.

I don’t know what the answers are, but I personally just feel forgotten and although I don’t necessarily think it would be fair to ringfence jobs for parents when others have continued working through without furlough or holiday, higher priority to safely reopening childcare settings and a bit more legal protection against discrimination on the grounds of parenthood/childcare would help.

We also need to take into account that predominantly female occupations - however important and socially necessary get paid less than male dominated occupations - nurses, social workers, teachers etc. So again structural inequality means women are more likely to be in lower paid occupations irrespective of who’ve they’ve ‘chosen’ to marry.

Society has stepped up an acknowledged that. That’s why you have long paid maternity leave well above disability benefits that men get from injury. What you are demanding now is that people who are still at work getting more experience than you be penalised so that you can get a pay bonus for doing nothing and a pay raise for doing no work.

So why should there be special treatment for women with birth injuries?

Because society requires women to have children to function?

The sooner society steps up and acknowledges that, rather than just sweep it under the carpet with the rest of women's hidden labour, the betterr.

Women and men both suffer injury and accidents fairly equally. Only women get pregnant because men can not. This is exactly why women should not be discriminated against for pregnancy or maternity reasons. So therefore out of those suffering economic consequences through time out of work, time and time again it will be women who suffer. Do you think that is reasonable?

Er, no. Fact is men suffer injury from work and car accidents far more frequently than women. It’s only sports injuries that are about equal. Men also suffer illness/chronic disabling conditions more frequently than women. So, no, it’s not equal. Only men can get prostate cancer or groin injuries, but women cannot. So why should there be special treatment for women with birth injuries? Both sexes have health issues that affect only them. And the economic penalty affects the sexes equally. I agree it’s not fair and something should be done, I’ve said that in my posts. But the key is that this type of time off work for injury doesn’t affect just women.

If you’re off work for illness or injury childcare won’t get you back into work will it? This is a completely separate issue from the thread which is about lack of childcare and whether that directly discriminates against women (it doesn’t) . It’s relating to women who are able to work, but choose to have long maternity leaves or choose their partner to work instead of themselves or share childcare and both work. And falling behind from choice is perfectly fair and should not be fixed.

If you look at the disproportionate number of older women in poverty, you can see how undesirable it is to actively encourage women not to be financially self-sufficient.

At the moment, some of that is that, as usual, things that were set up to give advantage to men, have now been changed to be 'fair' because those reasons are forgotten, and, once again, it's women who suffer.

The trouble, as Japan is seeing, and the UK is on the cusp of, is that society needs women to have children. The tax and NI we pay isn't for our pensions, it's for the people who are receiving pension now (a simplification, but broadly speaking true - the money is used now, not held in savings). Our pensions will be paid for by our children.

And much as women as a class haven't caught up with the idea that they need to be better at risk assessment and mitigation by remaining employable and not trusting the fairytale, Society hasn't caught up with the idea that if you don't incentivise women to have children (or bully them as in the past), they will eventually significantly reduce the number of children they have.

Eventually women will notice that having children screws them over, but not the men, and men will start actually having to work to persuade women to have them - that or society will turn right back around and start forcing us. The pessimist in me is expecting everything to start swaying a little too much towards the stick rather than the carrot.

Many people are forced into putting their kids in nurseries for long hours when they don't want to. That, I think, is pretty appalling. Especially in cases where they could care for kids themselves if the state were to give them the exact same amount of money as they provide to nurseries so they can work in a min wage job. Of course whilst doing so would give better outcomes for children and parents, it wouldn't make profit for the 1% (nurseries are profit making), which is probably why it isn't a thing.

I have some sympathy with your broader point but:
*The state only provides any money to nurseries for childcare at age 2 (age 3 for most children) so when women come to the end of mat leave no one is paying a nursery to care for their child but them (I actually think this is a problem, see my point 3 below)
*Nurseries are often (not always) profit making businesses but most struggle to break even - even more at the moment than usual. They're not exactly the biggest or most powerful of business lobbies - if they were the early years funding offered by the government wouldn't be so inadequate.
*Paying women to stay home rather than return to work may seem like a reasonable approach when children are tiny (though if it is paid for by removing early years funding then you're essentially giving one choice by taking away another for a lot of women), but leaving employment for prolonged periods leaves women economically vulnerable and disadvantages in the longer term. If you look at the disproportionate number of older women in poverty, you can see how undesirable it is to actively encourage women not to be financially self-sufficient. I actually also happen to think that encouraging a gendered division of labour where women do all childcare and domestic work and men do all paid work is bad for women, men and families but I accept that this is opinion, not objective fact.

Left the quotes off the 3rd paragraph. Those are @PlanDeRaccordement words.

"No I’m not comparing the two- accidents and childbirth. I’m saying that the economic consequences of the two are the same and for both, the victim is not a fault or making a choice to be injured."

Women and men both suffer injury and accidents fairly equally. Only women get pregnant because men can not. This is exactly why women should not be discriminated against for pregnancy or maternity reasons.
So therefore out of those suffering economic consequences through time out of work, time and time again it will be women who suffer. Do you think that is reasonable?

As for breastfeeding, if you let your employer trample on your legal right to express at work that’s on you. I fought hard for my right to express and won.

My legal right to express at work is all well and good, but given that my legal responsibility to women is to keep them from harm during pregnancy, labour and postnatally - the two clash.

There are not the midwives sitting twiddling their thumbs who will come and provide care for women whilst I go and express (which on a 12 hour shift I would need at least 3 or 4 periods to express). We are still fighting for breaks to be covered! I can fight as hard as I like, but it won't do anything at all. The employer says your colleagues should cover. That is their obligation met. How do you propose to get those colleagues to cover when already stretched beyond breaking point on a regular basis? Would I put women and children at risk? Not likely.

I’d be angry too treestumps. Partners do their fair share. Not dump all the child responsibilities on you because you’re the mum.