Domestic zombies, motherhood penalty & childcare

Paid paternity leave is not an incentive for men to take it. It’s a necessity in order for them to be ABLE to take it! My husband COULD NOT take even one week of paternity leave because he would only get paid £156 per week, so we would have been £1k per week out of pocket, and we couldn’t afford that. It massively affects women when men CAN’T take paternity leave even when they want and need to.

I nearly died giving birth, I had major surgery and I couldn’t even get out of bed without help. I certainly couldn’t look after my baby on my own. But I was discharged from hospital less than 48 hours after my surgery and my husband couldn’t even take a single week of paternity leave to look after me because of the huge financial penalty that he would incur. So yes, I think paid paternity leave is very important!

Commitment to our children has different evolutionary 'best fit' costs and benefits for women vs men.

During most of our evolutionary history, we have been animals who need to find enough food to survive each day, and avoid being eaten or dying from illness/injury ourselves. We also obviously need to reproduce, and the offspring survive into adulthood, in order for those successful genes to pass on.

By the time a baby is born, the mother has invested a huge amount in it. She's provided calories for 9 months, been less mobile during late pregnancy (harder to get food and vulnerable to predators), and risked injury or death during childbirth. She will provide all calories for another year minimum whilst breastfeeding, and likely a good percentage for several years more.She has the capacity to have a maximum of 15 - 20 pregnancies during her lifetime, but some of these babies in pre-medical days would have been likely to die in infancy. Each child is a huge investment, one of only a few chances at reproduction, and worth enormous effort to protect.

Men on the other hand pay none of the biological cost of reproduction. They contribute no calories, and have no increased risk. They do need sexual access to a female to reproduce, so the child of a frequent sexual partner is worth some effort to protect (since the child is likely theirs, and they will get continued sexual access to father more children) . But they have many lower cost strategies as well, and have the capacity to father many, many children. (Of course, if they don't get sexual access to a female they can't reproduce - that's the balancing down-side to being male). Each child is a fairly small investment, and may be one amongst many.

And men can rely on the fact that children are so much more important to the mother that she will keep giving more, so they don't need to.

And that evolutionary difference does hugely influence our behaviour. This is a fundamental inequality between men and women. If we ignore it, and pretend that men and women are exactly the same, then we model the world incorrectly, and things won't turn out the way we want them to.

As I get older, I recognise more and more how and why marriage is important. It basically brings social pressure to bear to force men to provide for their children and provide some protection to women taking on the cost of motherhood. Although these days, paternity tests could be used instead...

If the state put as much effort into getting money from men to support their children as it puts into tax fraud - and that money was given to whoever was caring for the kids - whether married or not, so it was clear that £x of the father's salary belonged to the SAHM - I think that would go a long way to reduce financial inequality between men and women.

I do think its a vicious circle. As long as caring is seen as 'women's work' it will continue to be un appreciated, underpaid etc.
Care work (paid and unpaid) is incredibly important to society.

@JessSi I completely get where you are coming from, but it is important to get men to take at least 6 weeks paternity leave, preferably more.

the reason is that if they do that, they are more likely to stay home when the baby/child is sick and cannot go to nursery. Taking time off to look after sick children falls disproportionately on women. I think is is because both parents few more comfortable if the mum does it. That has to change.

Paternity Leave needs to be paid (and only available to dad / 2nd parent) to incentivise its take up.
When men do a substantial amount of sole care (months, not Saturday afternoons when mum has prepared everything) they become much more aware of the work involved and it leads to a more equal household.
Obviously only women can carry babies and give birth and breastfeed, but from 6/9/12 months a father can look after a child just as well.

Hmm I’m not sure. I agree OP @JessSi that the mother-baby relationship is biologically determined and essential in the early months - at least 6 months I think, probably 12 months in terms of good outcomes for all. But I’m not sure that has to extend for all the pre school years and hence (as things currently stand) have an often disproportionately detrimental effect on women’s earned income and therefore also pension etc, for the rest of her life.
i think fathers are equally capable from about the age of 1 of not before, and if it were more “normal” (socially expected, and financially rewarded) for fathers to take a chunk of leave, and for both parents thereafter to share the load (actual and mental), then women wouldn’t have such a big hole to climb out of.
(As we’ve all pretty much agreed, no one size fits all here and everyone should make their own choice on the level of childcare to use, if any).
I do think if employers paid for more paternity leave, and didn’t restrict it to 2 weeks right after birth (when it’s pretty much useless apart from cooking and fetching and carrying for Mum) then it would start to change societal expectations. Paying for it would start to signal that it’s a worthwhile thing, even something to look forward to, and men experiencing the same return to work on ramp after a break might make the same transition less stigmatising for women, as everyone starts to share the burden of raising the next generation.
utopia?

While flexible jobs are shitty and low paid it’s not possible for both partners to take them. One partner needs to have a “proper” well paid job to pay the bills, leaving the other partner with the shitty job and all of the childcare. But if flexible jobs were good and well paid then both partners could take them and share childcare equally.

Yes I agree with you, low-earning women are at the sharp end. I think low-earning people are at the sharp end when it comes to pretty much everything as our society is very unequal.

Please don’t take this the wrong way as I’m not trying to start an argument, only continue this very interesting debate. But you’ve just done exactly what I tried to point out in previous posts by singling out high-earning women for outsourcing childcare. In the majority of cases, there are two working parents there who are both using childcare to enable them to continue their careers, pensions etc. Childcare is not just the women’s responsibility to sort out but society constantly reinforces that it is. Regardless of class and income, all women (and men) are repeatedly given the message that mothers are the ones who need to change, compromise, juggle everything. And fathers can just carry on as they were before.

I don’t think anybody is arguing that better paternity leave would be the silver bullet which solves everything, it could be one of several measures.

As for low-income women I agree that they’re in a really difficult position. The women I know who are on low incomes are able to claim back the vast majority of their childcare costs (85% I think) - I’m not saying that this makes everything easy for them as it doesn’t, I’m just mentioning it.

So whilst flexible jobs are shitty then women can take them but obviously a man shouldn’t be expected to. But if flexible jobs are good then men can take them too? Is that what you’re saying?

@Schlaar i totally agree on paying men for paternity leave. Many will rightly think if they’re not paid, why should they/ how can they? It should be the same as maternity leave and paid the same.

I've noticed a lot of women in my area who I know through school etc work in work from home type businesses (think hair, beauty, selling stuff), and a lot get sucked into the mlm type business models
Because they are desperate to work, but jobs aren’t flexible to fit around childcare and especially sick days. MLM seems like a flexible way to earn money - of course it’s a load of rubbish, but it just shows how desperate people are for flexible ways to earn.

employers don’t encourage/ force/ pay men enough to take paternity leave
If I took maternity leave it was paid at 90% of salary. If DH took paternity leave it was paid at the statutory rate of £156 per week. Unsurprisingly we couldn’t afford for him to take any paternity leave! We would be over £1k a week out of pocket and we simply couldn’t afford that. A huge step towards equality would be paying maternity and paternity leave equally.

For two people to have flexible jobs and share childcare, flexible jobs have to exist. And they don’t. At least not decent “career” flexible jobs. Flexible jobs tend to be shitty, and couples can’t afford for both of them to be in shitty jobs. So one parent has to take a shitty job for the flexibility and shoulder all the childcare, in order for the other parent to be able to have a decent job which doesn’t permit any flexibility. Again, it comes back to employers not providing decent jobs that permit the employee to do childcare as well.

Thank you

”Use it or lose it” means it can’t be transferred to the other partner.

Under the current shared parental leave system, the father can only take leave if the mother “gives up” some of hers.

If the leave is “use it or lose it” then it is only available to one partner and if they don’t take it then it is just lost. So for example an additional 3 month period of parental leave could be made available to fathers (or the non-birthing parent if it is a same sex couple) and they either take it or they don’t, but they can’t give it to the mother to take instead.

Not entirely relevant, but could someone explain 'use it or lose it'? I know it sounds straightforward but I still can't get my head round how it works.

This is an excellent thread on such a complex and frustrating topic.
I’ve been very lucky in my personal experience but have also seen how systemic the problems are.
DH & I have one child who’s a teenager now. When he was born I was already pretty senior in my organisation with a supportive CEO who didn’t bat an eyelid that I would go back 4 days a week (actually I worked full time after returning at six months for a while, but found it a grind, and had friends who all worked part time and enjoyed their children more - there is a lot to what others have said about spending time with your child and I felt I was missing out on time I would never get back, so I dropped Fridays). Our son was in private nursery the rest of the time which he enjoyed. DH was also FT and we alternated drop offs etc. As he was about to start school, DH was made redundant and decided to freelance from home, and roughly the same time I changed jobs (same company) and my responsibilities shot up, so I went back to FT while DH covered school runs, cooking etc (he was / is brilliant). A few years again after that, I felt burnt out, changed jobs again and went part time 4 days again.
Throughout this I had felt that my employer was progressive and flexible but as I became more involved in HR I came to see this was just a reflection of my experience and not universal; I saw plenty of cases of managers refusing flexible working requests for no good reason. Chances of a good outcome depended largely on the line manager and were patchy. The gender pay gap widened in my last years there and I could see why.
I ran a project during the pandemic which succeeded in working 100% remotely and flexibly: my leadership team was mostly female and we had a number of part timers partly for parenthood and partly for other things (like chronic health conditions). It worked really well, everyone respected each other’s flexibility and availability and the project was successful. But this was not the norm.
Some of the things I have come across that frustrate me and I would like to change have already been raised upthread but here are a few:

1. women who are effectively underpaid relative to men by the time they have children so they end up being the lower earner already before they have kids - there are lots of reasons for this including women not negotiating pay enough, employers not promoting younger women early enough, paying men more based on ambition and not paying women enough for their potential, and (crucially) employers not keeping accurate records on equal pay for equal work and examining the records in promotions and pay reviews across the board (this has been the law since the 70s but it is very easy for employers to say they abide by the law whilst seldom if ever being challenged to prove it on the data).
2. Couples treating their money as separate so it’s the woman’s salary that “pays” for childcare instead of pooling the household finances: I know there are considerations like tax brackets etc but I think that if the default were to look at household income instead of individual income then it would encourage more partners to think childcare expense/ responsibility is theirs as well as the mother’s
3. Gaby Hinsliff wrote a good book about a decade ago on this which suggested BOTH parents do 4 days a week with a different day off: that way, she argued, you only need 60% of childcare but you retain 80% of earnings; both get to spend time with offspring and both maximise chances of staying on the career ladder. Thought that was brilliant - why don’t more people take it? Oh yes…
4. employers don’t encourage/ force/ pay men enough to take paternity leave and go part time. Agree with others that men should be allocated use it or lose it PAID leave and it should be NORMAL to work part time.
5. cost of childcare being the highest in Europe - I worked with lots of Europeans who couldn’t believe it was so high here. It should be state provided and subsidised from the age of one, same as infant and primary school.

I've noticed a lot of women in my area who I know through school etc work in work from home type businesses (think hair, beauty, selling stuff), and a lot get sucked into the mlm type business models.
I myself had 5 years out of work totally, and went back to a very junior position. 6 years later I've managed to climb the ladder to a level higher than I left it. That's with primary age children, with an excellent out of school club, and working ft.
I think we do have to factor in the fact that lots of women do actually want to be with their kids when little. I made the choice knowing the risks to my career and luckily its been OK.
What might help could be a way to access training when you're not in work to keep up your skills, whether specialist or generic office skills etc.

Excellent post, I’ve noticed the same amongst my friends. Somehow it always works out that the woman’s job is more flexible.

I also noticed that when I was pregnant and on maternity leave, I was often asked if I’d return part-time. My DH was never asked this once - despite the fact we did the same job!