Maternity leave - small companies, poor treatment for women?

[PizzaBreath]

Hi all,

I’ve posted on here about my current company before under various guises: pay rise for men about to be fathers (never for women about to be mothers), 100% 2 week pay for men on paternity leave, but straight onto statutory (90%) for women, women on maternity leave not receiving pay rises the rest of the business are getting, i could go on.

However, I largely think this is the decision I made when working for a small, male dominated company. 50% of the SMT are women but no one one on the exec are female.

I’m just intrigued I guess, is this the norm for small companies? Let’s say

It shouldn’t be - everything you have listed is unlawful under the Equality Act 2010 (which offers protection against discrimination on grounds of sex).

The flip side is that maternity leave is particularly hard for small companies. Getting a temp in costs more money than the employee normally costs in my experience. But it's wrong, illegal to give pay rises only to men etc

Well I suppose that’s part of it, we don’t cover the roles (we say we absolutely will but don’t) we expect current team members to pick up the slack. I guess the more I post the more I realise what a fool I’ve been for working the extra hours etc in the past. And I can’t raise it now, as it’s so obvious it’s me thinking of going on mat leave.

Just giving this a little bump to see if others have had a similar experience at small companies.

Yes, I work for a really small company and we had similar. The ‘bad’ maternity leave policy wasn’t intentional, it just wasn’t something they’d ever focused on (rightly or wrongly). They changed it to a really good one when I raised it.

You will always find an element of subconscious bias against women and mothers. You can only ask and if they are good about it then that is a great sign, if they aren’t then move on. You can’t single handedly change them.