AIBU to be concerned maternity package has been cut to pay for shared parental leave?

[SharedParentalLeaveImpacts]

My company has a fairly generous enhanced maternity package. Not as good as the 6 months full pay some civil service friends get, but still above the statutory.

Next year, men will be entitled to the same package if taking Shared Parental Leave. The terms of the policy will change so that beneficiaries would effectively receive about 25% less overall. There is also a cap on the number of times you can take it. I’m unwilling to give any more details as it could be outing (I have name changed).

This won’t affect me personally but I could see this coming when the government legislated for SPL. I know companies don’t have to match maternity packages for men. But our company did a review of competitors and this is what others offer. So they have followed suit.

I can understand why they are doing this as the policy needs to be funded (we employ a lot of men and it could cost a lot).

AIBU to be concerned that women are going to lose out? Not me personally but other younger women? Or should they be grateful to receive above the minimum? Did the government not consider these potential impacts when designing their policy? Is this happening in other companies?

Please note I’m not willing to say what the industry is or give any more details about the specific policy. So will ignore these questions.

There was an excellent post on here a few weeks ago, which argued very eloquently that women are much more likely to prioritise manoeuvring themselves into a more flexible company / role, sometimes at the expense of pay progression, in preparation for having children. Men are much less likely on the whole to do this. Then, funnily enough, when it comes to having children it’s often the mother who is better placed to step back and pick up more of the childcare because the father’s job pays more / is less flexible. I can’t remember the exact stat, but I understand there isn’t much of a gender pay gap until men and women hit their thirties. I don’t have stats to prove it, but I suspect there is a causal link between SPL take up and greater pay and seniority equality as children get older. So I reckon maternity leave does play a part in later outcomes.

Where I work, women on mat leave, by default, get the median yearly performance-related pay increase - so if they are normally high performers, they lose out. In fairness, it cuts both ways in the sense that if they're normally terrible, they get a rise they wouldn't have got if they'd been at work. However, for someone who is working hard and performing well, this contributes to the gender pay gap, because a consistently high-performing man over a 5 year period would have a significantly higher salary than a woman whose 5 years had incorporated two periods of mat leave - and even when the woman is back, her percentage increase for high performance will be based on a lower salary.

As for the woman wanting to spend time with the children - are you saying men don't want to spend time with their children

Not at all but when DD was a baby she needed me to calm her down as she was teething or needed to comfort feed. Mothers and babies do have a special bond, maternity leave is important for this. Now DD is older - 18 months -it’s a lot more equal.

I’m clearly old-fashioned, but I honestly believed most families see mum as providing the better care for baby in the early days, especially when you factor in breastfeeding and the hormones that go with it.

Sorry, but this makes me really cross. DH has been the most amazing SAHP for DD since she was 6 months old. (At the time it was additional parental leave, so I couldn’t return until she was 20 weeks old.) We both wanted her to have a SAHP, so the ability to share leave gave us the opportunity to test out who it suited best - and it wasn’t me!

So I went back to work, I got the promotions and I financially support our family. And I get to do a job that I adore, all aided by that bit of leave that helped us work out what was best for our family.

Now, I’m not saying that I agree with your firm cutting their enhanced maternity leave provision, but I can’t get on board with SPL being a bad thing.

Summer Does that stage of needing comfort-feeding/teething last for the whole year of mat leave that many women take or would the child be ready to bond with dad after the first few months? (Genuine question, not disputing what you say - I don't have children) I'm thinking that of it could be split so neither parent is out of the workplace for more than six months, that would make a big difference to pay, promotion opportunities etc.

^ Not sure where that 'of' came from, hope you can understand what I mean!

Very good points about widening pay gap while on maternity leave and women gravitating towards flexible roles in preparation for maternity. This gap could be overcome by switching employers, that’s an effective way to get pay rises and promotions. That’s what I’ve done twice since having kids. But perhaps men switch jobs more than women... because like you say, they have a role that suits their family life, so are reluctant to change jobs. This could be another contributing factor to the gender pay gap. I certainly see examples IRL

@Amummyatlast Don’t be angry! That’s just my world view from the circles I mix in. No judgment here. I’m also the high earner (breadwinner but hate that term) DH works but does all the wrap around childcare. I travel and can be up late on my laptop finishing work after putting kids to bed. I enjoy it. I’m good at my job and my DH loves that I’m successful and actively supports my career progression. We just have a view that I’m best placed to provide the care in their early days and we (obviously wrongly according to this thread!) that a majority of families felt that way. Only being honest! When our DC1 hit age 1 everything became equal- then it shifted towards DH providing more childcare.

I'm thinking that of it could be split so neither parent is out of the workplace for more than six months

Well I can’t speak for everyone else but I would be absolutely heartbroken and devastated to leave my baby at only a few months. I think taking 6 months leave would be absolutely horrific. There’s this odd misconception that breastfeeding is only for the first 6 months. It is a huge source of comfort and your child’s main source of nutrition unless you want to move straight to formula or spend your whole day at work expressing milk which is tedious, difficult if you’re like me and have a lower supply and will most likely end breastfeeding. Moving on to formula can be difficult if the baby isn’t used to a bottle and can cause digestive issues- Especially for my DD who cried all day everyday for basically a year due to allergies/ teething. She also had terrible separation anxiety and needed to me with me. But by a year old she was so advanced and generally confident. I really do think she needed that time with me and it helped her development a lot. She’s a huge Daddy’s girl now but that first year she needed a primary caregiver which was me.

Each to their own and shared leave can be great for many families but let’s not forget how important maternity leave is. Everyone I know has wanted to take the year.

And just to clarify I don’t think SPL is a bad thing at all.

Only that funding 2 lots of parental leave costs more money. So a woman taking 1 year maternity leave gets eg 12 weeks full pay. While a colleague shares her leave with a partner also working at the company get 24 weeks full pay. The ‘double package’ is funded at the expense of the woman taking the full pay, who previously would have got 18 weeks full pay.

Now can you see why it’s not really fair? And why some women will feel obliged to share their leave even while it’s not really in their best interest or the child. There is a strong financial incentive to share the leave.

Sorry - funded at the expense of the woman taking a full year of maternity leave. Who could actually be a single mother and have no option to share her leave. Therefore is actually being discriminated against!

I'm not surprised. I'm not in favour of parental leave when it's the woman's body which needs to recover.

I think taking 6 months leave would be absolutely horrific

Quite. I found staying at home for 6 months absolutely horrific. It messed with my head. It was the worst part of my relationship with DS. I hated it. I hated the auto result expectation that I’d been designed by the intelligent designer of nature to be his primary soother and caregiver. I wasn’t alone. Countless women feel the same way. Countless women I know have been desperate to return to work for their own sakes, their own sanities, and for being the best parent they can be, and found themselves unable to do so because their far more “maternal” partners are not able to take the SPL hit of 140 quid a week. I became a better mum, a nicer person to be around and a healthy human being within a week of my return to work last time. We saved and saved for my spouse to take 2.5 months SPL. Best thing ever. The idea that mother-tied-to-child is some form of innate natural identity that my brain and soul had to believe in and perform, and that there was no flexibility and no route for any alternative routes to parenthood early years and mothering was highly damaging for me, for us and for many women I know.

But this conversation will not settle either way. It’s v clearly divided into contrasting notions of motherhood, womanhood, the role of policies, gender and early years, and no amount of “expressing both sides” will settle it.

I'm confused about this :Only that funding 2 lots of parental leave costs more money. So a woman taking 1 year maternity leave gets eg 12 weeks full pay. While a colleague shares her leave with a partner also working at the company get 24 weeks full pay. The ‘double package’ is funded at the expense of the woman taking the full pay, who previously would have got 18 weeks full pay.

With spl, you don't get more leave. The maternity leave can be split between two parents or taken by the mother in full, so why would a couple get twice the amount of leave?? That's not spl

Sorry, I mean full pay, not 'leave'. If you give weeks 1 to 9 to your partner, and you take weeks 10 to 39 say, you won't get weeks 10 to 19 paid at full pay. You'll get weeks 10 to 12 paid at full pay (if you have 12 weeks full pay). You can take these weeks at the same time, but they won't reset full pay because its being taken by a diff parent.

@Thoughtlessinengland a very eloquent and thought provoking response there. Thank you for sharing your experience- I found it enlightening as it’s so different to my experience. I can totally see why you feel so strongly about SPL.

I’m on MN trying to stay awake at this ungodly hour cradling a vomity, feverish baby while DH snores next to me (the irony is not lost on me!)

It’s so interesting how split opinions are over this. I agree that there is no settling this issue as experiences and needs vary so much between families. One family’s experience will differ from another’s - as the feasibility of breastfeeding and working demonstrates. Those who’ve continued bf on a return to work insist it can be done. Whereas mums like me who can’t pump or for whom working and pumping is not feasible - are proof that an early return to work is not compatible with breastfeeding.

I think this just shows what a minefield the SPL policy is and the issues it raises cut across ideas and experiences of motherhood, fatherhood, family finances, the role of the government and employers in social engineering, and early years care.

@TowelStripes Yes that is what is happening. Employers don’t talk to other employers about which bit of leave is being taken. They just apply their policies independently. A friend went back to work at month 6. Then her DH took over full time care and received full pay for 6 months from month 6 to 12. So they effectively got the equivalent of two lots of maternity packages. Someone up thread said the same thing. This is what my company are introducing next year. Hence the cut in benefits to pay for the extra packages.

@TowelStripes what you describe is true of SMP, but not necessarily true for enhanced parental leave packages as experience IRL shows. It’s definitely happening and the extra cost needs to be funded from somewhere

Me and my husband don't work for the same company and our orgs sent an email to each other confirming the leave we were taking.

I actually don't believe the story about a woman taking full pay for 6 months then her husband lying to their org and getting another 6.months. It's possible yes, but very difficult given the paperwork you need to give both organisations. The woman would have need to tell her DH employer what leave she was taking and what entitlement she was having. Unless she told them she was taking 3 months SMP and 3 months unpaid, the 6 months full wouldn't be available for him to take. You have to assert the pay/leave you are taking and when to both companies.

I don't believe it is definitely happening and there are other ways to safeguard against fraudelent claims if organisations wished. It seems like your company are changing their policy for other reasons than they are a concerned about fraudelent claims.

I have given my husband 8 weeks of my SMP entitlement. I could have given him my full or half + SMP weeks but his org (police) only pay SMP to partners so it wasnt the best use of the pay. That is massively unfair to him and absolutely the reason that men arent taking SPL. Any attempt to even that up is going to be beneficial for women in the workplace.

Companies don't hire women of childbearing age - I have two relatives that run businesses that say they don't - but if men were equally likely to notify of long periods of parental leave and share child rearing in those early months/years then there's no benefit to those orgs hiring a man in their 20s/30s to a woman.

When we did it (20+ years ago, not in the UK) it was organised between employer(s) and the health insurance (like the NHS but slightly differently arranged). The state pension people were also involved. It wouldn't be possible to cheat the system of who took what and for how long.

Not at all but when DD was a baby she needed me to calm her down as she was teething or needed to comfort feed.
I get that not all babies are the same and I get that especially tiny babies this can be a thing. But in general there is no reason that an involved father can take over comforting a baby. In my own circles (friends, family, acquaintences and people I work with) it has almost always been women who always wanted children and spent a lot of their time counting down to when they could "stop work". A fair few of the fathers bought into this too (and more than one, colleague, stayed in the office well beyond what was necessary to avoid the parenting at the end of the day. Several were proud of how they had manipulated the mothers of their children to believe that they were the only ones who could do this)

I was off for 3 years, (2 DC 18 months apart, 3 years allowance for each - they overlapped by 18 months) my DH took the final 18 months for DC2. It saved my sanity. Literally.

Looking back now I always struggle to find any extended period of time that I have spent with the DC that didn't end up with me climbing the walls. That is my personal story, but I'm not the only one by a long chalk.

Until employers, government and everyone else accept that fathers are parents as much as mothers and that they are entitled to, and should, spend an extended period with parent as their main occupation where possible (yes, with caveats, I hated being the SAHP I wouldn't want to force that on anyone) we are not going to achieve anything like equality (in the workplace, for NRP who want to share more of the parenting, etc etc etc)

Not wanting to labour the point about breastfeeding, but in my case I continued to breastfeed when I went back to work and never pumped - I didn’t get on with expressing. My baby had a couple of sippy cups of formula in the day to keep her going then I breastfed her around work.

DH and I were happy to feed her formula and breast milk at that point - we looked into the available research and the incremental benefits of exclusively breastfeeding beyond six months, rather than using a mix of breast and formula, didn’t appear very significant. Fortunately my baby took to formula well following gentle perseverance by DH.

’Well I can’t speak for everyone else but I would be absolutely heartbroken and devastated to leave my baby at only a few months. I think taking 6 months leave would be absolutely horrific.’

I can well believe that you might think this because you haven’t done it, so you’re only imagining what it might be like.

Believe me, if it were the norm to return to work after 6 months you’d just be getting on and doing it! I’ve had people say to me that they can’t imagine how I left 12 week old dc1 with a childminder and my response is ‘well, you’d have done the same if you’d given birth nearly 30 years ago and didn’t want to give up your career.’ All my friends who returned to work did the same, and we bf too.

Now I’m not suggesting a return to 3 month ML (it was physically tough though of course perfectly doable) but equally there is no need for the mum to be the default carer for a year or more. Dh was perfectly capable of comforting our dc from a very tiny age (probably because I didn’t assume I was the only one who could) and he also fed them breastmilk from a young age (mine tended to prefer a cup from a few months rather than bottle.) Yes, expressing takes effort but if you’re committed to bf then you just do it, or if course you could mix feed. Besides from 6 months a child will be eating other food too. And although an early return to work is physically hard work, I honestly believe in some respects it’s easier because there is none of the separation anxiety that tend to peak at about a year. My much younger sister had a baby much later than me and when she returned to work when baby was a year old I was genuinely surprised at how tricky it was for her to settle her child in childcare; there was crying and calling for her each time. Of course, the tears didn’t last forever but it was distressing for my sister and I remember feeling relieved that I’d never experienced that.

A lot of how people feel is to do with culture, habit whatever is ‘normal.’ If for example, 18 month long maternity leaves ever become the norm, people will look back on those poor mums having babies in 2019 who were rushed back to work when their child was only a year old!

I firmly believe that it’s up to each couple to decide how they want to run things and of course there will always be some couples who don’t want to share parental leave, just as there are some couples where the woman will become a SAHP because that’s what she and the dad want. Individual choice is fundamental.

But I also believe (and this does not conflict with individual choice) that society should promote equality between women and men, and what this company are doing is a good example of exactly that. There is so much disparity at present. Women are far more likely to earn less, not chase promotions, be the default care giver, or even give up work completely. And don’t even get me started on pensions and the fact that women as a group are much less financially secure in their older age because so many of them stop work or only have part time pensions! The fundamental answer is about normalising both earning and caring for both sexes as far as possible. And actually, putting the child at the centre, I’ve no doubt that ultimately they benefit too from this being normalised

Sharon Hays theorises this perfectly in her concept “intensive mothering” which has since since then offered a huge resource to numerous sociologists who have studied infant feeding, food work, and early years parenting to locate precisely how this logic of “but the child’s place is surely with the mother” has been used within patriarchy, policy, home and work. It has made enormous sense for men, for generations, to be able to sustain the claim that “babies can only be soothed by their mothers”, and dads would only “get it wrong”. The logic of just mum will do, nobody but mum will do, dad can only be mums supporter in the first year but not actually do full frontal care has worked marvellously for numerous wings of society. Of course physical recovery is a huge thing - but that should be designed into illness sickness and recovery policies. Actual care of the child being so inherently tied to the mother is not solely and wholly biological - it is hugely gendered, hugely sociological, and it functions nicely within patriarchal societies. SPL goes a tiny weeny way towards addressing that. But then again Daily Heil keeps repeatedly citing “oh but only a fraction of men took it up” without investigating the shit pay behind it and here we are.

And agreeing whole heartedly with acciocats. Very frequently this is reduced to “but I myself didn’t want to etc” without considering that policy frameworks are not really and should not really be designed on these grounds. Policy frameworks need to respond to large scale evidence bases, on numerous counts, taking into account numerous best practice frameworks and make numerous options available. The current option of making it the mandatory financial incentive for “child’s place is with the mother” tying beautifully into “but hardly any dads take the SPL (at shit pay)” reinforces gender pay gaps, gender divides and roles at a population level. There’s SO much evidence and data and discussion around this and for such good reason, way beyond individual feelings on things both ways, as it quite rightly should be for the design of effective and progressive policy.

Meh @Acciocats I absolutely agree to disagree then. I’d rather have been a SAHM than abandon my baby at 3 months. Or even 6 months. Just so I could force myself back to work to prove a point that I am equal to my husband. I didn’t see him as equal to me in the beginning because he doesn’t have boobs. It’s a fact and it felt natural for me to be with her. Like I said, many people can’t express or don’t want to. Plus DD did have terrible separation anxiety at that age and would have cried inconsolably because she couldn’t fall asleep without me.

Lucky for me my mum (i was born in the early 60s) cottoned on relatively early onto the pension scam that women of her generation fell into ("you can have a child, work part-time and your pension will be fine") - only to find that, actually "no, you will only get a shitty pension". She had enough years to work full-time and pay extra pension contributions so that she qualified for a full state pension in her own right. Something that women a generation later didn't get when the goalposts moved.

Looking at the WASPI women now - it seems absolutely bonkers to me that anyone is thinking of doing anything other than getting back to FT work asap, regardless of the sacrifice, because poverty in old age has got to be one of the absolute worst things to happen to a woman. (I mean it is bad for men but they mostly seem to have it covered. Funny, that)