When I first became a lawyer ten years ago, the Equal Opportunities Commission was conducting a big research project on pregnancy and maternity discrimination. I remember reading the results – newly-qualified, ambitious, and stunned.
I'd always assumed I'd become a mother, and yet – after all those years of education and training and working hard – I was being told about the devastating impact having a baby still had on so many women's careers. I remember those stats to this day: almost half of all women had been disadvantaged in some way, with 30,000 a year actually losing their jobs, just for having a baby.
It seemed as stupid and retrograde as women not having the vote, or education. It wasn't something my generation should still be contending with, I thought, and besides, it was against the law. I decided to specialise in discrimination, and helped my firm create a free online service for pregnant women and new mums, fought test cases, and I was determined to make a difference.
I was idealistic, and doubtless quite annoying – after all, there are always two sides to every case, and of course it's tricky to manage long periods of absence in the workplace. I soon learned that for most of my clients, getting them a big pay-off was a better outcome than the torturous uncertainty, expense and stress of the litigation process.
Now, I feel a failure. In December, when the TUC released new research into maternity discrimination in the work place, it felt like Groundhog Day. I'd read the exact same stories ten years previously. What was the point of that decade of work, when pregnant women remained so vulnerable in the workplace? I asked myself. The system I work in is failing. If anything, the picture now is bleaker, not better – the introduction of Employment Tribunal fees last year saw a scandalous 80% drop-off in claims. Justice, it seems, is only for those with fat wallets.
It's now clear to me that current discrimination law is not enough. What is needed is proper reform, not just for women, but for men - and for businesses, too. If we don't want to be reading the same stories in another ten years, we need to engineer a more gender equal society. Forcing change is something lots of people are squeamish about – '‘Big State’ interfering in private family life!' detractors will cry – but we need to force it, I'm afraid, as other countries have done with huge success, if we want anything resembling fairness in the workplace.
If men and women share parenting, and are equally likely to take parental leave, then this stops being a gender problem. Shared Parental Leave – and its precursor, Additional Paternity Leave – isn't good enough. At £138.18 a week, it's a joke. Until this leave is paid at a level which encourages dads to take it up in droves, it won't make a difference.
Scandinavia is leading by example. In Sweden - where they've had shared parental leave since 1974 - parents receive 480 days' leave, including 390 at 80% of their salary (capped at around £80 a day). 60 days are reserved for each parent and the remaining 360 shared as the couple choose.
There's also a "gender equality bonus" of around £150 a month per parent, to encourage both parents to share the leave equally and stay off together, paid from the third month of the father's leave. When Sweden first introduced a ‘daddy month’ - a block of time specifically for fathers - in 1995, it worked instantly, with the share of dads who took at least one month off increasing from 9 to 47%. Now, most fathers take around 3 months off per child, and so many go to parent and baby coffee mornings that they have their own nickname, “Latte Pappas”. Norway has a similar system, including 14 weeks of leave just for dads. The result is that 90% of Norwegian fathers take at least 12 weeks off. Contrast this with the UK, where 25% of new fathers take no paternity leave at all, and only one in ten take longer than their 2 weeks of statutory leave.
It would be expensive, of course, and Scandinavian countries have much higher rate of tax than us, but it is worth noting that in Sweden, these measures were introduced specifically to support economic growth from within – to encourage population growth, but also to stimulate economic output by protecting women's career progression. Less women lost to “the mummy track” means more can make good on the investment in their education and training; and Sweden has seen a corresponding increase in women's income and self-reported levels of happiness since fathers started to take on more equal parenting.
The message is clear. Real change – like closing the pay gap, fathers becoming primary carers, and women getting through that glass ceiling – requires some kind of financial incentive to make it happen. Maybe it's time for us to wake up and smell the coffee those Swedish "Latte Pappas" are drinking.