Losing a job is one of the most stressful things that can happen. In fact, losing a job ranks as the fifth most stressful life event, compared to the arrival of a first baby which ranks eleventh. Combine those two major life events, losing a job while pregnant or on maternity leave, and any of us would expect our stress levels to be off the scale.
At Maternity Action we speak to hundreds of women in precisely this situation. We answer about 2000 calls per year and each month deal with about 20 calls from women who are being made redundant. At a time when they had hoped their team would be organising a good luck card and a bunch of flowers, instead they find their boss has been organising their P45.
According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, around one in 20 mothers (6%) are made redundant at some point during their pregnancy, maternity leave, or when they return to work after maternity leave. We don’t know the circumstances of all of these redundancies. Maybe some of them were genuine redundancy situations. But when we look at overall redundancy figures for all women, it’s clear that there’s something else at play here. Pregnant women and new mums are twice as likely to be made redundant compared to all women in the labour market.
We were recently contacted by a woman who was booked to give birth by caesarean section the following week and had just been notified by her employer that her role had been identified as being at risk of redundancy and she was invited to apply for her new role with assessments and interviews over the course of the month following her caesarean.
For the individual women facing redundancy that we speak to on our advice line, this is a hugely stressful and often financially ruinous event. At a collective level, the fact that women are so frequently targeted for unfair dismissal in pregnancy is disastrous for gender equality, for women’s economic independence, for the gender pay gap, and for the wider economy.
So what can we do about it? We already have laws that should protect women from losing their jobs just because they’re having a baby. Pregnancy and maternity are protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010. The regulations which set out maternity and paternity leave entitlements compel employers to offer any suitable alternative role to a woman on maternity leave if she is selected for redundancy. Yet we know from the EHRC research and from the many women who call our advice line that employers are simply ignoring the law. This leaves women who have been unfairly dismissed with the unenviable prospect of taking their employer to tribunal within three months of being made redundant, while on maternity leave, recovering from labour and in a postnatal haze of sleep deprivation.
One woman who called our advice line recently was told her role was being made redundant when she was due to return to work after ten months’ maternity leave. Rather than being offered suitable alternative work, as the regulations require employers to do, she was instead being invited to attend interviews for a post for which all candidates were asked to provide a project plan for the role for the next six months which, after nearly a year out of the workplace, clearly put her at a huge disadvantage.
At Maternity Action we’re campaigning for a tougher law which would simply prohibit employers from making a woman redundant throughout pregnancy and until six months after return from maternity leave, except in a few limited circumstances, such as the whole business going bust.
Forcing pregnant women and new mothers out of the workplace is bad for women, bad for family incomes, and bad for the economy.
It’s time we had laws that actually work for pregnant women and new mothers.
Find out more about our campaign here
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If you’re pregnant, on maternity leave, or recently returned to work after maternity leave and you have a problem at work, you can contact our advice line from 10am-1pm on Monday-Friday or you can check our information sheets.