Guest Post from Working Families: Flexible working is key to achieving gender equality

[NicolaDMumsnet]

Gender inequality is alive and kicking in today’s Britain, and nowhere is this more evident than in the workplace. In April 2022 the median pay for all female employees was 14.9% less than men. And Covid-19 has laid bare the disproportionate burden of care on women, as well as their vulnerability in the labour market.

Without reshaping the world of work and childcare, these inequalities will continue to be a barrier to women’s progression in work. It is a long known and widely unchallenged fact that women’s careers can be stunted by becoming mothers. The outdated assumption that women are expected to sacrifice their progression at work in order to fulfil their biological role prevails. For this they pay a ‘motherhood penalty’, whereby the pay gap for mothers is even starker. Very often women opt to take a career break or reduce their hours to manage childcare, and their careers never fully recover. By the time their first child is 20 years old, mothers can expect to earn 30% less than similarly-educated fathers.

Childcare massively impacts parents’ capacity to work and progress in their careers, and yet the broken system we have does not support families—and mothers in particular. The 2022 Working Families Index found that mothers were twice as likely as fathers to report the availability of childcare as having a ‘big impact’ on their ability to work. With the onus so often on women to balance caring with work, it is no wonder that 38% of women work part time, compared to 11% of men. This is problematic when you consider that part-time roles are concentrated in lower paid positions and sectors, and are often more precarious. In the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic, 90% of the 490,000 roles lost were part-time positions, highlighting that part-time work often does not provide the equivalent security and financial reward as full-time work.

More than anything, women need a better supply of high-quality, part-time and flexible roles in the labour market. Currently, only 30% of UK job adverts offer flexibility. This means that 70% of job adverts are effectively locking out those who need flexibility to work, especially mothers.

Working Families’ recent YouGov survey showed that for mothers, flexibility is as important as pay when looking for a new role. So fundamental is flexibility to balancing childcare responsibilities, that 3 in 10 UK parents are currently working in jobs below their skill level because their jobs offer greater flexibility, with women more likely than men to experience this scenario. Not only is this a huge waste of talent, but it highlights the need for more flexibility in senior roles. At the current rate of change, PwC UK estimates it will take until the year 2151 to close the gender gap in the UK. We cannot afford to sit tight and wait for over a century for equality. There is so much scope for change that can happen at both a government and employer level.

We desperately need an overhaul of our childcare system. Making it easier to access quality, affordable childcare will open doors for many more women to partake and progress in work. A strengthening of maternity protections and parental leave policies would also help usher us along the path toward gender equality. Parental leave and other family-related policies should be promoted clearly on employers’ websites – not only will this offer greater transparency for parents and carers looking for new roles, it could also be a powerful incentive for employers to develop better policies.

But we can’t talk about solutions for closing the gap without putting flexibility front and centre, making it the default way of working in the UK. For the 6 out of 10 parents stuck in a ‘flexibility trap’—staying in a role because they fear losing flexibility if they applied for a promotion or a different job—the need for transparent policies on flexible working and parental leave are crucial.

We are optimistic about the upcoming changes in the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Bill, which represent a giant step forward by making the right to request flexible working a day-one right.

However, there is so much more that can be done. Requiring all employers to advertise jobs with flexible options by default, unless there is a compelling reason not to, would completely change the landscape for working mothers. Likewise, a requirement for large employers to monitor their flexible working offering alongside their equality and diversity reporting activities would help them to develop routes of career progression for those who work flexibly.

Employers have a key role to play in closing the gap. They can encourage and incentivise men to share caring responsibilities by enhancing paternity pay and shared parental leave and ensure this information is accessible to potential employees. By considering how each of their roles can be done flexibly—and advertising them as such—they can create a workplace where flexible working is available to everyone (and not just seen as an option for mothers). Employers also have the power to effect culture change through line-manager training and senior leaders role modelling flexible working patterns. Making flexible working the norm, not the exception, will mean that high-quality, flexible roles for women are no longer the holy grail, but an everyday part of the work ecosystem.

Working Families is the UK’s national charity for working parents and carers. Its mission is to remove the barriers that people with caring responsibilities face in the workplace. It does this in three ways: by empowering parents and carers to understand and use their workplace rights, by supporting employers to create and sustain successful flexible and family-friendly workplaces, and by driving meaningful policy and legal changes to make flexible working the norm.

The charity offers a free legal advice helpline for working parents and carers. If you have questions about your workplace rights or in-work benefits, please visit its advice pages.

Twitter: @WorkingFamUK
Website: https://workingfamilies.org.uk/

[Sharktopus]

Don't you mean Sex Equality?

[Chrimbob]

@Sharktopus

Don't you mean Sex Equality?

Agreed

[SimpsonEJ]

Allowing mothers to have more flexibility is great but in my view, there are two much more pressing issues that need to be addressed first: 1) the massive disparity between parental leave for men vs women and 2) extortionate childcare fees.

Parental leave gap:

If the woman takes a year off while the man only gets two weeks, the bulk of the care sits with the mother with little help from the father. As a result, the baby will naturally be more attached to the mother thereby making her role even more demanding. Some may argue this is natural and women are inherently more nurturing which I do not disagree with. What I do disagree with it the sheer volume of work a mother is expected to do on her own. In tribal times, women would have a village of other women to help with childcare - we live very differently now in units of two until our first child comes along when we are arguably at our most vulnerable and at that very time all the support we’ve had to date is pulled from us by forcing men back into work after just two weeks.

This may also create health issues for the mother, from exhaustion to post natal depression neither of which are conducive to a healthy career.

Fast forward to the end of her maternity leave, and the dynamic within the family has been set - the mother is the default parent and this will continue even if both mum and dad work full time. This translates to the mum being the one that’s always expected to leave work to pick the child up when they’re sick or stay home when the child isn’t able to go to school further limiting womens’ prospects and increasing the pay gap as a result.

Childcare costs:

The next pressing matter is childcare costs. Some couples cannot afford to have both working due to the incredibly high nursery fees forcing one of them to either take a further pay cut and go down to part time, or stop working altogether. In most instances, the person who changes their work arrangements is the woman as she is by now the default parent, society expects this of the woman rather than the man and the vicious cycle begins. Some women may of course want to reduce their working hours in which case, that’s great. But some are forced to as they have no choice.

Taking a career break or going down to part time undoubtedly limits your career prospects in a world where one type of worker (men) rarely do either.

This is not just about the morality of having equal rights for men and women. There is a massive financial impact on our country from the ‘brain-drain’ effect of women leaving the workplace. In a post-Brexit economy where we don’t have enough skilled people in the workplace, fixing these two issues should be a priority on the government’s agenda.

[CumoTow]

No one should give a toss about childcare costs i.e. if one can't afford to care for one's children, one shouldn't have any. It's not as if our species is endangered.
Back in the good old days (and I genuinely mean this) before second wave feminism destroyed the concept of marriage and foist today's single mothers and their undisciplined brats problem on society, the mother remained at home and cared for the children herself. More importantly, at that time, the working wage was enough to support a family. Fast-forward to today's awful age where the workforce has effectively doubled because women chose to leave this role in order to seek out the 'joys' of working life, the employer class naturally halved the wages so that now no single wage is sufficient to support a family. The unintended and unforeseen consequence of this is that child carers have become a necessity.
Now here's the real kicker that makes this all so hilarious to those of us who detest feminists: Naturally enough (although feminists hate this particular truth perhaps above all others) most child carers are women, and (also naturally enough) they expect to be paid as much for this job as anyone else in other work. So the 'unaffordable' child care problem is literally the fault of women calling for equal pay; and any feminist who complains about it is a bloody hypocrite.
So today, thanks to feminism, we have millions of women struggling to afford to pay other women to care for their children, all because feminists fooled women into believing that being a housewife was demeaning and that men were having all the fun going out to work every day to support their wives and families; and what did women discover once they got themselves into the national workforce? They discovered that it isn't all that much fun either, and extremely competitive and full of back-stabbing, unfairness, etc. How did women react to this? They claimed that what they were experiencing was sexism and invented the concept of the glass ceiling when, in truth, it's no less difficult for men in the workforce.

So, nope; fixing 'these two issues' should not be a priority for any government. The idea of a "brain-drain" effect from women leaving the workforce is pure idiocy. The patriarchy created the first world technology and luxuries that made life so comfortable that feminists felt the time was right for women to challenge it without women's brains and will continue doing so no matter how many women are 'forced to give up their careers' for the sake of having children.

Cue the 'you are why we still need feminsim' comments.

[EmpressaurusOfCats]

@Chrimbob

Agreed

Also agreed.

[CovertImage]

"Cue the 'you are why we still need feminsim' comments."

Well I'm just ignoring you. I hope everyone else does too.

And yes OP, sex equality is what you mean