Is it true that by having babies, working women damage businesses?

[SnowyGonzalez]

Or is it just that they are a visible, and therefore, easy target?

I once worked for a large, well-known multinational company. When a bunch of women there got pregnant they suddenly found themselves being made redundant. No point in going into the legal ins and outs of how this was possible; my beef is that there was clearly a policy of removing the new mothers, but if the powers that be had looked just a little more closely they would have seen, as the whole workforce could see every day, a whole range of people inflicting actual damage in the workplace by doing harm, rather than just performing the perfectly normal activity of propagating the human race.

When I refer to 'damage' to the company, I am thinking of:

• Senior managers using bullying, humiliation and intimidation to push people out, despite the company having a clear policy about this

• Bullying or weak departmental heads in charge of departments which, as a consequence of these styles of 'leadership' became demoralised and therefore underperformed massively. In one example half of a team of 20 left the department within 6 months, many of whom were so desperate to be out that they left without first seeking a new job to go to

• People avoiding work due to excessive drug/ alcohol use, taking time off as 'sick' days (one of whom took as many 'sick' days as entitled holiday leave during the course of one year). All these details were known to their managers, who did nothing about it

• People tying the company into disastrous contracts which cost well over £0.75 million of a relatively small budget

• Several men known to be repeatedly accused of sexual harassment by female staff members

With these few examples in mind I am struggling to imagine how a large company which overlooks such behaviour could seriously consider that a woman having a baby poses the greatest threat to its functioning.

bump

Of course women having babies dont damage businesses.

Unfortunately, I have seen all the things you listed too. Its par for the course and I thank my lucky stars I no longer work in a business.

I think the reason is partly down to the fact that many businesses and managers in them feel threatened by and cannot tolerate any employee who has something outside work that matters more to them than the firm they work for.

Not making a point here, but its why men won't ask for paternity leave. It marks you out as 'uncommited'. Women who have babies its the same thing. I once had an interview with a City firm where the interviewer told me the firm would 'own me'. I thought he was an idiot and made it clear I thought it as well - but that is the culture and very common in the City. The firm comes before family and if you were not prepared to put firm before family every single minute of the day you have to leave. Not surprisingly not many women work at senior levels in the City.

On women in business, me and DW are convinced that if any business employed equal numbers of men and women in all positions it would without doubt be more profitable than any other business in its industry. Women are far less likely to leave and hence staff turnover would fall. Hence reducing operational disruption, training and recruitment costs.

Quite.

Companies would be in trouble if women stopped having babies, wouldn't they? (IIRC there was a country where women threatened to do this, once - Italy, perhaps?)

It depends on the size and nature of the business, and whether it is possible to cover maternity leave adequately. Recruitment/training costs for maternity cover can bear heavily on small firms, and yes are damaging. That assumes that a suitable replacement can be found: for (real) example a small rural practice needing an maternity cover vetinerary nurse may find there is simply none available.

So I would find it hard to agree with sweeping statements about what may cause "harm". Is the culture of The City (as cited above) really typical of the UK private sector?

And what are the current stats on numbers of workers in SMEs, where genuine damage is much more possible?

It depends on the size and nature of the business, and whether it is possible to cover maternity leave adequately. Recruitment/training costs for maternity cover can bear heavily on small firms, and yes are damaging. That assumes that a suitable replacement can be found: for (real) example a small rural practice needing an maternity cover vetinerary nurse may find there is simply none available.

So I would find it hard to agree with sweeping statements about what may cause "harm". Is the culture of The City (as cited above) really typical of the UK private sector?

And what are the current stats on numbers of workers in SMEs, where genuine damage is much more possible?

onimolap, it may well be a bugger to arrange cover for an employee but that's what happens when you employ human beings - they do all these irritating things like get ill, get pregnant, have funerals to go, sometimes even die while employed...

If there exists a vet practice that would go bust if one nurse got pregnant, I think their business model is fairly ropey anyway, tbh.

"On women in business, me and DW are convinced that if any business employed equal numbers of men and women in all positions it would without doubt be more profitable than any other business in its industry." - You're a smart man, BeenBeta. And this has already been proven. There's a research centre affiliated to LSE which produced an extensive study in the last 18 months showing this, apparently companies across Europe which had equal numbers of men and women on their boards fared far better in the recession than companies with an uneven gender balance.

I'll search through my emails and try to dig this up, I seem to recall it makes for interesting reading.

edam - My point exactly. But pregnancy and family life is treated as an 'abnormal' situation because people choose it. It's like someone once said: how much would it cost companies every year in sanitation and training costs if parents had not invested time and effort in potty training their children (aka the companies' employees)? Or in teaching them social skills, getting them educated, etc etc - the list is endless. Companies owe a massive debt to the community/ society that has raised well-rounded individuals for them to employ; yet when those same well-rounded individuals make the choice to square the circle by themselves raising their own offspring, all of a sudden the company decides that actually there's no such thing as a circle of life; just a dead end which stops at the bottom line.

Apologies for the excessive use of idioms!

I've always wondered why some companies do charity work such as helping out with school reading programmes. Is this purely a cynical move to polish their image? Or is it, in part, an acceptance that any business is an integral part of the community? Either way, it seems hypocritical to help out in a school and yet shun the people who are putting children into those same schools (or those same companies...think I've made my point ).

It is often said that women taking maternity leave causes major problems for small businesses. That may be the case but there are two obserations that I think are pertinent here.

The first is that when any employee leaves a small business it causes major disruption. The second is that if men and women took time off to do parental leave and childcare equally it would no longer be seen as the fault or the problem with women.

The only area where I have some sympathy with the cries of small businesses is that they face extended uncertainty over whether a woman may return to work and she can wait until the last possible moment to inform a firm that she does not intend to return. I think there perhaps needs to be more fairness in that area. On the other and the number of woen who get made redundant during or shortly after pregnancy or maternity leave is far from fair.

Large businesses are such regular and constant staff turnover that I really dont see how women having materity leave causes any disruption - it just takes some decent operational management. Indeed, a woman going on matenrity leave can present an opportunity for other staff to broaden their experience.

ONLY rubbish businesses find women having babies causes them damage.

I used to work somewhere where there were always people on maternity leave. It made for a great working environment. There were always opportunities to experience different types and levels of work when you covered for someone which meant rather than getting in a rut people were full of enthusiasm. It also meant there was progression, as if you covered for someone often they would come back part time so you got to carry on at the higher level/doing something different. It also meant there were often new people coming in bringing different ideas, and then frequently staying on. A business with little change in staff can become stagnant, stuck in its ways, doing the same old same old 'because we always have'. Whereas a business with change brings in news ideas, innovation, interested staff, motivated staff who can see a chance for progression.

Of course than can be done through ways other than having people on mat leave, but having that as a way for introducing that dynamism is a pretty good way.

So no, women having babies does not benefit a business. Stagnation does.

damage not benefit. Soz.

I of course mean:

"So no, women having babies does not damage a business. Stagnation does."

As previously running a small business, the difficulty came in knowing how long you had to cover maternity leave and the cost of the uncertainty. Tbh, the same principle (in terms of uncertainty) applies to other situations like someone going off on long term sick leave.

All the large businesses I've worked for had enough capacity to absorb a maternity leave within the department or could transfer across from another department.

IME middle aged men have a disastrous tendency to do their backs in and suddenly take weeks or months off. Younger sportier men take more frequent shorter breaks due to sporting injuries.
Not such a long time overall but at least with maternity leave you get fair notice - back injuries are heralded with a phone call one morning saying "aargh, I can't walk, and will not be in for eight weeks".

I was made redundant on maternity leave. Business would be seriously fucked if we all stopped breeding.

I think the first post hit the nail on the head. I'm sure maternity leave can cause headaches for some businesses, particularly badly-run ones. But it doesn't cause any more problem than all the other things you cite, people just like getting more excited about it because it's a chance to bash women, in the way all those other problems aren't.

Without babies, there'd be no clients or citzens.
There is a serious disconnect going on in society whereby men/business/big institutions seem to believe they're self-perpetuating, and mothers are nothing but annoying hindrances to their efficient machines.
How much brainwashing does it take for people to forget where their clients come from...

Being cynical, I imagine "back injuries" are far less frequent in companies which only pay stat sickness (which tend to be small companies), so the burden of mat leave is probably greater to them. However, that's not to say it's insurmountable or a problem given the notice period.

One thing that is often overlooked is that women who do get a good deal from an employer on mat leave and when they return tend to stay longer with the company because having the flexibility and understanding is more important than (eg) a few £££ more somewhere else. Therefore, although you get ST disruption, you get long term stability.

There are a couple of things that I do think need addressing, primarily the extreme short notice a woman is able to give if she doesnt intend to return- think it should be increased to 6 weeks if mat leave taken is 6 months or more.

Didn't the last government extend the period of notice? I remember it used to be only 3 weeks, and that has changed now - not sure what to though.

Wrapped - I agree re extending the notice period, I don't understand why it should have been allowed to be so short in the first place. And good point re long-term stability.

I've found that report on the benefits of a gender balance in the work place, for anyone that's interested. Scroll down, it's the second hyperlink Innovative Potential: 'Men and Women in Teams'. It's actually from the London Business School, not LSE.

I find that some senior people in business and at the top levels of other sectors can be very narrow minded and short-termist. They may claim that they're acting in the best interests of their company / organisation in avoiding or pushing out child-bearing women. However, often all they're doing is having a positive effect on the balance sheet for pay over a single year by cutting maternity leave costs. It ignores everything else that those individuals might bring to the company in terms of education, skills and experience. OK - you've saved on maternity pay for a year by booting them out but now you have less of the long-term intellectual assets which would shore up your company in hard times. Clever, huh?

Intolerance of maternity leave often shows an inability to distinguish between urgency (saving money now) and importance (maintaining capacity to do good work and grow in the future) or to take a long-term view of sustainable growth entirely. The same people who think this way also seem to overpromote aggressive, risk-taking young males whose successes are often based on luck and whose failures can bring a whole company down.

Interesting to see the LBS report. I've seen bits of pieces of research that support this picture and have been looking for something more substantial for a while.

I thought that the notice period for resigning after maternity leave was just your usual notice period? So if the company gives you a notice period of 1 week that could be said to be their own bad planning... Most employees would give more notice than that though even if not required to out of consideration.

To those that say women going on maternity leave causes disruption and incurrs retraining/recruitment costs... so does any staff member leaving surely? And most staff resigning will leave with 1-2 months notice whereas you get considerably longer warning about an impending maternity leave.