Maternity leave being undermined by Shared Parental Leave?

[Sunkisses]

I'm concerned that recent legal cases show that women's rights via maternity leave and pay are being undermined and devalued by Shared Parental Leave, a possible unfortunate and very dangerous outcome for women. The legal cases ultimately (and thankfully) failed, but I want to draw women's attention to this. For me, this goes hand in hand with the denial of women's biological reality that trans activism does.

Two men bought cases against their employers arguing 'discrimination' as their employers paid more money (maternity pay) to mothers than they did to fathers who took Shared Parental Leave and just got the statutory amount. This is tone deaf to the massive toll pregnancy and childbirth has on women, recovery time, PND, the importance of breastfeeding, and the critical importance for bonding between mother and newborn in the first year. Worryingly it looks like their cases initially won at the Employment Tribunals, but thankfully were overturned at the Court of Appeal.

Our foremothers fought long and hard for maternity leave and pay. Our generation must make sure it is never undermined on our watch.

More info about the cases here: www.personneltoday.com/hr/hextall-v-leicestershire-ali-v-capita-enhanced-maternity-pay-shared-parental-pay-court-of-appeal/

I think SPL should be paid at the same rate as maternity pay. However, I think it is important to be aware that unscrupulous employers are likely to equal the playing field by reducing enhanced maternity rather than increasing SPL. So those fighting for this need to be sure it's done without any reduction in current benefits.

Yes and this is actually another massive issue with the SPL system, it's only a viable option for couples where the woman is the higher earner.

Surely by this logic a year's maternity leave is only an option when the man is the higher earner? Yet a lot of people still do it, and make it work, when the woman earns more or the couple make roughly the same.

@grasspigeons

Its often quoted on here about 6 months of leave for each parent being fair but people dont factor in that many, many women have to start their mat leave before the baby arrives due to pregnancy complications or the type of work they do so they may be returning at 5 or even 4 months after birth if they split the leave equally in the name of equality.

Yes exactly, this was the issue that I had. I hadn't physically recovered when I went back to work. There's very little flexibility in the system once you've decided to split it, even if circumstances change. My partner's workplace had hired someone to temporarily replace him based on the dates we gave and we were told basically that we couldn't change it once we'd agreed to it.

Grasspigeons again, this is not compulsory. It gives the option to split the leave and normalises male caregiving.

Also this has naff all to do with trans as the OP said. Second wave feminists have been fighting for this for donkeys years. The whole second wave movement was about breaking free from the caregiver role imposed by society.

It’s not just about careers. It’s about fairness. Women do a disproportionate share of work and many work in the home and our of the home. We end up with less money and we have no assurance of who will provide for us, even if we are married (because divorce is very easy and it’s rare to get long term alimony). Why shouldn’t men also take up the slack?

leghair no I don’t think employers will reduce enhanced mat pay because they don’t have to offer it in the first place. It’s a benefit that many employers do offer and if they do, they should offer it on equal terms. Employers don’t have to provide health cover or gym membership either but many do in order to attract candidates. I can’t see that stopping.

Surely by this logic a year's maternity leave is only an option when the man is the higher earner?

I would imagine that this is usually the case, yes. A woman cannot take a year's maternity leave unless either they have significant savings to cover the loss of earnings or her partner earns enough to support the unpaid portion. So if the woman is the breadwinner then it's often not really viable.

In my workplace many couples both work there and many do SPL. It also means that there is less unconscious bias around appointing a woman of childbearing age as a signficant period of time out of the office is just as likely to be taken by a man now. I am hugely in favour of it. Our workplace recognised that there was a discrepancy with payment for men if their partner worked for the same org than if they didn’t. So now it has been equalised. Creating no unintended consequences of the differential in pay.

There's very little flexibility in the system once you've decided to split it, even if circumstances change. My partner's workplace had hired someone to temporarily replace him based on the dates we gave and we were told basically that we couldn't change it once we'd agreed to it.

You have the legal right to change it with eight weeks notice. I can completely see how in practice that would have felt very difficult/impossible if they'd already hired a replacement because of the consequences for his relationship with work, so I have sympathy and can see why it didn't feel possible to you to change it, but legally it was. I don't see how they can make it much more flexible than that without putting employers in a ridiculous position.

OP I completely disagree. I’m currently 38 weeks pregnant with my first, and DH and I will be splitting our year’s allowance - I’m taking the first 6 months, he’s taking the second.

Advantages to us:

• Our baby gets to spend the whole of her first year at home with a parent
• I don’t lose a whole year of pension contributions.
• My DH will be the primary caregiver for 6 months, meaning there’s less chance of me getting stuck as default parent.
• I don’t make the sacrifice to my career of taking a whole year out.
• I’m the higher wage earner so our family finances suffer less.

I don’t see how this is detrimental to women’s rights? If uptake of SPL was higher then I suspect a lot of the workplace stigma around working mums would lessen.

DH is going to be paid at the same rate as if he were a woman taking the second 6 months of maternity leave. Ideally the situation needs to be that two parents working for the same company earning the same amount would have the same income regardless of how they choose to split the year. Putting a financial penalty on women going back to work to give some leave to their partners is wrong.

The case failed in part because they were trying to compare shared parental leave pay with enhanced maternity leave pay, which are completely different things. The court held that the purpose of maternity leave was in part to allow women to recover from childbirth, whereas the purpose of shared parental leave was to allow parents choice in respect of childcare.

In Snell v Network Rail the claimant won his sex discrimination claim because network rail paid women enhanced shared parental leave pay, but only paid men the statutory rate. Rather typically, network rail then removed the enhanced pay aspect from women. So I can sort-of see the OP’s point. However, I wholly support shared parental leave, having taken it’s more restrictive predecessor, additional paternity leave. It allowed us to test who was better at being the stay at home parent (DH), and has indirectly contributed to my progress in my career.

When I had my DC SPL was not available at all. Mumsnet backed the campaign for it and I was interviewed by The Times as mine was a good case to use (10 years ago)

I was main breadwinner on 4 X DH salary. My company only offers SMP so I couldn't afford to be off for more that the 6 weeks at 90% plus a couple of weeks holiday

It made me furious that we could easily have afforded for DH to take 6 months off at SMP which would have been incredibly beneficial, but I could not transfer my allowance

I agree pay should be the same for all to make it fairer but just grateful we even have this now - too late for me but better for others

The UK rates of statutory maternity and paternity pay are very low by European standards. German pays 100% of income during maternity leave, which is 14 weeks. That removes the immediate financial penalty for women taking a decent amount of leave.

Germany then offers both parents 12 months leave at 65% income (with a ceiling of 1,800 euros/month). Parents can take leave at the same time or not at all. This is a much better model than Shared Parental Leave.

There is a lot of debate in the UK about increasing the rate of pay for fathers, as they aren't taking shared parental leave (probably fewer than 1% take it). But its the whole system of pay which is underfunded, not just pay for fathers.

One of the clear messages from countries which did pay fathers more for their leave is that fathers still don't take it up. I think Germany had 3% take-up even with its well-paid leave. They did manage to increase this by providing bonus paid leave when couples did share leave, but it has been an uphill battle to get fathers to take even eight weeks time-off.

It is also frustrating to hear Government tout shared parental leave as the solution to the poor treatment of new mothers at work. It really hasn't shifted the culture and we can't expect it to sort this out. One in every nine pregnant woman loses her job because of maternity discrimination, so the problem is pretty thoroughly entrenched. And watching women lose their jobs for taking maternity leave doesn't give fathers much confidence about taking a chunk of leave.

The other factor that’s never considered is prematurity / NICU time. One of my twins only came home properly just before 3 months old. I know a twin mum who had one twin in in for 7 months. Those months can be eaten up bloody quickly if you have an early or unwell baby.

Overall I do think SPL should be on the same terms of ML, if your employer offers enhanced mat pay.

Couldn’t disagree with you more OP. Parity of parental leave and pay can only benefit women. The current system means that women, by dint of that first year or so at home, become the default carer for the DC. This directly leads to them returning on part time hours, or being the one who does nursery pick up, or covers the sick days. Genuinely shared leave would make that burden much more likely to be shared between the mother and father.

Further, there would be significantly less chance of (conscious or unconscious) discrimination against women at work. You can’t really overlook a woman for promotion on the grounds of her potential future caring responsibilities if a man is just as likely to have those responsibilities.

"You have the legal right to change it with eight weeks notice. I can completely see how in practice that would have felt very difficult/impossible if they'd already hired a replacement because of the consequences for his relationship with work, so I have sympathy and can see why it didn't feel possible to you to change it, but legally it was. I don't see how they can make it much more flexible than that without putting employers in a ridiculous position."

There's an extremely simple solution actually which is to scrap the shared element, which doesn't work, and replace it with a seperate protected allowance for the other parent which doesn't involve the mother giving up her leave to accommodate it.

It is quite right that these men should get the same benefits as women if they are sharing parental leave. My only caveat should be that the enhanced benefits offered by each employer should be split pro rata according to how much of the total available leave is taken by each partner. Lots of employers only have enhanced benefits for the first 6 months of maternity leave and then its SMP only for the remainder (and even that stops after 9 months) - I don't think it would be fair for a mother to claim their full 6 months of enhanced pay and then hand over to the father who then also gets a full 6 months of enhanced pay - they should get 3 months each of their respective additional packages.

I don't think it is valid to say that women should remain entitled to more because of their biological role because adoptive parents are entitled to the same treatment as biological mothers with no biological role.

Ensuring that fathers are entitled to exactly the same benefits as women in the event of taking parental leave will be hugely beneficial to all women. Feminists should be fighting for the men on this one. As long as the benefits for women are better than for men, there will be more employers discriminating against women of childbearing age in recruitment and promotion assessments. Only when there's equal costs and a significant chance that a male employee may trigger these rights will there be equality in the workplace.

Also eight weeks notice is ridiculous and unreasonable. You can't predict at three months post partum how you'll be at five months post partum, which was my situation.

@Pota2 I said unscrupulous employers, not all employers.

Lukewarm, that's not quite right re Germany. Standard maternity leave is 6 weeks pre-birth (which a woman does not have to take, but has the right to) and 8-weeks (or 12 weeks for prem or multiple births) post-birth, which she has to take, i.e. the employer is not allowed to accept her services during that time. All of this is on full pay. (And if you give birth before your EDD, any of the 6 weeks you didn't take is added to your post-birth mat leave - happened to me when ds1 came at 38 weeks). After that there is a period of 14 months parental leave at (as was 4 years ago when I had dd) 65-67 % (the lower your income is, the higher the percentage) of last salary which can be taken by either parent, but only 12 months if the parents choose for one parent to take it all (lone parents always get 14 months), and if the mother takes it the 8/12 weeks she spent on post-birth mat leave count towards that, so she will only be able to be off for a year in total, as will the father if he takes it all. But if you split it (any split), you get 14 months in total. With dd, I took a year, and dh took one month when she was 5 months old and another when she was 13 months to settle her into nursery. Any other split goes, just as the parents like, and you can reduce your hours and have 65-67 % of the shortfall made up during that time or double the period over which you receive it, during which it is paid at half rate. It's not perfect but it's excellent as regards flexibility, and apparently 35 % of fathers took it up in 2017 (and rising).

There's an extremely simple solution actually which is to scrap the shared element, which doesn't work, and replace it with a seperate protected allowance for the other parent which doesn't involve the mother giving up her leave to accommodate it.

It didn't work for you, and I'm sorry about that. But what you're proposing is a lot less flexible (how long would this protected allowance be?) and so would work less well for many other people. It sounds like it was a mistake for you to do SPL, but I think it's a bit sad and short sighted that you therefore want to take the option away from people like me, for whom it worked well, and instead dictate centrally exactly how men and women should split their leave.

And I can't agree with you that eight weeks is too much enough notice - I think it's a pretty reasonable balance between the needs of the employer and the needs of the employee. What would you say is a reasonable amount of notice to require?

My son works for a global company and following the birth of his baby he has six months PL on full pay. Goes into the office once a month for a ‘keep in touch day’.

The problem with focusing on enhanced maternity and shared parental pay is that most people don't get it. It is entirely up to employers if they offer it at all, how much and for how long. Lots of employers who offer enhanced shared parental pay offer it for six months, but reduce that period by the amount of the leave the other partner has taken. This forces women to return to work before six months if they want their partner to get any shared parental pay. We really need to sort out statutory pay so that all parents get a better deal.

It is valid to say women get pregnant, give birth and breastfeed in greater numbers than men and the ability to do this healthily whilst maintaining a position in the workplace needs to be protected in a way that simply doesnt exist for men. The ongoing childcare issue does exist for men and that needs to be done equally. It therefore should be a completely seperate type of leave paid fairly.
Adoption leave is a red herring. The babies didnt magic out of nowhere. Somewhere a woman gave birth to that child. She was entitiled to whatever maternity stuff was relevant to her circumstance.
Adoption leave is all about the needs of the child being adopted.

I think in a time where people continue to fight for equality, and there seems to be more and more equality between men and women, men and women should get the same rights re parental leave. There may reasons why the woman needs the leave more but she and her partner can decide this between themselves. Yes women are the ones to carry a child and give birth etc but that has always been the case and equality in the workplace works both ways.

What about the baby though? It's in the baby's interest to form a strong bond with the main caregiver - which to me means that yes, it makes sense for an adoptive main care giver (mother, father or other) to have a full year. I'm very supportive of increasing the leave available to secondary care givers but while children are very little I think it makes sense to prioritise the primary one.

The vast majority of posts here are talking about impacts on parents, not children, which to me is an important point but not the critical one.