Fucking double standards of women on maternity leave

[ShirleyPhallus]

This is sort of a TAAT but I’ve seen many of these recently

Really sick of the threads on here about maternity leave and how women shouldn’t go for jobs if they are newly pregnant as it could leave a business in the lurch to recruit their replacement. While I have some sympathy if it’s a small business, employees being able to do their duties and not being absent is a risk any business takes.

Really sick of the internalised misogyny of just how many posters on MN say how awful it is that women apply for jobs when pregnant.

Urgh sorry for the rant. Thought we were making progress but these are such 1950s attitudes

one just can't eny the detrimental effect ML has on a business. To say otherwise is at best cognitive dissonance, and at worst utter selfishness and psychopathy.
In consulting / professional services I would say the cost of losing women because you don’t offer sufficient leave or support and career advancement is far higher than the cost of mat leave. Losing talented staff becasue they are female and have babies means trying to find more, the hours of job search and interview, whether they work out. It often takes 4-6 months easily to hire talent , plenty of women are back by then! Of course this is slightly different from a BAU role, but just to make the point that paying maternity leave is cheap at the price for these types of firms overall (& on top of that they are paying paternity leave more and more often.)

I was promoted internally and accepted the new position whilst 38 weeks pregnant. The (all female) leadership team took the view that I was the right person for the job and that they wanted to keep me long term. I started my maternity leave the next week.

I took nine months maternity leave and came back to my new position. It turned out that I was the right person for the job as I was promoted again a year later and now have a senior position. For the organisation, it was far better in the long run to keep me.

@Youngstreet

I am pleased the UK has laws in place to protect pregnant women but I laughed at the 'women are supplying future generations point.' I've never met a woman who had a baby as a civic duty. Imagine if it ever became a requirement! The old USSR gave medals to prodigious mums i think.

That's not at all the point that I was making. It's not about some kind of communist state rewarding women for reproducing. The point was simply that the "cost" of reproducing falls entirely on women, who unavoidably have to take the hit to their working life if anyone wants or expects to have a family.

Has anyone here ever been in a position of responsibility or managing a team?
How do you think that sounds?

@FlyingOink

There's no guarantee for an employer that a new hire will be any good, will show up, or won't cost money in training then leave the company. Or indeed get sick and be unable to work. If we had to complete X number of years' service as part of our contract, employers would have more of an argument (not that I'm advocating this).

If maternity pay is unaffordable for small employers those businesses should be lobbying for a national funding system or some type of insurance to mitigate against financial risk. Ideally national insurance should cover maternity pay to 100% of the woman's regular pay, that way the employer only has to find temporary cover. Statutory maternity pay, like statutory sick pay, is shite.

If companies didn't stand to lose out financially we might see less sex discrimination and less discrimination against mothers. If affordable childcare was widespread and high quality, companies would benefit also.

I haven't seen business orgs campaigning for either though.

Maternity pay is covered by the government. All firms can reclaim 92% of maternity pay, small firms can claim an additional small percentage (3%) on top to cover admin costs.

www.gov.uk/recover-statutory-payments

I am in a female heavy global team and earn well. I am not having any more children but got my big break doing a maternity cover. As i am senior i am part of the discussions that this thread has surfaced. Globally, until paternity leave is culturally acceptable and then put into law ( or the other way around) this really is a feminist issue and i do my best to push that agenda. Women should not have to bear to brunt of the social and career cost.

[quote UltraVividLament]@BellatricksStrange some might call it misogyny... because that's what it is. Only in the mind of someone who thinks women are lesser would this be seen as "common sense".

If any man in this world wants a family, then women have to do the leg work. If anyone in this world wants there to be future generations then women have to do the leg work. Only someone utterly selfish or psychopathic would seek to blame and penalise women for that inescapable aspect of biology. [/quote]
Completely agree with this.

Whatever your views on how long mat leave should be, whether it should be paid, whether the original job should be protected, whether they should accrue paid leave (utter madness IMO), one just can't eny the detrimental effect ML has on a business.

I don't think many would say it doesn't have an impact on business but it's unavoidable surely?! 50% of the workforce are impacted by this, I don't really get how it's still seen as debatable. It's like debating the impact bank holidays or sick leave have on businesses - of course they have impacts but they are not avoidable and so business need to plan around them from the start.

Not to say that I don't appreciate the OP's predicament in that other thread, when she is trying to establish a new business and only has 4 employees, but it really is just one of those things. She will still get a good few months of work out of her new employee before she goes on maternity leave and then she will hopefully return afterwards.

One thing that's not been mentioned much so far is the woeful state of paternity leave and shared parental leave in the UK. I'm pregnant at the moment and my husband really wants to be able to take some shared parental leave. But actually making it work is really tough. He definitely won't be paid more than the statutory minimum and whether he qualifies to take any depends on stuff to do with my maternity leave and my employer.

If men were given more leave (possibly on a use it or lose it basis) the burden of leave would be spread across both men and women, which should reduce discrimination against women of childbearing age.

Some might call this misogyny, but it's just common sense. Why put yourself in a position where you are likely to face problems, when you could just as well employ someone without a working womb?
WTF have I just read?

Are you going to start asking this at application stage? Or should we just stop employing women completely because they're just too much hassle?🤷🏼‍♀️

It could be argued that it’s actually better for the business if a woman goes on maternity leave at the beginning of her time with that employer. They will have a pool of candidates who might be interested in the role, particularly if this may give them the skills to progress and seek promotion after. The business isn’t relying on the woman handing over everything in case something crops up. The woman isn’t planning her development in February to make budgets and finding a course that runs October to July and she worries she can’t get pregnant in that time due to her training. I’ve been in my role for 6 years and work autonomously. There isn’t a team I share my work with. It’s also the type of role that depends on partner engagement and understanding the history of the engagement, things said in previous meetings. There’s a lot of stuff in my head that can’t be handed over. Obviously if I left the company would have no choice and the new hire would need to work it out. I’d do the best I could at handing over because I didn’t want to tarnish my reputation but somethings would get lost between handover. I will be returning to work, so ensuring that projects runs smoothly is more important to me than if I’d just left - because it’ll be me picking up the pieces if it hasn’t gone to plan.

I think companies need to see maternity leave and how they treat pregnant employees as an investment in the future. When you hire someone, it’s because they’re the best for the job. That doesn’t change because they want a family. Anyone can get sick, need a change of hours or take an extended leave and if you want to keep your employee after that period you need to be flexible. Maternity leave you at least get notice for. If you can’t get cover, you can still plan, drop less important work and reallocate. I’m 2 months in maternity leave at the minute, I have my work as much notice as I could because I wanted to do an in person handover and make it as easy as possible for my projects to continue. A male colleague was put on long term during my maternity leave. As soon as it was known he would be out for a while, his role (similar salary to mine) was approved and recruited for. My maternity cover was only approved at 34 weeks despite work knowing the rough timeline from 12 weeks. I didn’t get an in person handover and my cover isn’t due to start for another few weeks. Male colleague is part of a team so the work would have continued but the team members would have been more stressed and have to drop some items, my role completely falls to me. My role hasn’t been done for 2 months and I can’t help but feel if I’d been male or gone on long term sick that this would be different. The way my work have dragged their feet on my cover, the stress they caused me thinking my projects would go unsupported for 9 months has made me question my worth and how much my company values me. I know I will be able to go back with flexible working but I’ll be casually looking and if I find something as flexible as this role, I’ll be moving. I have no loyalty to work and they’ve lost years of experience because they didn’t value my role and the need for maternity cover. Before someone tells me it’s costing the business less to cover the male colleagues role, it’s not. My enhanced maternity leave is less than his enhanced sick pay. His role is part of the day to day running and keeping us doing what we need but my role is linked with a financial reward if done correctly, both roles are essential but for different reasons.

I honestly think nothing will change until partners have decent parental leave too. I’m not talking about the option to shared parental leave, that option doesn’t work for many, but leave running at the same time as maternity leave. I think if you gave equal paternity leave with decent pay (even if not full pay) it would help with so many other things like increasing breastfeeding rates, reducing the reliance on women for being flexible to accommodate childcare, women being the default for sick days, equal division of work.

Has anyone here ever been in a position of responsibility or managing a team?

Yes. In a female dominated profession so maternity leave is a frequent occurrence.

IMO this is an example of why feminists tend to gravitate towards left wing thinking, and why we tend to think in terms of structures that create long term benefits, not short term individual gains.
How to fund the raising of children is a problem for society to solve, not individual women. Healthy, well raised children are a benefit to society.

As a manager can I also give you a different point of view:

My most experienced staff member in a particular team was on maternity leave last year. She told me a few weeks ago that she is pregnant again. Good for her, but there is no denying the impact on the team and the company.

We will be losing the most knowledgeable and experienced member of that team (all the other members have only been in post for a few months) and having been on leave so recently, she had just started again to interact with her clients and work at full capacity. We work with vulnerable people so for them having to get used to a new worker (maternity cover) will also cause disruption.

Of course we will do everything we can to support her but there is no doubt that this will be a major headache for us.

In an ideal world women should be able to go on maternity leave without anyone being affected but for companies, especially the smaller one, it can cause issues.

Would I recruit someone else who is pregnant when already dealing with the above scenario? I just could not. Because I would be training someone just to lose them in a few months in a small team which already has someone on maternity leave and very inexperience staff in place.

Big companies with decent budgets and capacity would not be so affected but we would struggle.

So my point is sometimes you want to do the best you can but that the realities of running teams and businesses also cannot be ignored,

Or we campaign for socially acceptable and legally enforced paternity leave?

@sofato5miles

Or we campaign for socially acceptable and legally enforced paternity leave?

This. While raising children is seen as primarily women's work we've no chance. We need men to take a more active role and that starts with parental leave.

[quote BellatricksStrange]@ShirleyPhallus

Bollocks. It's not a misogynistic issue at all, but one of employers wanting employees they can count on to reliably come in to work. Yeah I know, the utter cheek.

Whatever your views on how long mat leave should be, whether it should be paid, whether the original job should be protected, whether they should accrue paid leave (utter madness IMO), one just can't eny the detrimental effect ML has on a business. To say otherwise is at best cognitive dissonance, and at worst utter selfishness and psychopathy.[/quote]
But if you’re only ever going to hire people who you know will never go on maternity leave, that’s to say you’ll never hire a woman between the ages of 18-45. You think that’s a good business decision to have a workforce entirely of the same type of people? And that it’s good to force women out of the workplace?

Do you also think that employers shouldn’t hire people who drive cars, go on skiing holidays, drink or smoke? Those people might have accidents or illness and you couldn’t rely on them to come to work?

Has anyone here ever been in a position of responsibility or managing a team?

Lol.

I bet if it was made mandatory that the father takes 50% of the leave a solution would be found asap in order to not discriminate against new parents.

But @ElectraBlue it sounds like this woman is your top worker and a key member of your team? It may have been tough last year without her and will be again while she's off later this year, but she will not continue having children indefinitely (presumably!) and it's highly likely she will return and work hard for you and your team, potentially for years.

No denying it can be a headache when it's actually happening, but it's also about the long-term gain that comes from supporting good staff. Loyalty and longevity can be borne from that.

I got a job once and later noticed fpund out they nearly didnt employ me because they were worried about me getting pregnant. It was a small business and whilst I understand the concerns the reality is if you are going to offer less than full time hours on minimum wage dont be suprised if your potential employee pool is 99% women. It was in a industrial area where men could get much better paid jobs.

So IMO whilst I understand the concerns raised by small business owners on these sort of conversations, the reality is many 'traditionally female' roles pay less than 'traditionally male' roles. If you are paying low wages dont whine when you get women of childbearing age working for you.

Unless men take half the burden of parental leave their is no way for women to not be moaned about
Get pregnant in a job, people often moan about the impact on the business and the rest if the team
Get pregnant when out of work/going through redundancy, and get another job - selfish
Get pregnant when out of work/going through redundancy and dont get another job - clearly doing it to claim benefits or some shit like that
Get married to someone who earns enough to support you not working when you want to start a family - clearly a goldigger etc

Making it socially acceptable and financially viable for men to take parental leave, change their hours after having a child, doing half the sick leave etc is one of the ways that would help fix this.

Also i have managed a large team of women and had to deal with maternity leave etc. And I cannot overstate the value of keeping an experienced or dedicated employee in a role.

We also had someone off for 6 months after a car accident, and someone off for nearly 12 months after a stroke. We had somone off for 3 months after ankle surgery (sports related) and another employee off for four months with stress. Why are we not prioritising non drivers, non sports people, with no markers for health conditions or prone to stress when employing people.

As a non driver, non sports person I am up for that!

Also I have a non working womb, where do I note that in my CV?

Has anyone here ever been in a position of responsibility or managing a team?
What do you think? This may be a shock but senior people with lots of responsibility can also be very supportive of mat leave and women in the workplace, and often are. In my typically male industry (not professional services any longer) hiring senior women or any women is a real challenge, a tough combination of everyone wants to hire them, and there aren’t that many around to start with (so you also have to concentrate hard on keeping the ones you have or they will be headhunted). To not consider someone because they might decide to have a baby would very obviously be cutting off our nose to spite our face, and taking paternity leave is also very common in my company which is great. My husband is in a big construction firm here and taking paternity leave is also reasonably common there, it’s such a great shift in accepted behaviours.

@Toomanyradishes

I got a job once and later noticed fpund out they nearly didnt employ me because they were worried about me getting pregnant. It was a small business and whilst I understand the concerns the reality is if you are going to offer less than full time hours on minimum wage dont be suprised if your potential employee pool is 99% women. It was in a industrial area where men could get much better paid jobs.

So IMO whilst I understand the concerns raised by small business owners on these sort of conversations, the reality is many 'traditionally female' roles pay less than 'traditionally male' roles. If you are paying low wages dont whine when you get women of childbearing age working for you.

Unless men take half the burden of parental leave their is no way for women to not be moaned about
Get pregnant in a job, people often moan about the impact on the business and the rest if the team
Get pregnant when out of work/going through redundancy, and get another job - selfish
Get pregnant when out of work/going through redundancy and dont get another job - clearly doing it to claim benefits or some shit like that
Get married to someone who earns enough to support you not working when you want to start a family - clearly a goldigger etc

Making it socially acceptable and financially viable for men to take parental leave, change their hours after having a child, doing half the sick leave etc is one of the ways that would help fix this.

ALL OF THIS.

@sofato5miles

Or we campaign for socially acceptable and legally enforced paternity leave?

That already exists. It's up to the parents concerned to use it. They can't be forced to.

That already exists. It's up to the parents concerned to use it. They can't be forced to.

Shared parental leave is not legally enforceable and in certain industries it's not socially acceptable.

It's not as simple as parents just using it..... the biggest barrier is a financial one. If Dad's organisation only offers a basic package for parental leave and he's the higher earner then many families just can't afford it.

Plus, from a societal perspective many men just aren't willing to take the hit on their careers.

We need a huge societal shift plus financial incentives to make shared parental leave more commonplace.