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

Shared parental leave is not legally enforceable

Yes it is

@kimikosnightmare it may well exist but it's bloody difficult to take and believe me I tried

Shared parental leave is party a societal issue

I know women who are the higher earners who have still managed to take a full maternity leave despite being the higher earner
I know men who are the higher earners who cant take any shared parental leave because they are the higher earner

I know women who are the higher earner who still make flexible working requests to facilitate school runs etc
I know men who are the higher earner who cant facilitate school runs etc because they are the higher earner

I know women who take time off when their children are ill despite being the higher earner
I know men who cant take time off when their children are ill because they are the higher earner

I also know men who are the higher earners who do divide work, and women who are the higher earner who have husbands doing most of the sick leave etc

But in general the issue isnt that women have to be more impacted by children because of their relative incomes etc, its because of men and societies attitudes

@KimikosNightmare therein lies the socially acceptable part

@KimikosNightmare

Shared parental leave is not legally enforceable

Yes it is

While it might be legally enforceable for organisations to offer it, it isn't legally enforceable for men to take it (which is how I interpreted that post) Companies also aren't obliged to offer any enhanced packages which doesn't make it an attractive proposition. That's part of the problem.

On the uptake of Shared Parental leave being low - it's not incentivised at all. If a woman taking maternity leave gets say 6 - 9 months on full pay, but any leave transferred to her partner is paid at the statutory rate of £140 per week, why would anyone take it?

Uptake is much higher in countries where:

• men taking parental leave are on or close to full pay during leave
• there is a use it or lose it policy where some months of paid leave must be taken by the father and are not transferrable to the mother.

My husband and I are in the "lucky" situation where most of my leave will be at the statutory rate anyway, so we don't lose out much if he takes some of that leave!

[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]
Nonsense. Take out the gender from the discussion and it still makes perfect sense from an employer's perspective.

Image you had to hire either A or B. Both are equally qualified, but with A there is a good chance they will take up to a year off, leaving you to find a temp hire for that period (because A will expect their job back if and when they return). Not to mention they'll accrue holiday pay in this time.

Do you hire A or B?

So how is it suddenly a misogynistic decision just because A happens to be a woman of childbearing age?

@timeisnotaline

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.)

When a company is actively seeking to hire women, for whatever reason, then obviously the better ML terms they offer, the higher number of qualified candidates they'll attract. But not everyone is specifically looking for women. Many jobs can be done just as well by either sex, and employer's simply need someone who will reliably do the job.

I hired someone last year, who on accepting the offer told me she was pregnant. I was of course frustrated but she was still the best person for the job, and I would still have hired her if she had told me before the offer was made. She was entitled to no paid maternity but I negotiated full pay for her as a good will gesture. She sadly went on to have a mc but the working relationship is very strong and she is an engaged employee who (hopefully) will stay long term.

I totally understand this is a much more difficult issue at small businesses and has a much bigger impact. It’s a shame that people are still discriminated against for being pregnant and so feel the need to hide it whilst interviewing, but perhaps more support is needed for small businesses in these instances…?

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?

I'm not saying who you should or shouldn't hire, and I'm certainly not forcing anyone out of the workplace. But to answer your question, I think in the vast majority of cases it's pretty much irrelevant whether the workforce is diverse or not.

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?

Women of childbearing age have all the 'regular' risks to an employer, plus the extra risk of ML.

Again, imagine you could hire A or B, both equally qualified, but with A there's a good chance they'll cause you a massive hassle. Who do you hire? It's a simple business decision.

@BellatricksStrange my decade of experience in professional services is big4- clearly they hire men, and lots of them. It would be incorrect to assume my statement can only be correct if they mainly want to hire women. They profit from supporting female staff to return from mat leave and stay. Profit is their bottom line and how they measure people, they aren’t going to sacrifice that!

So how is it suddenly a misogynistic decision just because A happens to be a woman of childbearing age?

Because there is a much higher than average chance that A is a woman ( how many men are taking a year out of their job?) Women are the ones taking maternity leave because they are the one who give birth. Societal norms structure issues mean we have a very low uptake of shared parental leave which means in the vast majority of cases it is women taking time of work to care for their newborn.
If you routinely refuse to employ A it would pretty quickly start to look like sex discrimination.

So many pregnant people get told their pregnancy is inconvenient to a business as if your job is the only thing you should consider when having a baby.

Completely agree OP and @elbea that we are put between a rock and a hard place. We have no choice but to work! Well done getting your payout @elbea

I read that thread and thought the responses were abysmal aswell. That said I waited three years to have a baby because the small business I worked for was in difficulty. Difference between smoking & pregnancy is that we need people for the future.. yes pregnancy is a personal choice but also it performs an important societal role. This for me is the crux of the problem in the UK. Why should the government pay when it’s womens personal choice. Having children is not deemed valuable to our society and this is reflected in policy, public attitude and declining birth rate. Who will fund pensions in the future or work for generate profit? Not many people if the birth rate is almost zero because no one values womens role in producing generations for the future.

This is a UK problem that I don’t think exists to the same extent in some other comparable countries. France has a stable birth rate & maternity support is good here; public opinion is that we need kids so we’ll support you for a time in doing that. Not so in the UK. I suspect because we are all about elite men from a few private schools and big business- neither of which really give a monkeys about women or children. They might though one day, when they can’t recruit staff due to labour shortages, and the public are so anti immigration due to right wing politics and scaremongering that theres no one to fill these roles. We are already seeing a tiny bit of this with the loosening of immigration visas for front line care workers & HGV staff. Immigration is obviously a separate topic but women should be seen as valuable and so should bearing children.
xo

So how is it suddenly a misogynistic decision just because A happens to be a woman of childbearing age?

Is this a joke @BellatricksStrange? That’s literally almost the definition of misogyny - a sexist decision that keeps women in a lower pecking order

In terms of the why do we need a diverse workforce the jobs can simply be done by men, there are reams of studies that prove the impact of non diversity (of all kinds) in the workplace. And lets face it, would we be having a conversation about small business struggling to afford the impact of maternity leave and the poorly paid shared parental leave if the majority of those in power werent white rich men?

The average age for men having a stroke is inside retirement age (e.g. on average men are likely to have a stroke whilst still working) where as for women its outside working age. Where are the conversations about only hiring older women in the workplace and not older men?

Men are significantly more likely to suffer a severe trauma fracture compared to women before the age of 60. They can take 6 months to heal. Similar to a lot of peoples maternity leave I guess....

There are many many many reasons an employee may end up off for a few months. The only ones that presumptively go against someone are maternity leave. By assuming everyone between 16-45 may be a walking incubator who may need time off and therefore employing a man over them you are being horrifically sexist.

Bottom line is, if an an employer you cannot afford to cover an absence of an employee for several months then you probably shouldnt have an employee. Because any employee could go off at any point. As an employer you take on the associated costs with having an employee. You cant take somone on on the basis that they are never in an accident, have a health issue or have a child. Its irresponsible. And if you think you are avoiding it by only employing men you better hope those men are healthy non atheletes, non drivers who dont want to take shared parental leave

It is so depressing to see women ask why we need a diverse workforce when the jobs can be done by men.
It's the sort of thing you expect to see in the Daily Mail comments section.....

The irony is men would benefit hugely if they could take a years career break and go back to their job afterwards too.

That would be the way forward - make men do it.

I may have reached the limits of my practicalities ....

I was on some threads about this recently. They were largely heartening, but a few really sexist and old-fashioned views were present, and some very ill-informed and inflexible thinking on display.

One person didn't think diverse workforces mattered and in fact thought workers from similar cultures made things work better. Another wouldn't/couldn't answer my question about why their small business was not able to manage its cashflow and work projections so it could absorb things like ML, or accept that it is totally normal to offer temp cover roles with the proviso that they may be just that – temporary.

Goodness I am 5 weeks pregnant and now terrified to tell my work 😩

@Toomanyradishes

In terms of the why do we need a diverse workforce the jobs can simply be done by men, there are reams of studies that prove the impact of non diversity (of all kinds) in the workplace. And lets face it, would we be having a conversation about small business struggling to afford the impact of maternity leave and the poorly paid shared parental leave if the majority of those in power werent white rich men?

The average age for men having a stroke is inside retirement age (e.g. on average men are likely to have a stroke whilst still working) where as for women its outside working age. Where are the conversations about only hiring older women in the workplace and not older men?

Men are significantly more likely to suffer a severe trauma fracture compared to women before the age of 60. They can take 6 months to heal. Similar to a lot of peoples maternity leave I guess....

There are many many many reasons an employee may end up off for a few months. The only ones that presumptively go against someone are maternity leave. By assuming everyone between 16-45 may be a walking incubator who may need time off and therefore employing a man over them you are being horrifically sexist.

Bottom line is, if an an employer you cannot afford to cover an absence of an employee for several months then you probably shouldnt have an employee. Because any employee could go off at any point. As an employer you take on the associated costs with having an employee. You cant take somone on on the basis that they are never in an accident, have a health issue or have a child. Its irresponsible. And if you think you are avoiding it by only employing men you better hope those men are healthy non atheletes, non drivers who dont want to take shared parental leave

But 80% of women give birth. Men with broken legs and strokes and even cancer all together don't add up to 80%.

The support for women having children needs to be nationalised. It should be the same entitlement for all women, and the employer should only have to find cover (which is difficult as pp have said).

Having children is the default, not the exception. It's not like being ill. And making companies responsible for the costs (the 25% difference in payroll costs versus what can be claimed back according to a pp) means companies will adopt sexist recruiting practices wherever they can.

Ironically that sexism also affects women who have no plans to get pregnant too. And as for "but that would be discrimination" yes, it would, but try proving it.

it isn't legally enforceable for men to take it

Seriously? You think men should be forced to take paternal leave? Do you think women should be forced to?

@SpinsForGin

It is so depressing to see women ask why we need a diverse workforce when the jobs can be done by men. It's the sort of thing you expect to see in the Daily Mail comments section.....

I can't speak for other posters but I see that as acceptance of grim reality, not something to be celebrated. Why would small employers give a shit about diversity if they have enough male candidates to function well? Diversity is a "nice to have" for companies. It's much more important for employees than employers. That's why anti-discrimination laws were needed; if it wasn't illegal companies would just keep doing it. They still do, as it's difficult to prove discrimination, but some are dissuaded by the potential for bad press.

or accept that it is totally normal to offer temp cover roles with the proviso that they may be just that – temporary

I Iove the way this gets trotted out as a cure all for any problems a business might face.

It is not "totally normal".