Equal parental leave is the #1 thing that will advance gender equality at work
It’s obvious but I still want to say it.
I am not a gender equality specialist. I have never raised my voice louder than the next person when it came to talk about women’s rights. I am an advocate of course: I do think that women and men should have the same rights. On paper we do though. I have been lucky (or naive) enough to believe I have never been discriminated at work for being a woman. I know that life is deeply unfair, and that if anything, I was born on the right (lucky) side of the fence, so it never occurred to me to complain that anything I did not get in life was because of an external factor.
Today however, I would like to share my view on something that is obvious — yet doesn’t exist everywhere, and that I feel strongly about: equal parental leave for both parents.
I said I do believe men and women should have the same rights (in life and at work) and I mean it. Men don’t currently have the same rights when it comes to parenting that women do. So that’s what I mean by “equal parental leave”: a parental leave that is the same duration for both parents. In a lot of cases, that means paternity leave catching up with maternity leave. Maternity leave itself varies from places to places, from country to country. And that’s hard to control: I get it, it won’t be the same all over the world. Can it be the same within the same company and within the same country though?
I am a woman, and I haven’t had kids yet. So maybe this is why I am going to say this: I would much rather see maternity leave reduce slightly (for example, most banks and big tech companies grant 6 months fully paid maternity leave in the UK) so that it matches paternity leave (which varies but in those same places can be between 2 to 4 weeks fully paid). Average 6 months + 4 weeks and you get roughly 3.5 months. Call me crazy but I would much rather see my own maternity leave reduced to 3.5 months than have the huge gap there currently is.
It needs to be somewhat mandatory at first
You might ask: why mandatory? Well because! The stigma that exists for fathers to take all their time off is reducing but still present. In some cool tech companies where the CEO took his time off, it’s ok, but that’s not all companies. In a lot of old school companies (some of which I worked in), there is definitely a stigma for men to take their parental leave. I believe until we reach a state where it’s completely accepted to take parental leave for both genders (like it is today for women) we need to make it mandatory. Later on it will be ok to leave the option to take less parental leave than allocated (like very few women do, but still, some do).
What equal parental leave brings:
- no bias when recruiting men and women, knowing they could all be potentially future parents taking a leave of absence to raise their babies;
- the opportunity for fathers to bond with their children in a similar way that mothers get to experience, purely by being more present in the early life of the child;
- the opportunity for men to empathise more with women who are returning from parental leave, for men to realise it’s not easy to find back your place at work, and find your balance between work and home;
- perhaps a better distribution of the parental mental charge for men and women: when the woman is the one being primary care taker for the first 3 months of the life of a child, some habits form and the family structure tends to rely on the parent with the most experience. Those habits stay - way beyond the end of maternity leave;
- the opportunity for women to have a proper shot at a career if they want to: when I become a mother, I could return to work early for my career — after all, no one prevents it. But do I really want to leave my tiny 2 month old in the hands of a “stranger”? Maybe not! Maybe I would return to work much more peacefully knowing that my child is with his father for another 2 months.
I am just greedy
The argument for giving more time to the mother I often hear is that giving birth is a proper trauma on the body (no question here) and that women just need time to recover that the fathers don’t. Fair dues. But those extra 4 weeks or 2.5 months or 5.5 months (depending which country you look at!) became somewhat the root cause for discrimination at work. Have 3 children in the space of 10 years, and you end up working 15% less than the father who also had 3 kids in the same amount of time. So yes it’s only natural that you will probably earn less, miss some opportunities, be considered at risk of leaving again. Maybe I am simply greedy. We started with no maternity leave and no paternity leave, then women got 2 weeks, and then maternity leave got further increased and that was a good thing. Yet I do believe that if equal paternity leave was granted, then that’s it: there would no longer be a fundamental difference between a man and a woman at work? Would there? What would it be? Am I being too simplistic here?
Countries who could afford it need to do a bit more
I salute the initiative taken by a group of [250] French companies, who joined the “Parental Act”. Those companies vouch to grant a fully paid parental leave to the second parent, regardless of sex and status, for at least one month. It’s progress!
In the UK, a lot of companies still only grant statutory parental leave: for mothers that is 6 weeks paid at 90% of your full salary and then £148 per week for the next 33 weeks; for fathers it’s 2 weeks paid at £148 a week.
This is obviously pretty bad: very few people can afford to not earn a salary so the above deepens inequality in our society. Child care can be so expensive that it could actually amount to roughly the same as a low income salary, and if you have 2 kids, well you might as well give up working all together! — again deepening inequality in our society, and between men and women: guess who is most likely to stop working?
Banalities
Yes, bringing the second parent to parity will be expensive. Is it fair to ask this of companies today? A lot are trying, but it’s just not always possible. Should the government pay for it? Yes. Can they afford to? Well, can they afford not to? I am not an economist, and I haven’t done the maths or the research, I just intuitively think that if women were a bit more supported when it came to raising children: by fathers, by having access to affordable child care, then yes more women would be at work and will create and will contribute, and net net, that wouldn’t be more expensive.
So yes, nothing ground breaking in this article. Actually, some banalities. I feel I needed to say it though. That’s why I started this blog, to express myself. I do hope that some day it will become very obvious that equal parental leave is the right thing to do, a bit like when we look back now at women’s right to vote.
