Comment

Twelve months paid maternity leave will take us back to the 1950s

Many women struggle to return to the workplace after maternity leave 
Many women struggle to return to the workplace after maternity leave 

The expectation that women should take themselves out of their careers for long periods when they have children fuels a rising gender pay and opportunity gap. It’s a modern form of putting women in purdah, behind a curtain away from the world of money and power which remain predominantly in the hands of men.

You see it often with once-successful women who are pressured into the idea they’re supposed to take ages off. After long maternity leaves they struggle to return to the workplace. Feeling first alienated from work, with loss of confidence, then guilty about leaving their babies, it is made harder by employers who expect women to return on an all-or-nothing basis, like dropping off a cliff. Women can come back far behind in skills. Businesses, especially small ones, might have learned to manage without them because they have had to. A year is a long time to fall behind

Yet that's what the Labour party is encouraging with the announcement in its manifesto of 12 months paid maternity leave for all women. 

For me, the long maternity leave model sends the message that a woman’s place is in the home. Go and do your Mummy thing, leave us big boys in the office to go up the ladder, and come back when you’re ready to leave the kids behind and work for us. And the emphasis is on for us – you’ll be working for the people who used to be your peers, because we’ll have got way ahead of you in terms of our skills, experience and contacts. This suits us just fine. 

The net result, of course, is that women become less valuable in the workplace. Of two totally equal candidates, do you want the one who’s likely to vanish for a year, and you can’t even hire anyone else to replace them? Maybe repeatedly do that, for years? And come back far behind in skills? Or do you want the one who’s going to be there for you, shoulder to shoulder, working with you, getting better and better? It builds an inequality into the hiring process. Objectively, women become less attractive candidates

And then, for those who do care about staying in the game, and who are pressured into the idea they’re going to need to take ages off every time they have a child, they put it off, until they're older and have achieved success, and from that we have a fertility crisis. 

So, fundamentally as a woman, as a mother myself, I find the brandishing of extended maternity leave both a fig leaf concealing sexism against women, and another way of institutionalising female inferiority in the workplace. It makes things worse for women, not better. It makes us weaker, less hireable, less players, more played, as we are steadily sleep-walked back to the 1950s.

But I think there is a way to allow women to be with their children and still be at the top of their game at work.

I set up my own law firm as a young single mother, determined to run things in a new way that would work for other ambitious people who also want to have children and love and be with them.  I firmly believe we can have it all but only if we find a new way to open up the boundary between work and parenting.  And that means breaking some taboos.

When I gave birth myself for the fourth time last year, I didn’t take any maternity leave at all. I was in the office the day after my caesarean. I worked from home, in and out of the office for meetings, from day one, stayed on top of everything and kept the whole show on the road. I’ve breast-fed in the office, I’ve had my baby come into internal meetings. I just went for it. I had the support and flexibility as a business owner to set my own rules and keep going as I wanted, and I made it work.

I don’t want my staff to have to put off having a family. I encourage them to have children good and early if they choose, then return to work as soon as they feel able, even if it's just for half a day a week at first, in a way that fits with the gradual sense of becoming more independent of your baby. For our loyal, senior staff members we pay for top-flight childcare for every day they are back in the office. We’ve worked out special models worked on time and outcomes, not just turning up. We take a bespoke approach to the people who really care about staying in the game and are committed to the project. And they repay us in loyalty and brilliance, making it a great investment for an employer to make. 

We as mothers have to be every bit as committed as our male peers, but we need them to take their share of the burden and joy of childcaring, and we need employers to give us all the flexibility to make it all work. We need to find solutions for a modern world in which women have an equal place at the table rather than being hidden away in purdah. 

We have to take the curtain down, and unfortunately Labour’s policy is a step in the wrong direction.

 

Ayesha Vardag is founder and CEO of leading divorce law firm, Vardags

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