We need to talk about parental leave. Hacks/Hackers London is starting a conversation
This summer at Hacks/Hackers London, a monthly meetup and community of journalists and technologists, we started a conversation about parental leave.
We knew it felt important to a few of us who’d had recent experience either of having children or negotiating with our employers about the possibility. But we didn’t know how it would strike a chord — or how many people would leap to their feet saying they thought it was important too. We want to keep that conversation going and we have three suggestions for how that might work, including a crowdsourced bank of information about parental leave policies in media and tech.
The day after our meeting, Katherine Goldstein at Nieman Lab published a long piece on maternity leave in journalism from a US perspective. We also heard from people in the UK and from as far away as Australia about projects they’re implementing or planning, with a collective aim to make this patchy, often confusing situation better.
We put out a call for anyone interested to come to a lunch, which we held the following week. Ten people representing journalism and tech, from first job to senior management to freelance, turned up. They’ve become an active core but we’d welcome more people who want to get involved.
What we know
In the UK, women who are employed are protected by laws that ensure they get some support when they become mothers, and can return to their jobs. Men get far less: Just two weeks of paternity leave in many cases. Shared parental leave is possible for parents of any gender — but so far the uptake hasn’t been great, in part because lots of companies aren’t yet supportive.
Lots of companies add to the statutory benefits by paying more than the minimum. The media industry isn’t brilliant when it comes to this: some older news organisations pay up to six months, but many pay much less. In the technology industry there’s a huge range of policies. Twitter recently introduced some groundbreaking benefits which include 20 paid weeks for new fathers, while other big tech firms are also very competitive.
Small tech companies, many of which are start-ups, are often very different. With young teams and evolving policies, many haven’t even thought about how to deal with parental leave yet. Their first employees to have kids take on the role of pioneers — and sometimes of guinea pigs.
For freelancers, there’s less support and more insecurity. Women may be entitled to basic maternity pay. Their partners usually don’t get any support at all.
What we’re finding out
Since we started this conversation we’ve heard some stories that seem incredible in the year 2017. We’ve heard about women pumping breast milk in server rooms because nowhere else has been made available. Men taking their weeks-old babies and nursing spouses on foreign reporting assignments because they needed to keep working. Journalists whose email was frozen the day they went on maternity leave. People whose employer has no available information about parental leave, likely because they don’t have a policy. Field journalists told they won’t get assignments if they “keep going off to have babies.”
There are companies that put in place long lead-in times between joining and qualifying for parental benefits, hampering employee decisions about when is right to have children. We’re not blind to some of the unintended consequences of the UK’s legal protection for mothers, but many of the ways companies deal with the laws have unintended consequences of their own.
What we plan to do
At our first lunch we came up with three actions we think could help journalism and tech move forward:
Conversation: We want people to talk about this more within their organisations, and between organisations. All too often, conversations about parental leave end up being between one (often pregnant!) individual and a whole corporation. Afraid of being stigmatised, women don’t bring up maternity leave when taking jobs, and men feel unable to ask for more than the “norm”. Young people who aren’t yet planning families can still support colleagues who are. Managers who had poor experiences can make things better for their employees.
Transparency: This is a collective issue — it affects our entire professions, and society as a whole. We want to create more transparency about what companies are actually doing — or not doing — to support their employees through parenthood.
Mentoring: No one knows how to be a parent before they do it. Similarly, no one knows how to navigate parental leave unless they’ve had the experience. We want to match up people who’ve been there with those approaching parenthood for sane, impartial knowledge-sharing.
ACTION:
We’ve set up a Google Sheet to crowdsource parental leave policies anonymously (though you can leave your name if you want to, we won’t share them).
We’re working on the mentoring idea — and we’re open to volunteers to be mentors or expressions of interest from mentees. For example, you may have recently returned to work after parental leave and could mentor someone who is about to return and navigate how to leave on time to do the nursery pickup or negotiate flexible working. For thoughts on mentoring get in touch with Julia White.
Conversation will continue, and we’ll post and tweet more as we find ways to make it happen. For general comments and communications get in touch with Patricia Nilsson.
