Challenging the Motherhood Penalty
Staying at home with your baby is, even in Britain, a very privileged and risky decision to make
Conversations around the ‘motherhood penalty’ tend to circulate social and governmental monetary ways we can encourage women to have children. Ultimately, Britain, like many other countries, is on its way to a population crisis; women are choosing not to have children and the people who are here are getting older.
This has led many people to analyse why women aren’t having children at the rate they once were. A natural response that tends towards this statement of fact is ‘Why should they? They shouldn’t have to have children if they don’t want them’.
This is besides the point; no one wants to encourage women who do not have a maternal desire to reproduce, to reproduce.
However, data suggests it is not a lack of maternal desire preventing women from having children but rather the ‘impact on career’ and ‘impact on household finances’.
I’m pregnant with my first child and a chronic future-planner. I was born to a single, teenage mum and grew up in social housing supported by government benefits.
I’ve worked low-paid entry-level jobs since I was fifteen years old and worked very hard toward a better life. I’m now married to a husband who earns just enough for me to remain at home, earning nothing.
It was not born of old-fashioned ideals but rather became a natural consequence of time off after losing my sister. This time off turned into soul-searching and eventually, I decided that what I really wanted was to become a mother at this point in my life.
I weighed up the pros and cons of starting my career now; I don’t have a robust childcare support system in my family, which means that I’d need to pay for daycare to look after my baby while I worked.
The thought of this seemed ridiculous to me given what I’d earn versus what I’d spend on childcare. I also have a strong maternal instinct and know that I wouldn’t want to miss out on raising and teaching my child for my career — if given the choice, which most women do not have.
Staying at home with your baby is, even in Britain, a very privileged and risky decision to make. Women, for various reasons from practical to emotional, tend to be the caregivers of babies and children. The problem with this is not that women are the default caregivers, but rather that our society is not ‘mother’ friendly.
- Having a baby impacts women’s careers. This is due to practical reasons such as taking maternity leave for 9–12 months, over multiple periods if they have multiple children, and this naturally impedes promotional progress. They’re simply not in the office to make use of the social and practical opportunities required for growth and promotion.
- Women who take time away from work are considered as having a ‘gap’ in their CV, for which the responsibilities of motherhood are seemingly undervalued such that ‘being a mother’ is not answer enough.
- By taking time out as a mother, you risk reducing your income with no promise of a good income at the other end of this period. You don’t pay into a pension and you are not guaranteed any sense of financial security.
- We live in a society that values formalised ‘work’. Motherhood is not considered high status by the ‘society’ conglomerate. Many mothers themselves end up doubting their value and worth despite a homogenous attitude that ensuring your children become well-balanced individuals is important and necessary but also so hard it puts some people off having children entirely.
Whether you’re a liberal feminist or a tradwife, these are the consequences and general impact on women’s careers and financial situations.
Changing the Way Institutions Support Women
One of the ways we can tackle some of these issues is by challenging the attitude toward motherhood and the rigid, outdated institutional routines which prohibit women from entering them.
One example of this is education. Many career routes, for better or worse, require degrees, masters and other such qualifications. While the recent post-COVID digital world has seen more flexible work and study, most formalised qualifications still require rigid exam-based assessment.
Careers in finance are popular amongst mothers, particularly in the bookkeeping industry. It just so happens that AAT (a necessary prerequisite qualification for most bookkeepers) is a very flexible exam-based qualification.
Despite the exam-style assessment, the style is such that you can take the exam at any point (unlike university where you must sit the exam at the fixed period set out and if you don’t, you require a concession or must retake the year) that suits you. It gives women the flexibility to choose and fit the qualifications around their lifestyle.
The simple temporal restructuring of courses and exams could radically transform many women’s lives and improve social mobility. This makes having children significantly less constraining in terms of educational and career development and would free women up to have their families with significantly less risk to their lives.
It does not solve the ‘employer’ problem, but for so many women education is such a crucial prerequisite that they never reach the ‘employer’ problem in the first place.
As for the employer problem, it bodes a separate, much larger issue; social attitudes toward motherhood, which is outside the scope of this article.
However, there is a case to be made to elevate the status of mothers in our society such that any woman who has come away from her career to have children may return with some transformational gravitas. How many women have learned to perform multiple tasks under incredible duress, informally becoming nurses, PAs, financial planners, social cohesionists, community leaders and so much more… all as a result of motherhood?
For women who can bring these qualities into the workplace, might then experience recognition for their time spent away rather than facing a ‘motherhood bias’ and being viewed as implicitly lower status than their child-free counterparts. This could elevate their pathways to pay-rises and promotional opportunities.
Easier said than done.
Many people rush to some kind of monetary state intervention to alleviate the pain of some of these issues; tax breaks for women and families, financial incentives, sex-based legal preferences etc. Yet none of these so-called incentives are convincing enough for women to start taking up the mantle of motherhood.
They don’t address the problem. Even this article can only begin to scratch the surface of the issues our society poses to mothers and families.
The first hurdle is to correctly diagnose the issues women face when choosing to become mothers. For example, how much influence do social attitudes have versus financial hurdles?
By making society more family-friendly and encouraging social attitudes to look favourably toward mothers and children we may just start to scratch the surface of turning the tide against the impending ageing population disaster.
Conditions have never been more favourable to have children, and yet record numbers of women are choosing not to. Why do you think that is?
