Lib Dems be careful, employers hate children…
Companies do make fathers ignore their children, so policies that make fathers look more like mothers is a good thing, but is doing it this way likely to hurt mothers more than help?
The Lib Dems are on the charge again to level the parental playing field with this latest attempt to allow fathers more time to bond with their children by pledging to give them six weeks of paternity leave. It follows this fantastic effort by the coalition last year to allow parents to share the 50 weeks of maternity leave between the two parents. Essentially they are trying to emulate countries like Sweden.
Quite right too: fathers simply don’t get enough time at the start of the child’s life to really bond with their children. Two weeks simply isn’t enough time to disconnect from work and connect with the baby. So any extension to this time is going to help.
Why do they think this so important?
As well as being nice for fathers, at the core of this there is a little bit of social engineering going on here. They recognise the equality movement has gone as far as it can to equalise pay and staff numbers. The brick wall it has hit is that children simply demand time from employers. As I argue in this piece, without addressing the relationship a father has with his employer, you really can’t improve any further. Essentially companies reward those that show them more attention. Children tend to make mothers less committed to the workplace than fathers, so they are rewarded less as a result.
The Lib Dems recognise that the coalition policy to allow parents to share the 50 weeks will only solve this if all parents split this 50/50. Given they won’t, women will continue to be affected more than men. So, if you give fathers more time off to bond with their children, you make companies dislike them a little bit more, and you make them look a little bit more like mothers. Ideally if you could get them to then choose to share the mother’s maternity leave more, even better.
All seems like a sensible argument — except…
In giving fathers an extra 4 weeks, you are raising the total from 54 weeks to 58 weeks. So all this will do is make employers hate children that little bit more. Given we still won’t end up with a 50/50 split the net effect will be to make employers treat the main culprits, women, that little bit worse. Pay levels for maternity leave are likely to drop slightly, pay rises will be slightly lower for returning mothers, etc.
So what should the Lib Dems’ policy be?
They need to keep the net effect on business the same. Why not simply give fathers 4 weeks of the mothers’ allocation. This may seem harsh to mothers, but it is the only way to improve the remaining inequality gap. Over the entire population it will mean women take less time out to have children, which will improve a woman’s relationship with her employer, at the same time as souring a father’s relationship a little.
At the heart of it though they should be braver. As I explain in the article referred to earlier — the problem is the total cost of a child to employers. At the moment the mother’s employer tends to the see the majority of the 54 week cost. What is needed is a policy that shares this financial cost equally between employers regardless of how the couple decide to share the allocation — the article covers an example of how you could get this to work. Not until this can be done will the playing field truly be levelled between fathers and mothers.