Research from the Chartered Management Institute has revealed the negative long-term effect for women who take maternity leave, termed the “motherhood penalty”. Based on women in full-time management and professional positions, the problems include a pay gap that widens considerably as the woman gets older. The research also highlighted a softer type of discrimination, with mothers being placed into less demanding or part-time roles.
All this despite anti-discrimination laws, and the introduction in April of shared parental leave that, subject to conditions, offered parents the opportunity of sharing between them up to 50 weeks’ leave (on statutory pay). The hope was that this would lead to a new dawn in childcare gender equality, similar to countries such as Sweden.
At the time, there were concerns that the new legislation was too complicated and didn’t go far enough. (The Swedish model is more generous financially.) Another major concern was the social stigma still attached to any kind of paternity leave. While it’s too soon to gauge the full picture with SPL, men have been notoriously reluctant to take up paternity leave – one survey in 2013 reported that up to 40% of fathers chose to take no time off at all, never mind extended options.
Why is this happening? Why do so many fathers worry that they would be stigmatised and penalised if they stayed home with their children? Short answer: men are not stupid or blind – they’ve seen what has happened and, crucially, what is still happening to mothers in the workplace. The blatant and covert anti-mother bias is there for all to see and men don’t want it to happen to them.
Of course family finances would play a large part in these decisions, and perhaps some women wouldn’t want more leave either, for them or their partner. However, there remains this fundamental problem with childcare equality in the workplace – many men just wouldn’t want it because they’re scared it would screw up their careers. You can’t even blame it on machismo – an “I’m not changing bloody nappies” attitude. Instead, this smells of fear, an anxiety that overrides any faith in so-called legal rights or what could be genuine enthusiasm to stay home with their kids. A widespread male conviction that their families would be better off if they stuck rigidly to the traditional career path.
So entrenched and toxic are these problems and attitudes that it’s difficult to know where to start, especially considering that discriminatory laws are already in place, but are flouted. Even today, a childless woman could get all the right answers from companies in job interviews about their policies, but when the children arrive, these “softer”, more nebulous, difficult to prove types of discrimination kick in. Meanwhile, her male colleagues quietly note her ill treatment and opt out.
Away from Swedish models and well-intentioned SPL legislation, this seems to be the reality – that the ongoing appalling treatment of mothers in the workplace is also affecting and influencing fathers, making them deeply suspicious of and resistant to change, even if they want it. Of course, this could be wrong, and there could be a huge take-up on SPL, but I rather doubt it. In basic terms, a cart has been put before a horse. However tantalising the new childcare legislation, men are unlikely to take advantage, while mothers, even those taking routine amounts of maternity leave, are treated so brutally.
It is workplace discrimination laws that need to be strengthened and implemented with more force, giving greater protection to all working parents. That’s parents, mind you, not just mothers. It says something that, while some men are the architects of workplace chauvinism, and other men are stunted by it, most of the time, it is still women who bear the brunt, finding their careers shipwrecked on a little island called “woman’s problem”.
Hold the smut about Tinder’s organ scheme
The dating app Tinder has (ahem) “hooked up” with the NHS to raise awareness about organ donations. Please don’t lower the tone and make the obvious joke (“Which organs are they talking about?”). Leave that to smutty lowbrows such as myself.
The NHS has persuaded Olympic gold medallist Jade Jones, Emmerdale’s Gemma Oaten and Made in Chelsea’s Jamie Laing to have bespoke profiles. When users swipe, they’ll see a message that says: “If only it was that easy for those in need of a life-saving organ to find a match.”
You can see how this has happened. The national organ donor shortage is a big problem and Tinder is massively popular with a huge youth base that an NHS campaign might otherwise find difficult to reach.
Good luck to the campaign – let’s hope it does some good. However, I can’t help but think that this might be a slight ethical mismatch. Akin to Pussy Riot joining forces with Spearmint Rhino or the RSPB trying to raise awareness via a Bernard Matthews turkey roll campaign. Let’s hope that I’m wrong – and that for once swiping right leads to more than the queasy sex euphemism “Netflix & chill”.
God bless Quality Street one and all
As it’s coming up to Christmas, it must be time for a heartwarming “shrinking confectionery” story. Nestlé has come under fire for shrinking its Quality Street. At first, I thought this meant that we would be picking up tiny green triangles and minuscule purple ones with tweezers, laying hundreds of them delicately upon our tongues, in the manner of bemused festive giants. Something to look forward to!
However, before a cry goes up of “Honey, I Shrunk the Sweeties”, it seems that they mean those big tins you get at Christmas – the ones you pretend you don’t buy, while encouraging visitors to partake of your organic carob-brittle that tastes like urine-soaked gravel – is trying to rebrand as a quality foodstuff.
Getting back to Quality Street, it seems that the big tins are not so big any more – they’ve been getting progressively smaller. To prove it, a woman who has kept her tins over the years has photographed them in a descending line. The effect is rather wonderful – a cross between a Turner prize entry commenting on the diminishing effects of commercialism on the human spirit and a purple, sweetie-themed Loch Ness monster. And indeed the newest tin does look as though the two older tins have sat on it.
However amusing it is to think of someone keeping Quality Street tins all this time, perhaps patiently waiting to make this exact point, product shrinkage is a real thing. Nestlé has denied it (saying it has a range of different-sized tins), but it has not escaped consumer attention that, instead of items becoming more expensive, often they get smaller instead.
So, in the festive spirit, gawd bless Nestlé – for giving the public the Christmas gift of making industry-wide product shrinkage even more bleedingly obvious.
