Five reasons why exclusive maternity leave is bad for women

The radical extension of maternity leave and parents’ rights is sabotaging women’s careers, according to the head of the new equalities watchdog.

Nicola Brewer said that it was an inconvenient truth that giving women a year off work after the birth of each child - soon to be paid throughout - was making employers think twice before offering a job or promotion.

The chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission was speaking to The Times on the eve of a speech in which she will call for a significant rethink of family policy.

Ms Brewer said that generous maternity benefits had entrenched the assumption that only mothers brought up children and failed to hasten a social revolution where both parents were equally responsible for caring for their family.

British fathers have the most unequal rights in Europe, entitled to only two weeks of leave compared with 52 for mothers. At the moment, nine months of maternity leave is paid, but this will rise to a year by the end of the current Parliament.

Ms Brewer said that calls to the commission’s helpline from women who had lost their jobs after becoming pregnant suggested that they were paying a heavy price for their new rights. She said that her fears deepened earlier this year when the entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar claimed that many employers binned the CVs of women of childbearing age.

Business leaders have criticised the new maternity laws, saying that they are a headache for employers and that it is difficult to plan the workforce if parents go part-time. But this is the first time that a criticism has come from an organisation that campaigns on behalf of women.

Ms Brewer said she feared that plans to extend the right to request flexible working hours until children were 16 could hamper women’s employment prospects further. Of the one million parents who have made use of flexible hours so far, the overwhelming majority are women.

“There has been a sea change on maternity leave and flexible work and we welcome that,” she said. “But the effect has been to reinforce some traditional patterns. The Work and Families Act has not freed parents and given them real choice. It is based on assumptions, and some of the terms reinforce the traditional pattern of women as the carers of children.”

She added: “We have come a long way but after winning all these gains it is worth asking: are we still on the right track? The thing I worry about is that the current legislation and regulations have had the unintended consequence of making women a less attractive prospect to employers.”

Although the latest legislation allows for the last six months of maternity leave to be transferred to the father if the mother goes back to work earlier, but that misses the point, she says. “The way it is framed means it is up to the women to transfer the leave to the man. It is not his right,” she said. Ms Brewer said that it was not a case of taking away the new rights from mothers but of extending them to fathers. In her speech today she will ask why men should not be entitled to 12 weeks of leave on 90 per cent of their earnings following the birth of a child - the same as women.

She questioned the way in which the Government and opposition parties always tried to make a business case for each piece of family-friendly legislation. “Of course, there is a business case for these changes and many companies are going further,” she said, “but this is a social argument as well as an economic one. There may well be a cost [to business], but as a society we are already thinking in terms of wellbeing as well as take-home pay.”

Officials at the commission say that they are studying research from Sweden that has found that fathers who take up to two years off work after the birth of a child are 30 per cent less likely to get divorced. A six-month consultation exercise is to be launched today through the online chat rooms Mumsnet and Dad.info.

Katherine Rake, director of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality between women and men, said that she shared the commission’s concerns about the effect of legislation on women’s careers. “Under EU law employment rights once given cannot be taken away, so there is no point regretting past decisions,” she said. “The Government should both better protect pregnant workers and introduce paid parental leave that supports mums and dads to share care.”

The commission has in the past been accused of courting controversy. Trevor Phillips, the chairman, said in April that a lack of control over immigration had led to a “cold war” between rival ethnic communities. He also criticised the Archbishop of Canterbury for saying that Sharia should have a role in the legal system.

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