A recent provocative article in Mail Online by British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, raises a loaded question: are mother's rights making women unemployable? She asks, "while a slew of government policies are aimed at helping working women achieve a more satisfactory existence, are they not losing sight of the real workplace picture?"
Mothers in the UK are given much greater financial support and leeway with their maternity leave than mothers in the United States. Shulman shares, the "majority of pregnant women I know take close to a year off, during which they are entitled to statutory maternity pay for up to 39 weeks. They return with the expectation and right to have their old job back after 52 weeks." Statistics like this are enough to make an American working mom (like me) green with envy. According to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, in America, "nearly 24% of the best employers for working mothers provide four or fewer weeks of paid maternity leave, and 52% provide six weeks or less. So clearly, women on maternity leave in America have much less to worry about when it comes to losing their job to younger employees in a lower pay bracket. We go back to work so soon after giving birth, and work so hard with very little maternity support, that it just isn't the same issue for us as it is for working moms in the UK. Women returning to the work force after giving birth in the U.S. are barely away from their desks long enough for the voicemail button to light up.
After reading Shulman's concerns for women in the UK to retain their hard won rights in the workplace, I can't help but sympathize to some extent with her argument that working moms who demand too much time away from their jobs might be causing a backlash against working women in general, and may be furthering the prejudice that "females may become too inconvenient and awkward to employ and find themselves legislated back into the home".
Shulman questions the unrealistic notions of women returning to work after maternity leave saying, they "don't want exactly their old job back. They want the same role but molded into a time frame that suits family life better. They want to investigate four-day weeks, flexitime, jobshares, and they often then have another baby and are entitled to take another year off."
And she admits that questioning the flexibility of a mother's rights is "barely acceptable," but it does raise the uncomfortable issue that on the whole, an extended maternity leave may end up jeopardizing a woman's role in the workplace on an individual and on a national level. I wish we had this issue to debate in the U.S.! Unfortunately, we are so far over on the other side of the spectrum, in this country, with many working moms expected to return to their desks within days of giving birth. A happy medium definitely needs to be reached so women may prosper and be supported both while on the job and while taking much needed and deserved time off to be a mother.
