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[shreena]

Q.  Do equality laws hold women back?

A.  I don't know, get back to me when we have them.

Increasing maternity leave to about 25 times the length of paternity leave doesn't look much like equality to me.

Discuss

Comments

[wildeabandon]

Yes. I cannot understand why something so obviously sensible hasn't been implemented. I just can't.

[shreena]

It's not quite as easy as it looks (although I'm very pro it) because, if a woman says that she's pregnant and wants maternity leave, you can kinda judge her claim based on the fact that she looks pregnant and you do (I think) get a doctors' certificate for the files. It's not as easy to judge paternity - do you then get a DNA test? In all cases or do you assume paternity if a man's wife is pregnant?

I'm sure there's some way of doing it but it's definitely trickier.

[biascut]

You could just have the mother nominate a co-parent of either gender, without any regard for biological relationship, and then split the leave with them. That would get work for an awful lot of situations.

[triskellian]

Not sure there's much discussion to be had. It seems to me like such an obvious solution to so much gender inequality to allow parents to share leave and pay between them in the way that suits them best, and it boggles me that hardly anyone is even suggesting it :-(

Y'know, in my madder moments, I seriously consider getting pregnant and then getting my partner to sue his employers for sex discrimination.

[shreena]

Whywhywhy is it called equality legislation, though? It drives me batshit. Basically, the general aim of the legislation seems to be to ensure that women can, if they want, both be the primary caregiver for their children and have a career. Great! That's just want I wanted for Christmas. Not.

[triskellian]

Ah, that'll be because obviously all women really want to have children. The equality bit is enabling us to play at working in between having children, so we get to pretend we're just as good as men while still devoting all of our time to our babies.

[angoel]

As a complete side-step from the original question, I don't honestly see why it's employers paying the reduced-pay during maternity leave instead of the government, and I don't see why it's a proportion of salary rather than a fixed amount commensurate with whatever the government think is sufficient for looking after a child.

[white_hart]

Employers can reclaim 92% of the maternity pay (100% for small companies) from their national insurance payments. It's just easier to use the existing infrastructure rather than having to add maternity pay into the benefits system - same with statutory sick pay. And it's a fixed amount after the first 18 weeks.

[angoel]

Ah. Perfect. I thought that it might be something like that, but I wasn't able to find anywhere which tied in with my view, so I thought that I must have been making it up.

[lordrosemount]

I think the government is often over-concerned with abstract ideas over how to achieve this ephemeral concept of 'equality' than addressing what's actually going on in people's lives