Alongside addressing male bias in pensions, governments must address feminised poverty in old age by introducing policies that enable women to stay in paid work. That starts – but certainly doesn’t end – with properly paid maternity leave.
EU countries with comprehensive support for working parents have the highest rates of female employment.61 Numerous studies world wide have shown that maternity leave has a positive impact on women’s participation in the paid labour market.62 This impact is seen not only in the raw numbers of women employed, but also in the number of hours they work and the income they earn. It has been shown to be particularly beneficial for low-income women.63
There is a caveat, however: not all maternity-leave policies are made equal. The length of time and the amount of money on offer matter. If women aren’t given enough time off, there is a risk they will leave the paid labour force entirely,64 or transition to part-time work.65 When Google noticed that they were losing women who had just given birth at twice the rate of other employees, they increased their maternity leave from three months at partial pay to five months at full pay. The attrition rate dropped 50%.66
With the exception of the US, all industrialised countries guarantee workers paid maternity leave,67 but most countries aren’t hitting the sweet spot either in pay or the length of leave allowed. And they certainly aren’t hitting them both together. A recent Australian analysis found that the optimum length of paid maternity leave for ensuring women’s continued participation in paid labour was between seven months to a year,68 and there is no country in the world that offers properly paid leave for that length of time.
Twelve countries in the OECD offer full replacement wages, but none of these countries offers more than twenty weeks, with the average being fifteen weeks. Portugal, for instance, one of the countries that offers 100% replacement wages, offers only six weeks of leave. Australia, by contrast offers eighteen weeks of maternity leave – but at 42% of earnings. Ireland offers twenty-six weeks – but at only 34% of earnings. For women in these countries the full length of time they’re technically allowed to take off can be, as a result, academic.
British politicians like to boast (particularly in the run-up to the EU referendum) that the UK offers a ‘more generous’ maternity leave than the fourteen weeks mandated by the EU’s 1992 Pregnant Workers Directive.69 This is technically true, but it doesn’t mean that women in the UK get a good deal in comparison to their European counterparts. The average length of paid maternity leave across the EU is twenty-two weeks.70 This figure hides substantial regional variation in both pay and length. Croatia offers thirty weeks at full pay, compared to the UK’s offering of thirty-nine weeks at an average of 30% pay. In fact a 2017 analysis placed the UK twenty-second out of twenty-four European countries on the length of ‘decently paid maternity leave’ it offered its female workforce (1.4 months).
And now that Britain is leaving the EU, the country is likely to fall even further below its European neighbours. Since 2008, the EU has been trying to extend its maternity-leave ruling to twenty weeks on full pay.71 This proposal was stuck in stalemate for years, and finally abandoned in 2015 thanks in no small part to the UK and its business lobby, which campaigned strenuously against it.72 Without the UK, the women of the EU will be free to benefit from this more progressive leave allowance. Meanwhile Martin Calla-nan (now a Brexit minister) made a speech to the European Parliament in 2012 in which he included the Pregnant Workers Directive in his list of the ‘barriers to actually employing people’ which ‘we could scrap’.73
For some women in Britain, no maternity leave at all is already a reality, because the Pregnant Workers Directive doesn’t cover female politicians. Women in the national Parliament have access to maternity leave, but there is no provision for them to vote without turning up in person. Technically, women on maternity leave can make use of a system called ‘pairing’, where one MP is matched up with an MP who would vote in the opposite direction, and neither vote. However, in July 2018 we saw just how inadequate this solution is, when the Conservative MP Brandon Lewis, who was paired with the Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson, mysteriously ‘forgot’ he was paired when it came to two crucial Brexit votes that the government won by an extremely narrow margin.
But bad as this is, it’s even worse in local government. Under Section 85 of the Local Government Act 1972, ‘if a councillor does not attend council for six months, they lose their position unless the authority has approved their absence’. You might hope that an approved absence would include maternity leave, but a report commissioned by women’s charity the Fawcett Society found that only twelve councils (4%) in England have a formal maternity leave policy, and although some have informal arrangements, three-quarters offer nothing at all.74 And so, as a result of policies which forget that half the population can and often do give birth, women lose their jobs.
In 2015, councillor Charlene McLean had to stay in hospital for months after she gave birth prematurely. Despite having remained in contact with the council, and having been informed she had normal workers’ rights, when she returned to work she was told she would have to stand for re-election because she had been off for six months. Even after what happened to McLean, Newham Council did not change its rules to account for women’s bodily realities, instead simply opting to ensure that all expectant mothers received the right information about their lack of rights.75 The following year Brigid Jones, a Birmingham City councillor, was told that she would have to step down from her role as cabinet member for children’s services if she became pregnant.
Things are worse for women in the US, which is one of only four countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee at least some paid maternity leave.76 The Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees twelve weeks of unpaid leave – but, amongst other restrictions you are eligible only if you have worked for a business with at least 50 other employees for the past twelve months.77 As a result, even unpaid leave is only available to 60% of the workforce.78 There is nothing to prevent the remaining 40% of US women being fired. And of course the number of women who can afford to take unpaid leave is lower: one in four American mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth.
For some US women the gaps are filled in at a state or industry level. In January 2016, President Barack Obama gave federal workers six weeks of paid care leave,79 while four states (California, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey, along with Washington DC) now offer paid family leave, funded through employee social insurance.80 Some women are lucky enough to work at companies that offer maternity leave. But even with these gaps plugged, around 85% of US women have no form of paid leave.81