Proposal #13: Both parents should have the option of taking shared amounts of leave

By Fiona Millar

If you want a pithy explanation for why we should actively campaign for shared parental leave in a baby’s first year, check out Ruth Lister’s letter in the Guardian last Friday.

Long periods of paid leave after a new baby are a good thing. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that they have a positive effect on the baby’s emotional and physical well being. But when they are designated for the mother alone, they can have unintended consequences on equality in the workplace, on the pay gap and on the well being of families.

Firstly because they entrench patterns of behaviour in the home. American writer Susan Maushart sums up the well worn path in her book Wifework. Most couples, she explains, start out with good intentions to share all the household tasks. ‘Yet over time – usually a very short time – something happens to those good intentions. New mothers and fathers emerge from the haze of baby shock to find themselves behaving like something out of a 1950s sitcom. Suddenly he goes to work and brings home the bacon. She stays at home, frying it and feeding it to junior. ‘It’s only temporary’ they tell each other. Yet by the time she’s ready to rejoin the workforce, the pattern has been set in concrete.’

This can affect women’s status at work and their self esteem. Because they are shouldering the lion’s share of both household chores and childcare, mothers are often the first to choose part time or flexible work, often in lower status, less well paid jobs which don’t match their educational qualifications or training.

Many drop out of work altogether for long periods. This in turn plays a significant part in the ongoing pay gap and can have a depressing effect on self confidence as women lose work experience, skills and often find it difficult to get back into work when their children are of school age. The Oxford sociologist Jonathan Gershuny once described this as the ‘Allerednic’ (Cinderella in reverse) syndrome. In this modern day fairy tale the prince and princess are translated in a young couple with broadly equal, good career prospects until the prince marries the princess and turns her into the scullery maid by getting her pregnant.

But perhaps even more important is the effect this has on fathers and their relationships with their children. Many younger dads openly talk about wanting to spend more time with their children from an early age. What stops them? The culture in many workplaces, the fear that they will look ‘soft’ if they ask for part time or flexible work and the brutal economic reality that the pay gap may have already started to set in, making it financially difficult for them, rather than their spouses or partners, to give up work.

The introduction of shared parental leave, especially with a ‘use it or lose it’ clause for fathers, might start to change the enduring ‘breadwinner/homemaker’ stereotypes, encourage both parents to feel more responsible for childcare and other family responsibilities, give more men the confidence to ask for flexible work (almost 40% of women with dependent children work part-time compared with 4% of men with similar family responsibilities) and encourage employers to acknowledge this.

Fiona Millar is a writer and journalist specialising in education and parenting issues. Her latest book ‘The Secret World of the Working Mother‘ is published by Vermilion.