Maternity Leave - equal rights

awec · 24-02-2015 01:09PM

efb wrote: »

How much paid leave should the other parent get? In your opinion?

And paid for by whom?

I am not sure you really get what people are saying here.

There should be time off for the mother to recover. Nobody is saying otherwise. The entire time that mothers get off right now is not purely for recovery. When a mother goes back to work should be up to the mother and her doctor and not set at some arbitrary number. I know mothers who have went back to work after 6 weeks because they wanted to.

If a mother wants to go back to work 6 weeks after giving birth then the father should be able to take the remaining 16 weeks or whatever of her maternity benefit off work PAID.

To summarise this for you: there should absolutely be time off for a mothers recovery, but there should be a portion of the paid leave that each individual couple can decide how to allocate between themselves. There should on top of this be a period where the father gets paid time off as well as the mother.

For example: mother goes off work 2 weeks before giving birth. Mother gives birth. Father takes two weeks paid leave for the first two weeks. Mother and father are both at home during this time. Father goes back to work two weeks later. Mother decides that 4 weeks after that she wants to go back to work. Mother goes back to work, father takes the remaining weeks paid leave (18 weeks by my count?).

IrishTrajan · 24-02-2015 01:41PM

Just a little Samba wrote: »

They definitely don't receive equal pay.
Women on average get paid 14.4% less then men for the doing the same job in Ireland.

It depends entirely on the sector that the person is working in. Would you expect a woman to earn as much as a man who works in construction, for instance, despite not being as inherently physical?

Productivity, maternity leave, the nature of the job itself... I'm not an expert, but I would presume that it is rather difficult to ascertain the root causes of the "gender pay gap", and that simply looking at incomes isn't entirely applicable.

There are stay-at-home mothers, for instance. Their incomes would skew the average income of females away from men.

Regardless, if you work hard enough, you will succeed, it doesn't matter what gender you are. Richest person in Australia is a woman, Margaret Thatcher was in a heavily male-dominated political arena, and managed to fight her way to the top.

Forgive me if I seem a bit insouciant regarding the "gender pay gap", I just believe there are more valuable things we can spend our time doing rather than bickering over the alleged slights based on gender.

Neyite · 24-02-2015 01:48PM

efb wrote: »

Women have maternity leave to give birth and get body to readjust post pregnancy. This is not applicable to men. Statutory parental leave I support and it's in place.

Not true I'm afraid, nowhere does it state that its to recover from birth. Maternity leave is designed to facilitate breastfeeding until recommended weaning age - currently that age being 6 months, as recommended by WHO. Before these guidelines, Maternity leave was 16 weeks. My colleague who has third level aged children only got 16 weeks maternity leave. Because breastfeeding was recommended until 16 weeks then.

So, because its framed to facilitate breastfeeding, it is a gendered benefit, and probably why men don't get a share of it. Though I dont see why, with more awareness of expressing and freezing milk, that it cant be changed.

So currently you get statutory maternity benefit until the six month mark, and can opt to take a further 16 weeks unpaid. Employers can choose to top up this payment to equal your salary but thanks to recent austerity, many have chopped this staff benefit, so already a couple look at a significant drop in monthly income for the first six months because the mother may only bring in the statutory maximum of €262 per week.

Its not really feasible for most couples to take unpaid leave. Not only would you be down an entire paycheck for those months, you also may have had a drastically reduced one for the six months prior to that, so were already on a shoe string with additional costs involved with a new baby. Then when you do go back, you are walloped by massive childcare fees, so your disposable income never recovers. Add into that the unpaid leave you take when you have a sick child - all the bugs and snotfests, teething and earaches that they succumb to, in that regard, kids are expensive.

I'd love to see the swedish system gender neutral system come in here. It's main points:
Parents get paternal leave, paid for by the government, not the employer. It depends on circumstances but usually works out at about 80% -90% of your normal pay.
Parents get 480 days, with an additional 180 days for twins.
Parents are encouraged to share the leave equally, incentivised by a further equality bonus, or you can transfer a share of your days over to your partner.
A sole parent qualifies for the full 480 days.
During the first three months, the father gets an additional 10 days to spend at home with his partner and child.
The employer can reduce your work week by 25%.

The fact is, we have an ageing population, more and more families are having less children than they may like, purely because of financial constraints. Who will then grow up to pay taxes into our pension pots. It makes sense to invest now to reap the rewards in years to come.

As well as that, a truly equal system will absolutely do away with any gender bias in the workplace. If two married thirty-somethings are both equal candidates for a job, anecdotally in a lot of workplaces they plump for the male over the 'child-bearing age' female because of the hassle involved in covering maternity leave. But if the male candidate posed potentially the same hassle, it levels the playing field. And that's before we even start on the benefits of men getting to spend more time with their babies and toddlers.

My partner would have loved to been able to share my maternity leave. He was very hands on and was able to do everything for the baby and home bar produce milk. The days are gone where its assumed men are incapable of changing a nappy or putting on a dinner. Thankfully. And it's about time the likes of maternity leave was changed to reflect that.

The_Captain · 24-02-2015 01:52PM

Elly_Welly wrote: »

My husband gets 10 days paternal leave from work.

Which means for 10 days, I've 2 babies to feed!

When men grow (functioning!) breasts, call me.

You must be embarrassed being married to someone so pathetic

efb · 24-02-2015 01:57PM

awec wrote: »

I am not sure you really get what people are saying here.

There should be time off for the mother to recover. Nobody is saying otherwise. The entire time that mothers get off right now is not purely for recovery. When a mother goes back to work should be up to the mother and her doctor and not set at some arbitrary number. I know mothers who have went back to work after 6 weeks because they wanted to.

If a mother wants to go back to work 6 weeks after giving birth then the father should be able to take the remaining 16 weeks or whatever of her maternity benefit off work PAID.

To summarise this for you: there should absolutely be time off for a mothers recovery, but there should be a portion of the paid leave that each individual couple can decide how to allocate between themselves. There should on top of this be a period where the father gets paid time off as well as the mother.

For example: mother goes off work 2 weeks before giving birth. Mother gives birth. Father takes two weeks paid leave for the first two weeks. Mother and father are both at home during this time. Father goes back to work two weeks later. Mother decides that 4 weeks after that she wants to go back to work. Mother goes back to work, father takes the remaining weeks paid leave (18 weeks by my count?).

This seems reasonable to me

Lovely Bloke · 24-02-2015 01:58PM

^^ great post. (edit, not efb's)

Being the father of a 10 month old I'm going through all of this.

Luckily, my company has a Work From Home policy, which means I can have an extra couple of hours with the baby every so often (no need to commute, I still work my full days - we've a home office, door closed = don't come in) meaning my wife can get the odd unexpected lie-in, or take some time out if she needs it.

The baby was exclusively breastfed, and while talk of expressing and freezing milk is great and all, sometimes it's just not possible (if the baby is a very hungry baby, or there's some issue with the production rate of milk etc), but when it si possible, it's so good to be able to do the night feeds at the weekend or the nights where I know I'll be working from home the next day.

My wife took the 6 months (topped up by her company), and then the extra unpaid, but the company pro-rata'd the money, so there were no months where income was drastically down - now the baby has to go to childcare, wife on a 4-day week to save a bit on that, but it's a drastic expense either way.

efb · 24-02-2015 02:00PM

Neyite wrote: »

Not true I'm afraid, nowhere does it state that its to recover from birth. Maternity leave is designed to facilitate breastfeeding until recommended weaning age - currently that age being 6 months, as recommended by WHO. Before these guidelines, Maternity leave was 16 weeks. My colleague who has third level aged children only got 16 weeks maternity leave. Because breastfeeding was recommended until 16 weeks then.

So, because its framed to facilitate breastfeeding, it is a gendered benefit, and probably why men don't get a share of it. Though I dont see why, with more awareness of expressing and freezing milk, that it cant be changed.

So currently you get statutory maternity benefit until the six month mark, and can opt to take a further 16 weeks unpaid. Employers can choose to top up this payment to equal your salary but thanks to recent austerity, many have chopped this staff benefit, so already a couple look at a significant drop in monthly income for the first six months because the mother may only bring in the statutory maximum of €262 per week.

Its not really feasible for most couples to take unpaid leave. Not only would you be down an entire paycheck for those months, you also may have had a drastically reduced one for the six months prior to that, so were already on a shoe string with additional costs involved with a new baby. Then when you do go back, you are walloped by massive childcare fees, so your disposable income never recovers. Add into that the unpaid leave you take when you have a sick child - all the bugs and snotfests, teething and earaches that they succumb to, in that regard, kids are expensive.

I'd love to see the swedish system gender neutral system come in here. It's main points:
Parents get paternal leave, paid for by the government, not the employer. It depends on circumstances but usually works out at about 80% -90% of your normal pay.
Parents get 480 days, with an additional 180 days for twins.
Parents are encouraged to share the leave equally, incentivised by a further equality bonus, or you can transfer a share of your days over to your partner.
A sole parent qualifies for the full 480 days.
During the first three months, the father gets an additional 10 days to spend at home with his partner and child.
The employer can reduce your work week by 25%.

The fact is, we have an ageing population, more and more families are having less children than they may like, purely because of financial constraints. Who will then grow up to pay taxes into our pension pots. It makes sense to invest now to reap the rewards in years to come.

As well as that, a truly equal system will absolutely do away with any gender bias in the workplace. If two married thirty-somethings are both equal candidates for a job, anecdotally in a lot of workplaces they plump for the male over the 'child-bearing age' female because of the hassle involved in covering maternity leave. But if the male candidate posed potentially the same hassle, it levels the playing field. And that's before we even start on the benefits of men getting to spend more time with their babies and toddlers.

My partner would have loved to been able to share my maternity leave. He was very hands on and was able to do everything for the baby and home bar produce milk. The days are gone where its assumed men are incapable of changing a nappy or putting on a dinner. Thankfully. And it's about time the likes of maternity leave was changed to reflect that.

This seems excellent and I would support the addional taxes needed to fund this

rainbow kirby · 24-02-2015 02:00PM

You can share the leave in the UK from the start of the new tax year onwards - but there's a cultural shift that needs to happen too. The concept of men looking after their own children seems to be absolutely alien to some and employers still think less of men that avail of paternity leave.

24-02-2015 02:07PM

Dravokivich wrote: »

Since when? The only things I saw mentioning a father getting this sort of leave was due to the death of the mother.

I've heard a number of new parents discussing it lately and advising people expecting about the fact that if the mother goes back to work then the father can take her paid maternity leave. I'm pretty sure the people I heard discussing it knew what they were talking about too.

One context was a teacher about to give birth, where it would make more sense for her husband to take her leave as she will be off for the summer anyway.

Carawaystick · 24-02-2015 02:08PM

Neyite wrote: »

Not true I'm afraid, nowhere does it state that its to recover from birth. Maternity leave is designed to facilitate breastfeeding until recommended weaning age -

This might hold up if there wasn't maternity leave only for adoptive parents, where there would be no breastfeeding.

24-02-2015 02:12PM

Mod

Being particularly pedantic is akin to trolling as it does nothing but wind up posters who are otherwise having a perfectly level discussion.

If you are unable to post without winding other posters up, please refrain from posting at all.

Thank you.

Neyite · 24-02-2015 02:31PM

Carawaystick wrote: »

This might hold up if there wasn't maternity leave only for adoptive parents, where there would be no breastfeeding.

And maternity leave is granted to mothers of stillborn and dads who's partner have died and they don't breastfeed either.

Statutory maternity leave is six months long, correlating with the WHO recommended weaning age. This action plan recommends that legislation regarding protection of breastfeeding during maternity is strengthened, suggesting that they are already in place, along with other measures to encourage and normalise breastfeeding.

The Peanut · 24-02-2015 02:31PM

Neyite wrote: »

I'd love to see the swedish system gender neutral system come in here. It's main points:
Parents get paternal leave, paid for by the government, not the employer. It depends on circumstances but usually works out at about 80% -90% of your normal pay.
Parents get 480 days, with an additional 180 days for twins.
Parents are encouraged to share the leave equally, incentivised by a further equality bonus, or you can transfer a share of your days over to your partner.
A sole parent qualifies for the full 480 days.
During the first three months, the father gets an additional 10 days to spend at home with his partner and child.
The employer can reduce your work week by 25%.

It would be brilliant if there was any movement from the government in this direction.

My wife stopped working for 7 years to facilitate us having a family and allowing her to be at home and look after the kids. In each instance - 3 kids - I took 2 months parental leave after the birth. We both wanted to be fully hands-on with them and it is a very important bonding time during the first few weeks with the baby at home. It's also very important to help with the general running of the house and ensuring that the older kids are not denied time with parents either.

In all instances, we had no salary coming into the house. Obviously, we wouldn't have done it if we couldn't afford but it would have been much easier financially if there was some degree of financial support in the form of paternity leave. It would offer up some great options for new parents. They are not small for long and the additional time with them was brilliant.

Being away from work was great too.:D

TheQuietFella · 24-02-2015 02:39PM

keithclancy wrote: »

In Germany they call it 'Parental Leave'

Excluding the actual time for recovery from birth, the Man or Woman can take parental leave for Children.

This would be better for women as they would not be at a disadvantage due to taking long breaks in their work history.

This is a child they are bringing into this world.
It's not a cat or dog that you can leave out in the back garden & leave it fend for itself until you return from work!
I would advocate that women take all the time necessary to be with their child during their early development.
Work can't or shouldn't be that important or if it is, you shouldn't be having children as your priorities are in the wrong place.

The Corinthian · 24-02-2015 03:28PM

rainbow kirby wrote: »

You can share the leave in the UK from the start of the new tax year onwards - but there's a cultural shift that needs to happen too. The concept of men looking after their own children seems to be absolutely alien to some and employers still think less of men that avail of paternity leave.

This.

Caring for children is still considered a woman's role. Socially, a stay at home father is still thought of as somehow not fulfilling his role as a provider - or incapable - and women who work are often vilified for not fulfilling their role as a mother. Both genders do this.

The law does not help in this regard as it makes it clear that a father is little more than an assistant to the mother at best, if not simply a financial resource. The default position of a father, if unmarried, is he has no legal right to take care of his child - he's a legal stranger, on a par with a babysitter. He has the 'right' to pay child maintenance and that's about all.

Add to this the common ratio of custody awards in separations (where the mother will still get custody even if the father was the carer), differences in maternity / paternity leave and so on and you have a very clear message that it's not a man's job. As a result the vast majority of child care is carried out by mothers, not fathers.

There's a price to this and that price is that women's careers will naturally suffer. The danger of their taking maternity leave will affect their chances of employment (many small firms simply cannot afford to hold a place for them, they're an easy demographic to identify and so easy to discriminate against). And if they take a few years out to raise the child before school starts, then that lost time will affect their pay as they will have several years less experience upon reentering the workplace.

It's not rocket science really and backed up by the facts, in that childless women in their forties and women in their early to mid twenties out-earn their male counterparts.

One solution is to go down the positive discrimination route, introducing things like quotas and the like. But outside of the dubious effectiveness of such measures it really only serves a 'cake and eat it' approach to the topic. The other, much harder, solution is to change those legal and social barriers to making child care a gender neutral concept.

Introducing paternity leave won't do this alone - when the Germans introduced it take up was tiny, because it was still perceived as a woman's job. Ultimately the whole system has to be changed.

Unfortunately there's not much interest in that, from what I can see. Too many vested interests.

Wompa1 · 24-02-2015 04:10PM

Elly_Welly wrote: »

My husband gets 10 days paternal leave from work.

Which means for 10 days, I've 2 babies to feed!

When men grow (functioning!) breasts, call me.

You go girl!!

Although, it might say more about you that you had a child with somebody you consider to be a child himself. Mommy complex?

Elly_Welly · 24-02-2015 04:13PM

Wompa1 wrote: »

You go girl!!

Although, it might say more about you that you had a child with somebody you consider to be a child himself. Mommy complex?

Not a child, but a poor cook.
Other than that, he's all man

Dravokivich · 24-02-2015 04:14PM

Elly_Welly wrote: »

Not a child, but a poor cook.
Other than that, he's all man

Tell him to get a microwave or go hungry the next time so :pac:

Maternity Leave - equal rights

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