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Sometimes I feel as though I live in an alternate reality (granted, I am in Sweden right now, so mabye I am). Why this new bout of frustration and feelings of aliendom? An article in the July 14th Times Online entitled, “Equality Laws are now ‘holding women back.’” Apparently, Britain is extending its paid maternity leave from nine months to a year. This is supposed to do a service to women. What it really does, according to Nicola Brewer, the chief executive of Equalities and Human Rights Convention, is make them less attractive candidates for jobs and promotions. If you hire them, chances are they’ll leave anyway, right? Yes, right. A fertile woman with a new ring on her finger might be the last person I’d want to hire if I knew that I had to give her one year of paid leave when she starts having babies. Nothing strange about that.
 What is strange is that the law granting lengthy maternity leave is categorized as an “equality law.” There is nothing equal about it. Not only does it, as I think Brewer correctly assesses, disadvantage women by making them less attractive for hire, it discriminates unequivocally against men. And British fathers apparently have the least equal rights in all of Europe. Their two weeks of leave are measly in comparison to the mother’s 52. So, forget “equality laws.” These are laws perpetuating inequality. And, as Brewer notes, extending the exclusive leave for mothers had, “entrenched the assumption that only mothers brought up children and failed to hasten a social revolution where both parents were equally responsible for caring for their family.” A comment by Rory Ridly-Duff underlines the point, “The headline could have read 'family policy holding men back at home', rather than women at work.”
I couldn’t agree more when Brewer argues for fathers to have the same right to paid leave as mothers. Now that is an equality law. And, only when both men and women are likely to go on equally long parental leave will they become equal candidates in the eyes of employers. A truly equal hiring scenario is one where an employer looks at two CVs and doesn’t consider the parental leave issue, since both the male and female candidates may take as much time off.
BINGO! How can this be breaking news? Isn’t that obvious? Granted, even in Sweden, where men and women have equal rights to leave, women tend to take the longer time off. But that is changing. In the interviews that we conducted with young Swedish men they, across the board, claimed to want to split the 18 months of parental leave equally with their spouse when they have children in the future. If word leads to action, our generation of Swedes may finally reach a point where equality laws actually lead to equality.
Again, I realize I have kept my head buried deep in Lattice and Swedish sand for a while now, and may have forgotten how the rest of the world views parenting— or should I just say mothering?
But come on, guys. Wake up and smell the formula. - Astri Photo on Flickr by vonbergen.net under Creative Commons License.
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