GIVING women a lengthy period of maternity leave could mean they miss out on highflying jobs, a new study has revealed.
Source: The Timesonline >> Read Full Article
Maurice Chittenden
The findings from three continents show that the more family-friendly a country tries to be, the less its women succeed in the workplace.
The report’s conclusions indicate that Harriet Harman, the equality minister, could harm women’s career prospects if she succeeds in raising paid maternity leave to a year.
The study shows that new mothers who have a year or more off before returning to work often hit a “maternal wall”. Employers assume they are not committed to their jobs and deny them the opportunities given to the childless.
British mothers are entitled to 39 weeks’ paid maternity leave but can take 52 weeks off in all. Harman’s attempts to extend the pay to the full year have been opposed by other ministers, including Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, who are worried about the impact on small firms. Lord Sugar, the enterprise czar, has said maternity laws are already too generous.
Next year the elite group of FTSE 100 companies will have five women chief executives when Alison Cooper, 43, takes over as the head of Imperial Tobacco. Across the country, women hold more than a third of managerial positions.
British women fare better on the career ladder than in Sweden where a woman can take 60 weeks’ paid leave. There only 31.6% of managers are female.
Both, however, lag behind the United States, which has no statutory paid leave. To qualify for 12 weeks off without wages, they need to work in the public sector or for a firm that has at least 50 other employees within a 75-mile radius. American women occupy 42.7% of the top posts in their country.
Australia is the only other developed country that has no paid maternity leave, although women will be paid 18 weeks of the federal minimum wage from January 2011. Its women occupy 37.1% of managerial jobs.
The study from the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm, Sweden, is entitled Why Are There So Few Top Female Executives in Egalitarian Welfare States? It says women in Anglo-Saxon countries where maternal leave is less generous climb higher up the career ladder than in Scandinavian nations where years of female-friendly legislation may have inadvertently disadvantaged women … Continue Reading
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