‘I am absolutely livid,” fumed my friend. A headhunter, she had just been told
that a woman she had placed with a top FTSE company had taken a year’s
maternity leave, come back, begged for a promotion (telling the HR
department threateningly that she didn’t want to be ruled out just because
she had a small child), got the promotion and two months into her new job
announced she was pregnant again and would be taking another year off. The
HR department boss was unhappy but could do nothing. The woman was within
her legal rights.
“It just takes the piss,” said my friend. “Behaving like that just makes it
much more difficult for the rest of us.”
My friend is not a dinosaur, she is a mid-thirties working mother who recruits
men and women into senior jobs all over industry: “Every time a woman does
that, it makes it that much harder for me to put forward a female the next
time. Women who abuse the system give all of us a bad name.”
Her words were ringing in my ears last week when I saw that City bigwig
Nichola Pease (deputy chairman of JO Hambro capital management) had given
evidence to the Treasury select committee. “We have got to be realistic and
make sure the protection around women doesn’t end up backfiring,” Pease said.
“A year’s maternity leave is too long. What I worry is that legislation and
protection turn this into a nightmare. We’ve got to be realistic and make
sure the protection, which has a very good motivation, doesn’t end up
backfiring.”
There is no doubt that particularly in small companies the new rights on
parental leave are causing serious headaches; it is not just the likes of
Sir Alan Sugar who are thinking twice about hiring women who might have
babies. Sylvia Tidy-Harris, 48, runs womenspeakers.co.uk and has a staff of
four. “I avoid hiring women of childbearing age at all costs,” she says. “I
don’t advertise because there are so many regulations that you can’t ask
anyone anything and if you don’t give someone a job because they are
pregnant they can sue you.”
She says the costs of taking on temporary staff through an agency while a
woman is off on maternity leave are prohibitive (sometimes doubling the rate
paid per hour), but if she gives a new person a contract, this brings its
own problems: “If they are good you have to send them packing when the
mother comes back; and when women do come back they can ask to work flexibly
and that’s a nightmare as I need full-time. I’m not a child hater, the law
has gone too far.”
There are 5m small businesses in the UK employing about 12m workers, so what
they think matters. What you hear again and again is the lack of choice
employers now have. The law forbids companies from asking a woman on
maternity leave what her plans are, presumably so she doesn’t feel pressured
to come back before she is ready. But the reality is that, law or no law,
mothers in competitive fields know that if they take the full year the mummy
track beckons; the only mothers I know who have taken a full year off are in
the public sector. On top of that, if you are the main breadwinner then
being off longer than the number of weeks you will be fully paid (about 24)
won’t work financially, however tempting it might be.
Of course, daring even to say any of this enrages the sisterhood. Pease, who
has three children and is married to Crispin Odey, a hedge fund boss
(together they are worth £204m), has been attacked for not knowing anything
about women who “don’t have a £10m cushion to sit on”. But if small
businesses won’t hire premenopausal women because of the equality
legislation, then that will hurt millions of low-paid ladies.
Despite the good intentions, these rules are doing more harm than good. It
seems crazy to me that your employer can’t ask you even vaguely how long you
are thinking of having off; or that women can accept senior jobs without
having to so much as mention that they won’t be around to do them.
It is crucial that we as a society get this legislation right; there are now
172,925 female undergraduates and only 141,643 male ones. Mothers in the
workforce are here to stay.
I can’t help wondering whether it is up to the state to say how much time
mothers should take off. I can see that if you had an ill child or were
returning to a job you loathed, then 52 weeks might be tempting. But many
women don’t want to be off work for a year: one friend went back to the City
after two months — she missed the adrenaline; another was on the phone to
her boss from the delivery room; another pal took a crucial meeting two
weeks after having a caesarean. They didn’t have to, they chose to.
Now that was not my choice; I took six months off with both of my births
(admittedly the prospect of sitting quietly at my desk with a coffee was
rather blissfully appealing when I was stuck at home with a two-year-old and
a newborn — about as knackering as it gets). And even admitting that will
get me into enormous trouble with some mothers out there. This is amazingly
emotional territory. It goes to the heart of the way women choose to live
their lives.
The whole point about feminism was that it gave women choices. Some women
choose to work, others to stay at home, some work part-time, some resume
their careers when the kids go to college. Many women work to keep a roof
over their heads. No one’s situation is perfect and often the price of
“having it all” is feeling stressed and exhausted.
I remember when I had my first baby, a Colombian friend came round: you don’t
know how lucky you are, she said. In Colombia, as in America, maternity
leave is 12 weeks. I thought of her a few weeks later when, on holiday, I
started talking to the young American couple next door. The mother was
miserable. She had returned to work full-time when her daughter was 12 weeks
old and was missing her desperately. She loved her job but it involved
travel and long hours. She couldn’t see how she could continue and be a
mother. I gave her a hug, feeling rather guilty; there I was happily back in
my job, working flexible hours, having had six months paid leave.
I am very grateful to the working women who came before me and fought so hard
to get the employment legislation that enabled me to be a good mother and
have a career. But just because I am grateful doesn’t mean that the pendulum
hasn’t now swung too far in our favour. When I hear of women abusing their
hard-won rights it makes me furious. With rights come responsibilities.
British women have got a great deal — if we exploit that deal, we’ll lose it.
eleanormills@sunday-times.co.uk
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