Samantha Jenner was a true corporate high-flyer; by the age of 36 she was a
senior manager at a blue-chip organisation with international clients, a
300-strong team working under her and glittering career prospects.
When she announced she was pregnant with her first child four years ago there
were celebrations all round and she went off for six months’ maternity leave
believing she would be fully supported on her return to her high-powered
role. She was wrong.
“There had been a lot of changes within the organisation while I’d been away,”
she said.
“No-one told me anything when I got back; it took me a week to realise that my
responsibilities had been rearranged completely.” Jenner worked hard to
reestablish her relationships with the international stakeholders she
represented but found she had been stripped of her managerial
responsibilities.
“My old team members were all reporting to other people,” she said. “My job
didn’t seem to exist.”
Last week the conclusion of a legal battle between the Giorgio Armani group
and its former employee Sarah Vince-Cain was a reminder that situations like
Jenner’s are not rare. Vince-Cain won £120,000 in compensation for unfair
dismissal and sex discrimination after she was pushed into a lower-level
role and eventually sacked after her second maternity leave.
The news that the Giorgio Armani group had failed in its High Court appeal
against the verdict came on the day that Nicola Brewer, chief executive of
the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, warned that equality laws may
now be holding women back at work.
“There has been a sea change on maternity leave and flexible work and we
welcome that,” she said. “But the effect has been to reinforce some
traditional patterns. The Work and Families Act has not freed parents and
given them real choice. It is based on assumptions, and some of the terms
reinforce the traditional pattern of women as the carers of children.”
Brewer said her concerns that these days women of childbearing age might be
overlooked when applying for jobs had deepened after the millionaire
entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar said some employers discarded CVs from such
women. “We have come a long way but after winning all these gains it is
worth asking: Are we still on the right track? “I worry that current
legislation and regulations have had the unintended consequence of making
women a less attractive prospect to employers.”
Research by the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality between women
and men, revealed that 30,000 women a year were losing their jobs because
they were pregnant.
Anecdotal evidence also suggested that Brewer was right to feel worried. In
Samantha Jenner’s case, her rapid ascent of the career ladder was
undoubtedly stalled by taking six months’ maternity leave, and when she
became pregnant again – during a time when her employer was in the middle of
restructuring – she decided to accept a period of gardening leave and quit
the company for good.
She now runs her own textiles business and consultancy. Amanda Alexander is
the founder of Corporate Mothers, a maternity coaching company and HR
consultancy that advises businesses on how to retain working mothers.
She said: “There are too many highly trained professional women who just drop
off the career ladder. Many of the women who come to my seminars say that
their careers have stagnated after they’ve gone part-time or tried working
from home.”
Alexander suffered a similar fate in her previous career as a project manager
in the IT sector. “I asked to work four days a week but my employer refused.
Soon afterwards I was made redundant,” she said. “I’m sure the business
reasons for it were sound but I did wonder if it would have been the same if
I hadn’t asked to go part-time.” Even when the part-time option is
available, it can mean accepting a reduced level of responsibility that can
hinder chances of future promotion.
Claire Scott chose to return part-time to her job in events management when
she had her first child 10 years ago. “From my own experience I would never
recommend it,” she said. “You end up squeezing the work of a full-time job
into fewer hours and I was always aware of the difficulties it caused my
colleagues, who had to wait for me before things could progress.”
Eventually, frustrated by her reduced role in the decision-making aspects of
the business, she left to go freelance.
“Going part-time was my own choice, so I feel fairly philosophical about the
path I took,” said Scott, now 41. “But it is frustrating in a way when I
compare my career to my husband’s. He’s been making steady progress over the
last decade, while I’m probably stilla rung below where I was before I had
children.”
Some organisations, however, seem keen to create the right environment for
staff with family commitments. BT has a 97% return rate for women after
maternity leave and a reputation for promoting women to senior positions.
Dave Wilson, BT’s head of people and policy, said the ethos was as
advantageous to the business as to the employees. “The statistics might say
that one group is likely to have a higher turnover than another, but if you
decide not to recruit from that group you reduce the talent pool,” he said.
“Flexible working helps us to attract and retain the most talented people.”
It also saves BT about £500,000 a year in recruitment costs because it does
not have to find and train replacements for the working mothers who might
otherwise leave. Not all companies have the capacity for such flexibility,
though. Smaller businesses inevitably find it harder to cope when a member
of staff takes maternity leave and some concede that any further changes to
the law could make them think twice about recruiting women.
“The real problem is the uncertainty,” said Mary Bough-ton, who runs a small
herbal-medicine company that has a staff of 12. “Not knowing when or if an
employee might return to work until the term is up has a huge impact.” She
believes that Brewer’s fears are well founded.
“For small businesses a further extension of maternity leave might be very
difficult to cope with. That could be the point at which the law designed to
protect women really does begin to disadvantage them,” she said.
