Is maternity leave holding back women in the workplace?

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – A provocative article in Maclean’s Magazine suggests family-friendly policies are hurting rather than helping the careers of many women.

The idea that you have to choose between being a “good mother” and having a successful career is not a new debate, but the magazine is focusing on what it calls a sacred cow in Canada.

“These family friendly policies that we have, like maternity leave, are what end up pushing more women out of the workforce,” says associate editor Tamsin McMahon.

“In Canada we have up to a year of paid leave with the bulk of that time split between the mom and dad. But in reality that has become a year off for mothers. This is widely seen as a good policy, supporting women in the workplace and at home. But when you look at some of the studies that have been done, it turns out that maternity leave is bad for women in the workplace,” she tells News1130. “That’s why we have a persistent gender gap when it comes to pay, it’s one the reasons we have the issue of the ‘glass ceiling’ where women will pull back or leave jobs in higher numbers than men.”

Maclean’s Magazine has framed the issue around the tug-of-war between being home with the children and being at work.

“You have women who truly want both and they take off for a year. The time they are off on maternity leave, they completely shut themselves off from work and the workplace moves on. When they return, they struggle to get back in — they’ve lost their clients, they’ve been largely marked as not being fit for promotion,” says McMahon.

She points out the economy has changed dramatically since longer maternity leaves were introduced in Canada, more women are entrepreneurs, more are self-employed, more are the primary breadwinner for their family.

“For many women it’s just not realistic to just turn your back on your career for a full year. Many of them are either taking a shorter leave and returning to work part time, many are working through their leaves combining caring for a new infant with doing some work on the side because they feel they need to stay invested in their career. Yet some women face a tremendous amount of judgement for doing that, they are told they are bad mothers for not spending all their time with their new infant.”

A 2010 study from TD Economics found that for every year a woman is off to care for children, there is a three per cent wage penalty, which can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a career.

“And this penalty doesn’t necessarily go away, you lose earnings by not getting a raise, not getting promotions and this can persist long after your children are grown.”

McMahon says there is no doubt it is important to take time to bond with and care for an infant, but a year long leave is not realistic for the modern economy.

“We’ve outgrown this and we need to take a different approach to the idea of work and family and being able to combine the two simultaneously.”

However critics believe there are problems with Maclean’s take on parental leave.

“It’s certainly a provocative title — ‘Is maternity leave a good idea?'” says Marjorie Griffin Cohen, a professor of political science and gender sexuality in women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

“I think there are a lot of problems with this. First of all, they looked primarily at women in law firms and women who find difficulty working 65 hours a week when they have children,” she tells News1130.

“Basically this whole notion that we somehow need to tailor maternity leave to fit people in the upper income brackets of the labour force seems very strange. It would have been better had the article looked at what maternity leave means for most women in the labour force. It really is incredibly important, particularly when we have so little in the way of subsidized daycare in Canada.”

Cohen says the only people who can afford infant daycare are the higher wage-earners and we often forget how important it is for parents to bond with their children, particularly in the early years.

“What is better is something like the much more flexible Quebec model which recognizes people with different kinds of jobs need different kinds of leave provisions. Quebec says you can either take a shorter leave at a higher rate of pay — as much as 75 per cent of your insurable earnings — or you can take it over a longer period of time at a lower level of pay.”

Cohen feels the model is the beginning of a solution to what has become a problem for women across Canada.

“Primarily, they alone are taking the brunt of raising small children.”

For the full article, check this week’s issue of Maclean’s, on newstands and iPad now.