From the EHRC's report - but what could you actually achieve with a laptop in such circumstances?!
Three cheers for the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The Report, Working Better, published today, is the best ever contribution to the debate about how parents share work and care and, in particular, the need to consider the role of ‘working fathers’ – a new phrase highly conspicuous for its absence until now.
“The needs of ‘working fathers’ are often neglected. There is little discussion of the constraints facing them, or of the economic penalty for being active fathers. Yet fathers’ active involvement in bringing up children is important. There should be an opportunity for everyone to create the right balance between life and work”.
The report’s critique of current work leave entitlements for mothers and fathers – very long maternity leave and very short paternity leave and an extreme difference between the two by international standards – is devastating.
“New parental rights introduced over the past decade are well intentioned but entrench the unequal division of labour and caring between the sexes and work against gender equality.” Current Government policy “conveys the message that it is primarily women who are responsible for the care of young children”. They are “pushing parents into difficult compromises, creating barriers to genuine choice, and hampering decisions about sharing work and care more equitably”.
The report also finds that a large number of men are also asking for flexible working – 40% of all requests under the current right to request legislation are from men – but finds that employers are much more likely to refuse requests from men than from women. This difference creates gender inequality “by confining [women] to part-time ‘Mummy track’ careers, with lower earnings, low prospects of returning to full-time working and perceptions of lower commitment to the organisation”.
This leaves both mothers and fathers frustrated. 60% of parents think fathers should spend more time with their children and half of fathers think they spend too much time at work.
The report makes radical statements about the importance of promoting active fatherhood. “The promotion of active fatherhood may well be crucial in removing the obstacles that prevent women from achieving their full potential at work.” The report presents the evidence of how children whose fathers spend more time with them do better. The report even introduces for the first time an intelligent discussion about the unequal sharing of housework between women and men, looking at the underlying economic causes.
The proposals for change would bring about the best of international practice, introduced over a long 11 year period. The enormously long maternity leave and its transferability to fathers – which won’t work anyway, as the report points out – should be scrapped. All leave after 6 months should be parental leave, eventually divided 4 months for mum, 4 months for dad and 4 months for either. All leave should be available much more flexibly – paternity leave, for example, would not need to be taken as a single block of leave. And all leave should be paid enough for it to be affordable. All this would “enable genuine choices for men to take up caring responsibilities and women to make fuller economic use of their skills”.
None of these arguments are new. They have been policy in other European countries for decades and have been debated for years in UK. But nobody as influential as the EHRC has ever made such statements. Will we look back on 2009 as the year we started digging ourselves out of the enormously big hole that we dug for ourselves in the last ten years, when we introduced leave entitlements that so actively reduce choice for parents, impede economic productivity and promote the traditional patterns of work and care that parents no longer want?
