Duncan Fisher

I was busy writing my second blog on shared parenting when the debate about maternity and paternity leave took off.  Here is what I said to the journalists and policy people who have phoned me in the last two days.

The two changes - transferability of maternity leave to fathers and extension of paid maternity leave from 9 to 12 months - were firm commitments five years ago when nine months of paid maternity leave were put in place for mothers and two weeks for fathers.  The actual news is that one of the commitments has been dropped and the other has been kicked forward to be dealt with by the next Government.  The desk has been cleared.

Good, I am pleased.

The extension of leave for mothers, without an extension of leave for fathers, immediately precedes the increase in the pay gap starting in 2007, after years of progress towards equality.  This was predicted beforehand and I believe the connection is causal.  The currrent leave system has legitimised the idea that men have an entitlement to unblemished work and career prospects when they become a father and has legitimised the idea that the sole responsibility for nurturing children rests with the mother.  This is one of the biggest differences in paid leave entitlements between women and men in the world.  So I am happy that further extension of paid maternity leave has been stopped.  I do not think that stopping this extension will reverse the damage to women from this legislation, but at least we have stopped digging deeper.  We can start introducing more leave for mothers only when we have adequate leave for fathers; then, quite apart from the benefits that accrue from fathers being more active in caring for children, women will avoid the penalties of being the only parent expected to take time off work.

As for transferability, I am, frankly, rather bored by the debate.  It is a debate about empty gestures.  Government knows the system is not going to work anyway; it published its analysis of why not in 2004 (see paragraph 28).  Only 4-8% of families where the mother is eligible for maternity leave, are predicted to use transferability.  Partners of women who are not eligible for maternity leave will have no entitlement, whatever their employment status.

It is obvious why it won’t work.  What mother and father, after six months, want complete role reversal?  Very, very few.  But if the leave were flexible, then you would see something very different.  Take one conservative possibility of the millions that flexibility would make possible - perhaps mum on 2 days/week of work with 3 days maternity leave, and dad on 4 days/week of work and 1 day of leave.    In that arrangement, baby is only out of parental care 1 day a week, and the smallest amount of work flexibility could remove even that.  We need the leave system to be amenable to the boxing and coxing that is the stuff of life for parents of babies.

And why the transferability?  This is a nightmare to administer - someone has to track what both parents are doing.  Just let each parent have a period of leave, and then each can negotiate individually with their employer.

Then there is the problem of pay.  The leave is not well enough paid to be affordable by many families.  The unpaid component of the maternity leave is purely hypothetical - there is already three months of unpaid parental leave for each parent, but hardly anyone knows it exists because it is not affordable and not worth knowing about.  In the example above, the family might even decide that one day off a week for the father is not affordable, given all the other penalties he is likely to face by declaring to his employer that he is prepared to compromise work for something else.  I would rather see, for a specified sum of public money, less leave and more pay.

I also question the six month rule - that any mother wishing to return to work, even part-time, before the child is six months, is not allowed to use her leave to let her partner take care of the baby.  Human beings are distinct in the degree to which the care of infants is shared with kin; six months alone at home all day is a pretty tough call for mothers, going against how we humans are hard-wired to share this work.  Breastfeeding is often used to justify six months, but going back to work for short periods does not stop breastfeeding, and a father who has been well prepared to support breastfeeding can be the best person to look after the baby while the mother is at work.  I am not presenting this as the way to do things; I am just asking how it helps mothers to withhold this choice? (And, of course, there is the problem that most fathers are not well prepared to support breastfeeding, even though, in terms of bang for buck, this would be the cheapest way to increase the UK’s amazingly low breastfeeding rates.)

The shelving of changes to the leave system till the new Government means there is the opportunity for a real re-think.  If we introduce the currently proposed changes in 2011, it will take about five years to ascertain they do not work, then three years to introduce a change.  So by 2020, we will be starting to introduce a workable system.  Let’s save ourselves a decade and start the incremental process of building a rational system, starting with a sound foundation, based on what real families really need.

Fatherhood breastfeeding, gender equality, paternity leave, work

Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, gave a speech on the family on 8 July at Relate.

He said that it was important to support family relationships of all kinds and in all family formations.  He talked about the need at the present time to support relationships under stress from unemployment, repossession and debt.

He presented again the Liberal Democrat proposals for leave entitlements - 18 months of parental for parents between them (after maternity and paternity leave), with six months apportioned on a “use it or lose it” basis to each parent - similar to Scandinavian systems.

He devoted the latter part of the speech to fathers, calling for three changes: (i) better leave entitlements and more work flexibility for men; (ii) greater engagement with men by maternity services at the transition to fatherhood; and (iii) changes to child support, benefits, tax and housing to facilitate a father’s continuing caring role after separation.

Fatherhood Add new tag, family, fatherhood policy, LibDems, maternity, parental relationships, paternity leave, politics, separation, work

A father's place is in the home - at least some of the time?

So, it’s official.  The extension of paternity leave has been ditched.  The official reason is the recession, but the decision to delay an increase in paternity leave until after the next general election had been taken well before any recession was in sight.

There are two key points about the current situation that no commentators have pointed out.

First, dumping the change to paternity leave is not going to make much difference to families and children because the system was not going to work anyway.  Read more…

Fatherhood Fatherhood, paternity leave, work

10 minutes before sitting down to write this week’s blog, Jeremy from the Fatherhood Institute sent me this link to the latest Dad Labs video on paternity leave.  I just have to pass it on!    I think Dad Labs is one of the best websites in the world on fatherhood - it is worth seeing all the videos they produce, no less than four a week.  (They are all streamed onto the home page of www.dad.info too.)  Enjoy it!

Fatherhood birth, Fatherhood, paternity leave, USA

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?

Fatherhood birth, family, Fatherhood, fatherhood policy, paternity leave, work

Parents and work

The Good Childhood Report, as presented in The Sunday Times last weekend by its authors, points out that mothers work more than they used to and juxtaposes this with the statement that children are increasingly cared for by someone else other than their parents.

This wording was unfortunate.  We know that the media only holds mothers to be responsible for caring for children, both on the right and on the left.  And so the resulting furore was inevitable: a repeat of the same old debate about whether mothers should or should not work.  And, inevitably again, this leads to blaming mothers.  This debate is of extraordinarily little use to parents, most of whom have very little choice about whether they work or not.  There is a complete disconnect between the story writers in the media and the everyday experience of today’s parents.

The missing piece of the puzzle is fathers.  If we hold them to be responsible, like mothers, for regulating their time between work and home, then a new possibility arises - totally new to the media, a part of everyday life for nearly every family in the UK - the mother can work AND the child can be cared for by a parent.  Fathers already care for their children more than all professional childcare put together.  No researchers have yet found any evidence that fathers caring for children leave the children any worse off than if they are cared for by their mothers, provided that the father has the sort of support a mother would get in the community (which is not always the case).  (And it is important to distinguish between averages and individuals - in some families, the child is better off with the mother and in some families, the child is better off with the father. )

Fathers work a lot more than mothers and care for children less.  So it is the fathers’ work that we should be looking at first, if we are to get more parenting time for children.  Exactly the opposite of the media’s approach.

Debating fathers is a useful debate, because 70% of both mothers and fathers want more work flexibility and work flexibility is something that can be delivered if we shout hard enough for it.

The good news is that the Equality & Human Rights Commission is just completing a major study of work and family and this will declare that a fundamental priority for the future of work is that men and women both balance work and caring roles.  The focus will be on men’s work - that is where the biggest change needs to happen.

Legislation around leave entitlements in the UK is a disaster.  We have the biggest difference in leave entitlements between mothers and fathers in the world, contributing strongly to economic incentives for one parent to work full-time and the other to manage alone the balance between work and care of children.  That is what happens when we hold only mothers responsible for rearing children.   We are in a deep hole, with a system that is in continual positive feedback, driving parents into separate caring and working roles.

Fatherhood family, paternity leave, work

In June last year, Barack Obama gave the best speech on fatherhood that any politician in the world has ever given.  He spoke of his own fatherhood: “now my life revolves around my two little girls” and describes how his concern for them pushes him to think about poverty, racial equality, gender equality, international cooperation and climate change.   He was candid in his admission of his own shortcomings: “I have been an imperfect father…..I have made mistakes and will continue to make more; wishing that I could be home for my girls and my wife more than I am right now.”

Obama made a series of proposals in that speech which are now part of his family policy agenda, set out on the White House website.

Here are some of the highlights:

• $100m funding for fatherhood programmes and domestic violence prevention

• 24 hours of leave each year for parents to participate in their children’s academic activities at school; leave for workers who care for individuals who reside in their home for 6 months or more; and leave for employees to address domestic violence and sexual assault.

• $1.5bn to help every State to set up maternity and paternity leave arrangements.

• Promotion of flexible working to businesses – making the business case, helping business to change and financial incentives for telecommuting.

• Expansion of the Nurse-Family Partnership to 570,000 families a year.

Thanks to Chris Brown of the National Fatherhood Initiative in USA for tipping me off about this.

Here are some more things to enjoy from Obama’s oratory on fatherhood:

“Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important. And we are called to recognize and honour how critical every father is to that foundation. They are teachers and coaches. They are mentors and role models. They are examples of success and the men who constantly push us toward it.

“But if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing — missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.

“As fathers and parents, we’ve got to spend more time with them, and help them with their homework, and replace the video game or the remote control with a book once in awhile.

“We should be making it easier for fathers who make responsible choices and harder for those who avoid them.  We should reward fathers who pay that child support with job training and job opportunities and a larger Earned Income Tax Credit that can help them pay the bills.”

Here is the famous video of Obama’s girls proposing a new dog for the White House and accusing their father of leaving his work bag lying around.

Fatherhood fatherhood policy, paternity leave, USA

Nick Clegg is about to have another child and has used the occasion to criticise the amount of leave that fathers are entitled to when a baby is born - two weeks compared to 52 weeks for mothers, the biggest difference parents anywhere in the world.  It is magnificent to see male politicians declaring on these matters - Nick Clegg’s statement is the strongest appeal ever made in Parliament by a father.  (See BBC report.)

This is not only bad news for men who would like to spend more time with their children, it is bad news for women.  It may be illegal, but employers know full well that any woman of child bearing age could become a mother and claim 52 weeks off work.  Crucially, however, they rest assured that men will not do this. It is men not taking leave that is the problem, not that women are taking leave (after all, unlike men, they have to).  And so Government has created an enormous economic incentive for employers to discriminate against women.

An article on www.dad.info examines how workplace culture and economics play out in families, pushing mothers and fathers into different trajectories when a baby is born - the mother into the home and the father into work, where their positions rapidly become entrenched.

The only organisation of influence that has dared to point this out is the Equality and Human Rights Commission.  It dared to say that the key thing that needs to change to achieve gender equality is how men work.  The economic recession was the excuse used by Government to drop any effort to change the current system, so we can expect to see this new engine driving gender equality in operation at full throttle for the next 10 years.  Watch the pay gap go up.

Fatherhood fatherhood policy, LibDems, paternity leave, politics