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The Guardian
16-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Going on maternity leave? Don't expect it to be a bundle of joy
When I started to approach my second maternity leave, five years after the first, my main feeling was not excitement or freedom but dread. That low, leaden kind of panic, which grew inside me alongside my son's new fingernails and feet. I'm thinking about it again, another five years on once more, as Radio 4's Emma Barnett publishes Maternity Service, a book centred around the idea that maternity leave has never been accurately titled. Instead of the holiday it's billed as, she writes, it's hard work. It's 'a period of leave from all you know: taking leave of one's mind, body, job and relationships'. And it's a period that 'doesn't end when or if you return to work. It's just the start'. I felt, back then, if not quite shame, then certainly, a sharp awkwardness describing my fears of maternity leave as my due-date neared. Because, really, I had it good. The fact I had maternity leave at all, and a job to come back to, felt like a privilege. In the UK up to 74,000 women lose their job each year for getting pregnant or taking maternity leave, a figure (reported by campaign groups Pregnant Then Screwed and Women In Data) up from 54,000 a decade ago. In America, women get no federal paid leave, no guaranteed financial support and no universal services. But beyond the practical, there is the idea that this is meant to be a simple and beautiful time. It's talked of as a blessing, a dreamlike window of love and rest and milk, but much of my first maternity leave was shadowed by loneliness and fear and a series of identity crises that crawled over me in the night, without work, without sleep, without time to wash my hair. I found it hard to remember what I was for, or who I was – nurses insisted on calling me 'Mum'. And I know that even those who didn't scrabble through grimly like this will have had days of boredom, or anger, or pain, or insecurity, watching their colleagues become enamoured with their replacement. In the same way that it has slowly become acceptable to admit, radically, that there are parts of parenting that aren't delightful, Barnett is insisting we acknowledge that, regardless of what people regularly tell new mothers, we don't, in fact, need to 'make the most of every second' of maternity leave. That there are parts of it that are simply shit and that's OK – it doesn't make you a bad parent to say this out loud, and it doesn't make you a bad person. I recently returned to the columns I wrote about that year, my closest thing to a diary, and was shocked to realise I'd been describing postnatal depression. I wrote of the baby, 'The thing I feel for her is physically painful. It's an awful love… A bruise being pressed, continually, by a strong thumb.' I was talking about the kind of love that was, 'two centimetres from grief,' an inescapable, destabilising thing that followed me round the early-morning east-London streets and unmoored me from the person I'd been. So I was determined to make sure my second maternity leave was different. After some gruelling administrative mishigas, eventually I got an appointment with a counsellor, scheduled for the week I'd go on maternity leave. We planned to talk about birth trauma, mental health and how to populate this maternity leave, so it felt as different as possible to my first. While there were many things I couldn't plan, there were some I could – I would schedule time alone, we would ensure our care responsibilities were split more equally, that sort of thing. Shared parental leave was introduced a year after I had my first child. It was designed to give fathers a greater role at home, but research by economists shows the policy has fallen flat, so it's still on parents to structure their families in equitable ways that, at the very least, don't leave one of them seething blankly at windows. Anyway, everything was in place. The baby was due, the counselling booked and then, the day my dreaded second maternity leave began, the country went into lockdown. All bets were off, we were spitting into the wind. And, despite everything – despite the five-year-old at home, despite my mum not being able to visit – the maternity leave itself turned out far better than my first, partly because everybody else in the world was similarly unmoored, and partly because it couldn't have been more different. Barnett is right – the cultural idea of maternity leave is not fit for purpose. There are plenty of things employers and government can organise in order to make sure it doesn't feel as though women are disappearing when they have a baby, including introducing real flexibility, legally required data collection to track how they're being treated around maternity leave and an enthusiastic embrace of paternity leave. And, of course, if women's postnatal bodies were celebrated, and their conflicting feelings around motherhood and identity were understood, it might be easier to advocate for policies that protect and support them. Maternity leave takes a strange bite out of a life. You leave work, you leave youth, you leave your body, somewhere in a room in Archway. You leave a part of yourself behind and are not sure for some time quite what's left. But while it's certainly not always the dream it's pitched as, there are plenty of opportunities to make maternity leave less of a nightmare. Email Eva at
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
This 1 Factor Might Be Behind 74,000 Women Losing Their Jobs Each Year
Two weeks after giving birth, Kate discovered she was being made redundant – it was a huge blow to her during what was already an emotionally vulnerable time. 'I had sorted out all my KIT [keeping in touch] days and when I'd be returning etc., and it was so out of the blue,' said the 32-year-old. Kate had been invited to join a Zoom call whilst still in hospital but didn't get the message until she was home. When she viewed it back, she said it was 'the CEO reading from a script telling me they were liquidising the company in the UK'. The mum claimed that a month later, the company was advertising for the same role with the same job description. Sadly her situation isn't unique. New research from charity Pregnant Then Screwed, in partnership with Women In Data, has revealed a rise in the number of women who are potentially pushed out of their jobs when they're pregnant, or on or back from maternity leave. Up to 74,000 women now lose their job for getting pregnant or taking maternity leave each year, according to the new report. In 2016, it was 54,000 – so an increase of 37%. Pregnant Then Screwed surveyed 35,800 parents and Women In Data extracted a nationally representative sample of 5,870 parents for its State of the Nation report. The report found that 12.3% of women are sacked, constructively dismissed or made redundant whilst pregnant, on maternity leave or within a year of returning from maternity leave. If scaled up to the general population, this could mean as many as 74,000 women a year are forced to leave their job. "To find that 74,000 mothers a year are being pushed out of their job for daring to procreate is not surprising, but it is devastating."Joeli Brearley Joeli Brearley, founder of charity and campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed, said: 'We have long suspected things are getting worse, not better. Our free advice line is ringing off the hook, it has reached a point where we simply cannot cope with demand. 'To find that 74,000 mothers a year are being pushed out of their job for daring to procreate is not surprising, but it is devastating. 'That's a woman being pushed out of her job every seven minutes in the UK for doing something that is part of the human existence.' The new report also found that almost half (49.5%) of pregnant women, those on maternity leave, and those returning from maternity leave said they've had a negative experience at work. Of those who had a negative experience, one in five (20.6%) left their employer. A third (35.9%) of women say they were sidelined or demoted whilst pregnant, on maternity leave, or when they returned from maternity leave. Yet just 2% of women who experience discrimination raise a tribunal claim. Under redundancy laws in the UK, pregnant employees, as well as those on maternity leave, adoption leave or shared parental leave must be offered a suitable alternative vacancy, if there is one. A new law came into force in April 2024 to extend redundancy protections to 18 months after a child is born. In a bid to raise awareness of the number of women potentially forced out of work during pregnancy and the first year after birth, Pregnant Then Screwed will be live-streaming a giant physical shredder which will be shredding the CVs of mothers and aired across a billboard in Westfield. The Juggle Is Real: What It's Like To Be A Working Mum I Couldn't Stop Yelling At My Kids. Then I Uncovered Something Surprising Was Causing It THIS Is The Eye-Watering Number Of UK Parents Going Into Debt Over Child Care Costs
The Independent
27-02-2025
- General
- The Independent
Increase in pregnant women losing their job, study suggests
Up to 74,000 women lose their job every year for getting pregnant or taking maternity leave, new research suggests. The figure has increased from 54,000 a decade ago, according to campaign groups Pregnant Then Screwed and Women In Data. Their survey of 35,800 parents found that 12% of women are sacked, constructively dismissed or made redundant whilst pregnant, on maternity leave or within a year of returning from maternity leave. The report estimated that this could mean as many as 74,000 women are forced to leave their job every year. Half of pregnant women, those on maternity leave, and those returning from maternity leave said they had a negative experience at work, leading one in five to quit their job, according to the research. A third of women said they were sidelined or demoted whilst pregnant, on maternity leave, or when they return from maternity leave, but only 2% of women who experience discrimination took a claim to a tribunal, said the report. Joeli Brearley, founder of Pregnant Then Screwed, said: 'We have long suspected things are getting worse, not better. Our free advice line is ringing off the hook, it has reached a point where we simply cannot cope with demand. 'To find that 74,000 mothers a year are being pushed out of their job for daring to procreate is not surprising, but it is devastating. 'In 2016, the coalition government commissioned a report to better understand how widespread pregnancy and maternity discrimination is. 'The report found that things had significantly deteriorated over the previous 10 years. Despite committing to repeat the research every five years, this has not happened. 'What sort of message does this send to women.' Taisiya Merkulova of Women In Data said: 'Collectively, we need to close the gender gap and remove the challenges women face to achieve equality of opportunities in the workplace and reduce burden of the unspoken 'tax' on mothers from additional unpaid labour as carers and in the home.' The campaign groups urged companies to increase their paternity leave offer, create family friendly workplaces, including advertising jobs as flexible and collect maternity retention data. TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: 'This is just plain wrong. No one should be losing their job as a result of getting pregnant. 'This is why the measures in the Employment Rights Bill, such as giving pregnant women and new mothers a period where they are protected from being dismissed, are so important. 'They will give greater protections to pregnant women and new mothers.' Government spokesman said: 'The law is clear, no-one should face discrimination at work because they are pregnant or are taking maternity leave. 'Despite this, we know that discrimination still occurs far too often. 'This is why our Employment Rights Bill, and subsequent regulations, will make it unlawful to dismiss pregnant women, mothers on maternity leave or in the six months after they return to work – employers who break the law could face a costly discrimination claim.'
