True lies about maternity rights

Writing on the Left Foot Forward website, Kate Bell, head of policy at Gingerbread, complains that I got my facts wrong on maternity rights. As a pressure group campaigner, it is understandable that she argues the case for longer maternity leave for women. She proceeds by quoting a selection of statistics on women’s employment, and asserts that these prove that maternity leave rights have changed women’s behaviour, encouraging more mothers to return to the jobs held open for them by their employer.

This is what everyone wants to believe, including the Department for Work and Pensions that commissions and usually publishes the relevant policy evaluation surveys, and writes the related press summaries reporting a dramatic increase in the rates of mothers returning to work.

A closer look at the results and other relevant studies, however, reveals a more complicated picture. As I’ve argued in Key Issues in Women’s Work, mothers’ rate of return to work has been inflated by a series of factors and adjustments made to the data that are readily overlooked by journalists looking for a headline finding:-

First, there is compositional change in the female workforce, especially among the younger women who predominate in these surveys of first-time mothers and mothers of a newborn. The proportion of women who are well-qualified graduates is steadily increasing, and the rise is fastest among young women, obviously. It is agreed that women who have already invested in professional careers are most likely to use the new maternity rights to return to their employers. However there is little change in the behaviour of graduates, nor in the behaviour of other women, the great majority, and hence among women generally.

Second, the government-commissioned evaluation surveys keep changing the date used as the reference point for a mother’s “return to work”—from 9 months after a birth, to 10-11 months later, to 12-18 months, or to 18 months after a birth. Obviously, the longer the lapse of time after any birth, the higher the percentage of women who will have resumed work at some point.

Third, the key policy question is not whether mothers ever return to work, but whether they return to the specific job held open for them by their employer—usually at some inconvenience to the employer. Even the first survey, in 1979, was uncomfortable about addressing this question. Subsequent surveys have ducked it, skating round the issue to talk instead about mothers’ return to work in the most general way. Any return, to any job, with any employer, including mothers who switch to a part-time job, or to a local job closer to home with a shorter commute – all are counted as a ‘return’ which proves that the legislation helps mothers.

But if a high proportion of mothers resign from their jobs during their maternity leave or soon after their brief return to work that persuades them they prefer to be at home with their child, then legislation is clearly not changing women’s behaviour. My calculations from the survey results reported suggest that there has been little or no change in women’s behaviour, with about half of mothers returning, and half not returning to the job their employer held open.

Fourth, and most important, the evaluation reports keep shrinking the basis for their analyses—from all mothers of newborns (the initial sample), to all mothers who worked up to the birth, to mothers who worked up to the birth and notified their employer they intended to return to their job, to mothers who continued working up to the birth and were eligible for maternity leave rights and/or maternity leave pay. As the reference group for an analysis becomes more narrowly defined, the proportion within it who return to work is steadily raised—but as an artefact of the analysis rather than because of any change in behaviour.

Given this constant pressure to deliver positive research results that prove the impact of government policy, the only surprise is that we have not yet seen 100 per cent “return to work” figures, at least not yet.

To get a real understanding of the overall picture, we have to turn to “blue skies” and other independent studies by academics. Hence I quoted the results of the Millenium Cohort Study, by far the biggest and most reliable source, which shows that even by the child’s third birthday, only one in ten mothers is working full-time, and around half have no paid job at all. The “return to work” is in practice often only temporary.

What Kate Bell chooses not to address are the studies by Swedish economists and others which show clearly that family-friendly employment schemes lead employers to avoid hiring and promoting women in the private sector; that Scandinavian countries have the highest levels of occupational segregation in Europe (apart from the post-socialist egalitarian countries that boast even higher levels); that the pay gap is no lower in Sweden than elsewhere in Europe; and all the other inconvenient truths about the impact of “gender equality” policies. There is nothing wrong with wishful thinking. But social science aims to deliver the whole truth, the whole picture, rather than the selective and partial accounts that support true lies and received wisdom.

References

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