Opinion & Commentary
Crash the glass floor
There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned battle between working mums and their stay-at-home sisters, especially when a glamorous and high-profile mother such as the editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, weighs in.
Writing in Britain’s Daily Mail last week, Shulman argued that moves to enshrine and enhance mothers’ rights in the workplace threaten to undermine women’s success in crashing through the glass ceiling by making them virtually unemployable.
Shulman admits this is ‘the view that dare not speak its name’. Yet her comments echo those of Britain’s former Equality and Human Rights Commission chief executive Nicola Brewer, who last year cautioned that an increase in Britain’s paid maternity leave provisions could have the ‘unintended consequence of making women a less attractive prospect to employers’.
Governments throughout the Western world, including in Australia, are gradually introducing legislation aimed at making the workplace more family friendly.
In Australia, new national employment standards will come into effect on January 1 next year, several of which relate to job flexibility for parents.
Rather than one year of unpaid leave, new parents will be entitled to two, and both mum and dad will have the right to request flexible work conditions.
Family-friendly work arrangements are, in principle, available to mums and dads. But the reality is that they are overwhelmingly taken up by women. Shulman and Brewer fear that employers will start to notice this and discriminate against young women when hiring or promoting staff.
In an attempt to overcome this, several European nations have quarantined part of each family’s parental leave entitlement for fathers, who must ‘use it or lose it’. But the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that while many dads are happy to take the extra leave (often at Christmas or summertime), they aren’t necessarily making long-term changes when it comes to deciding which parent changes the nappies and which one brings home the bacon.
Australian governments so far have been reluctant to impose such family-friendly requirements on employers, probably because they know any absolute right of parents to demand flexible work would lead to the kind of anti-mum discrimination in the workplace Shulman warns of.
But it is still possible that Australia’s new pro-family national employment standards will have unintended consequences. If so, don’t be surprised if high-profile business women begin to weigh in with their own warnings about women crashing back through the glass floor.
Jessica Brown is a Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies
