Ideas@TheCentre
Through the glass ceiling back to the glass floor
There’s nothing like an old-fashioned battle between working mums and their stay-at-home sisters, especially when a glamorous and high profile mother like the editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, weighs in.
Shulman argues in this week’s Daily Mail 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.
Family friendly work arrangements are, in principle, available to both mums and dads. But they are overwhelmingly used by women. Maternity leave can be renamed ‘parental,’ but the new label doesn’t necessarily mean men are rushing from the boardroom to the playground.
Shulman fears that employers will notice this and discriminate against young women when hiring or promoting. Bosses will assume that a man (or a woman well past childbearing age) won’t ask for parental leave or a three-day work week a few months into a new role.
Advocates of mothers’ rights in the workplace argue that the solution is to encourage dads to play a more active role in parenting. If employers see men and women take up flexible work provisions in equal numbers, they won’t have any reason to discriminate against mums.
But this view has only had limited success. Although gender roles are gradually changing, both men and women have proved remarkably resistant to social change when it is foisted on them by well meaning governments and sociologists.
New pro-family National Employment Standards will come into force in January next year in Australia, and may inadvertently lead to the sort of anti-mum discrimination that Shulman warns about. If so, don’t be surprised if high profile businesswomen start weighing in with their own warnings about women crashing back through the glass floor.
Jessica Brown is a Policy Analyst with the Social Foundations Program at The Centre for Independent Studies.
