Women should be able to enjoy taking a full year’s maternity leave without feeling guilty about being away from work for too long
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER, Hillary Clinton’s former aide, is under fire for saying a year’s maternity leave is too long for a woman to be away from her desk.
“You can really fall behind in a year. It’s too long out of the workplace,” she said, causing some people to think she was encouraging women to put work before maternal bonding.
But that’s only half of the picture.
What she went on to say was this: “My ideal would be the woman takes six months and the man takes six, and they divide that however they want.”
I’d add that in an “ideal world”, the man would have the baby!
It would be the end of civilisation as we know it as men couldn’t cope with one contraction let alone a whole labour. But I digress.
Slaughter’s point is that both parents need to bond with the child and both parents need to understand what it takes to be parents and workers.
I couldn’t agree more.
Although, as she said, Slaughter is talking about an ideal world — certainly not one that currently exists in the US — where maternity leave policies are back in the Dark Ages with many women lucky to get six paid weeks off work after having a baby.
Here, we are more evolved, with women entitled to a year of statutory maternity leave and some employers providing six months of full pay during that period.
Given that, statistically speaking, companies with women on the board do better than those that don’t, hopefully employers are waking up to the fact that if they want to have access to 50 per cent of the workforce, generous maternity leave policies ultimately make them a better company.
For the past two years, we’ve also been entitled to “shared parental leave”.
It’s just that, one year into the new policy, only one in 100 men were taking up that opportunity. I’m sure the reasons for that are complicated but I reckon a big one is that childcare is still seen as, “women’s work”.
Even so, my view on maternity leave is that women should take as much as they want — and be encouraged to do it.
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If you want to take the full year then you should, and you shouldn’t let anyone talk you out of it — certainly not with the logic that you’ll fall behind in your career.
Yes, it’s a financial sacrifice to lose your full salary temporarily, but you will be so grateful for that first year with your baby and nothing will ever bring it back.
I should know. The biggest regret of my life is going back into the office when my daughter was only three days old.
Of course I could have taken longer but I put myself under immense pressure for my working life to continue as if nothing had changed.
I thought it was “the right thing to do”. So, three days after producing another human being when I should have been lying down in a cosy bed recovering, I went to work because I had to have a meeting to sack one manager and meet another one.
A few hours into the second meeting I went to the bathroom and noticed two huge wet patches on my jacket.
As I’d been in a room full of men, no one had said a word.
It was a lonely moment and one in which I wondered what on earth I was doing back at work!
Of course, 21 years ago the term, “work-life balance” hadn’t been invented so a lot has changed for the good.
But there is undoubtedly still pressure on women to return to work quickly if they want to stay “on top of their game”.
But let’s face it, unless you are a neurosurgeon or a UN negotiator, the world will probably keep turning and no lives will be lost if you take your full allocation of maternity leave.
Don’t forget that a career lasts a lifetime.
So if you take your full year of maternity leave, please don’t feel guilty about it — be grateful.
And enjoy every minute of it. Because, take it from one who knows, if you are a working mum deciding whether to sacrifice the Nativity play/sports day/assembly for another important meeting, there is plenty of time for all the guilt later on.
Harmony sets the bar too low
SO, the race to complete the world’s first “sex robot” is getting closer to the finish with the invention of Harmony, a female robot who can tell jokes, hold a conversation and quote Shakespeare.
My, haven’t we come a long way since the humble blow-up sex doll? The inventors of Harmony say that she will be more like a companion than a mere sex doll.
Meanwhile, some people have applauded the concept of sex robots by saying they will stop some men raping women which, I have to say, is dangerous thinking.
Of course, no one could dispute the idea that anything that saves women from being raped is a good thing.
But I have a serious problem with the logic that the solution to rape is to encourage men to act out their fantasies on a literal sex object.
Isn’t it better to encourage men to question why it is they want to rape women in the first place in a bid to stop them entertaining those fantasies – let alone acting them out, either on a woman or a robot?
One rule for the menfolk
ISN’T it funny how French Presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron was forced to deny a gay extramarital affair back in February?
I guess the logic is that because he is married to a woman 25 years older than him, he must be hiding something – like a gay affair.
Meanwhile, of course, President Trump (and millions like him) married a younger woman and no one bats an eyelid.
Traffic Warden goes too far
I’M a big believer in doing your best at work but I think the traffic warden who prioritised ticketing an illegally parked car over helping the unconscious driver inside it took job diligence a stage too far.
Restoring faith in humanity
HOW warmed were your cockles by the sight of marathon runner Matthew Rees helping fellow competitor – and complete stranger – David Wyeth over the finish line after he basically collapsed, above?
After all that training, Rees chose that, rather than be selfish and go for his best time, he would help someone else complete the race when they otherwise wouldn’t have.
I know there are lots of bad stories about what people are really like but to me that says something about the true spirit of human nature.
What a guy.
Nap-ercise is a real thing
FINALLY, I’ve found a gym class I can get into: Nap-ercise.
What exactly does it consist of?
A blissful 45 minutes of peaceful, candlelit snoozing under a cosy blanket.
Normally, I avoid gyms like the plague but for this I’ll make an exception: Sign me up, please! And . . . relax.