Image: Pregnant man, by Gaetan Lee

The Australian Government announced paid parental leave on the weekend, effective from 2011.

There are some flaws in the scheme (18 weeks, what happens after, etc…), but overall, I was pretty darn happy about it. Others, not so much.

Take one of my Twitter followers, who responded to my fairly benign endorsement of the scheme with a tirade including such gems as:

Why should I as an employer have to paid for you to fulfill your desire to have children? It doesn’t contribute to my business.

And:

Why should there be policies for that? Why should women b treated different to men? They’re not an endangered species.

And:

why can’t they just have their kids if they want & then return and compete equally with everyone else -male, female, young, old

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his response comes more from annoyance about single people subsidising families than from a lack of empathy for women.

Nonetheless, I find his framing of having kids as a “choice” women make… odd, to say the least. Most of the time, the decision to have a child is something two people make - it’s just that the woman disproportionately bears the burden of that choice. Hence the reason a lot of people - myself included - tend to frame this debate in terms of paid maternity leave, and policies to help women in he work place.

I’m sure a lot of men’s rights activists would jump at my throat on this, citing alimony payments, ex-wives who won’t let them see their children, and so on. And there are a lot of awesome, highly involved fathers - amongst the current generation of dads, especially.

But biologically, it’s the woman who does the work of carrying the child in her body for nine months, and pushing it out of her body at the end of that duration in what is usually an extremely painful experience. I’m sure pregnancy has lots of great things about it too, but I’d still classify it as physical work, and as physical work that only one gender is capable of performing.

Women also continue to perform much of the social labour around children. They’re far more likely to take time out from paid employment to care for them, whether for three months or fifteen years, and they suffer a serious loss in lifetime income because of this (which puts them up shit creek if they get divorced). If they do go back to work, it’s hard to stay on the same career track they were before - whether because they’re working part-time, or because of the bizarre tendency to see women with children as less skilled post-motherhood rather than more. Then there’s the guilt, whether internal, external or both, that many experience for being away from their children for 8 (or 10 or 12) hours a day.

Now, I’d be happy to hand all (or at least part) of this stuff to men. To make a mutual decision to have a child not fall so much on women’s hands. But since the biological side of things is ours only for the time being, we have the long-awaited possibility of paid maternity leave.

PML, admittedly, is but a very small part of the solution to the issues I’ve laid out above. It’s equally about creating workplaces that recognise the hard work their employees put in while they’re there, but also appreciate that both men and women, families and singles, have lives outside work - and which don’t predicate success on 60 or 80 hour weeks. It’s also about changing the way we conceive the domestic sphere, so that both men and women are happy to contribute their share.

In such a world, babies and the caring of them would not “just” be a “women’s issue”.