Year-long maternity leave, flexi hours, four day weeks... why would ANY boss hire a woman?

By Alexandra Shulman for the Daily Mail

In this provocative and very personal article, Vogue editor ALEXANDRA SHULMAN argues that mothers' rights are making women unemployable...

Concerns: Alexandra Shulman asks whether government policies have lost sight of the real working place

Last week, I had a couple of days off. I spent a half-term afternoon with my son and wandered through the neighbourhood in search of ingredients for a slow-cooked sausage sauce for supper. Slow-cooked? Not a phrase in my usual domestic repertoire.



As I walked through the residential streets toward the shops, the world appeared surreally quiet.



There were women with pushchairs, the odd gang of teenagers, old men puffing cigarettes outside pubs - but to one used to the momentum of a bustling office at 3pm, it seemed both strange and stifling in its implacable ordinariness.

It reminded me of how alone I felt during my maternity leave when I was one of those women pushing my baby home from the park as dusk began to draw in.



That stroll encapsulated the conflicted way so many women feel about their working life and their need to balance home and family.



I treasured what for me was stolen time to be a mother and homemaker, yet it also made me appreciate the liveliness and richness that my work brings.



It is also the very issue that drives a stream of women into my office to discuss their futures, their maternity leaves, four-day working weeks, possible job shares, all now encouraged by recent legislation.



Nobody can legislate a route through the conflict between work and motherhood.



Nobody can predict the visceral love you feel for your children, the fear you have when they are small that when you are not physically there, they might come to harm.

Neither can laws help the sickening exhaustion of endless, sleepless nights combined with working days and the seeming impossibility of achieving success as a worker, a mother, a wife, even at times as a human being.

But while a slew of government policies are aimed at helping working women achieve a more satisfactory existence, are they not losing sight of the real workplace picture?



And are they ignoring the evidence, not documented but heard in the beat of the tom-toms if you listen hard enough, that some of this legislation might even be harming women's chances of employment?



I completely understand the decision of any woman to give up their job to stay at home with their children.

Who knew?

Under EU plans, women will be entitled to full pay for the first 18 weeks of maternity leave. The current UK entitlement is six weeks at 90 per cent of your salary

And it seems entirely reasonable that in many situations a woman who becomes a mother will want to trade in her role for something less demanding.



But what I don't understand is the idea that you should be able to keep exactly the same job, with all the advantages that entails, and work less for it, regardless of how that affects the office or colleagues.



I don't think I'm a monster. I currently employ a 90 per cent female staff on the editorial team at Vogue.



Of them, 98 per cent are of childbearing age. Babies, children, the possibility of children, the difficulties in conception, the problems once they arrive - that is the stuff of the water cooler debate around here.

Juggling motherhood and a career: Are women wise to try and do both?

I was in the same job when I had my one and only child in 1995. I took 18 weeks off. I remember when Sam was 12 weeks old, my boss called me to see 'how I was getting along'. He hoped I'd be back soon.

It was meant to be an encouraging phone call, but I, like so many other women in that situation, felt a bolt of panic. What if I didn't get back soon? Would they still want me? Would I still be able to do the job?



Legally, I and the several of my staff who were also pregnant could have taken longer off, but we all took the same length of leave and were propelled back to work by financial necessity and the sense that that was what one did.

To abandon our job for more time just didn't seem the right thing to do. My mother - a journalist, too - had three children in the late Fifties and early Sixties.



She took two weeks off and had to pretend to her male employers that pregnancy was a bit like flu - inconvenient and not worth discussing.



Yes, it would keep her away from work, but only for a few days. She recalls sitting in her hospital bed, post-delivery, with her typewriter 'tapping away on my slack stomach' and that the men she worked for were horrified that she was returning to work at all and had simply assumed she would stop.



But she needed the money and, equally importantly, enjoyed her job. Thankfully, we've come a long way from then. But have we gone too far in the other direction?



Nowadays, the majority of pregnant women I know take close to a year off, during which they are entitled to statutory maternity pay for up to 39 weeks. They return with the expectation and right to have their old job back after 52 weeks.

Except that, when they do return, many of them don't want exactly their old job back. They want the same role but moulded into a time frame that suits family life better.



They want to investigate four-day weeks, flexitime, jobshares, and they often then have another baby and are entitled to take another year off. But is this realistic?



Can the diversity of circumstances and job requirements mean that one-size-fits-all legislation works? Criticism of the situation is very much the view that dares not speak its name.

It's barely acceptable to write this piece at all - and probably impossible for a man.



I met a woman last week who heads up a small company. 'You're not allowed to say it, but the reality is that the maternity situation is a nightmare.



'Of course what happens is that the younger ones in the office step up to fill the gap - and,' she whispered, 'they're cheaper.



'At the end of a year, how much do I really need that person back?'

Successful fashion entrepreneur Anya Hindmarch, who has built her own business while bringing up five children, adds another dissident voice.



A full-time jobs means full-time work - not doing the school run as someone else solves the latest office crisis

'If we are not careful (and I speak as a mother and an employer), maternity leave and benefits will become too biased towards the mother and not considerate enough for the employer.



'In which case, it can start to work against women as it becomes too complicated and expensive to employ them. To me, it shouts of shooting ourselves in the foot.'



My own experience is, I realise, substantially different to most women's but, as all personal experiences do, it informs my opinions.



I had to work full-time. When I had my child I was the main breadwinner in the family, a family that broke down three years later, leaving me financing a London house and the three-year-old and a 14-year-old stepdaughter living there.



Working mother: Alexandra Shulman and her son

You might argue that the marriage broke down because I was working full-time in a high-profile job and my husband was not, but you would be wrong.

I employed a live-in nanny, and have continued to do so, because employing live-in help is cheaper than live-out and simply makes life easier if you work as I do.

I have never worked a shorter week, partially because I want the full salary to pay for the private education of my son, the help and the house we live in.



But it is also because I don't, at root, think it would be the correct way to do this job.

I realise that most people are not in the same situation. They can't afford childcare for their babies and their jobs neither pay so well nor are so fulfilling.

Who knew? 74pc of women in the UK without children feel they deserve time off equivalent to maternity leave, according to a poll

But it's not the workers on the factory line, the bank clerks, the farm hands or the Tube drivers who are successfully negotiating part-time deals or who are able to take a year's maternity leave and then return.



It's the young professionals, women who are the people I was 20 years ago.

'Flexible hours for full-time jobs' trumpets the website working mums.co.uk. But, hang on a minute, for many of us a full-time job means working full-time.

Poll Are greater rights for mothers making women less employable? Yes No Are greater rights for mothers making women less employable? Yes 10725 votes

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It doesn't mean being on the school run at 4pm on Friday when a work emergency breaks out, or making paper snowflakes with your four-year-old while a younger and undoubtedly worse paid and probably childless fellow employee is trying to solve a problem that needs to be dealt with now.



And how fair is it for a deputy to be promoted to cover a maternity leave only to be demoted back to their box on your return after a year?



It's a situation that is increasingly encouraging small businesses, individuals, or employers in small rural communities who simply can't work around an employee's year off and who don't have a pool of freelance cover, to look instead for women who won't have more children - or indeed men.

Of course, as employers we should all do our best to help women, and men, with their childcare.

I think it vital to be understanding about sick children and there are always going to be childcare cover crises where parents just can't get into work.



In my office, I can forget about getting anything much achieved during the nativity play season (and that includes the two dads) with sports days running a close second.



But while employers certainly should have a duty of care for their employees, shouldn't employees in turn have a certain duty of responsibility to their job?



How cherished does one feel as a boss by someone who is only at work nine months out of three years, the rest being taken as maternity leave, or by someone who - when resources are already stretched - forces a flexi-time deal?



Women have increasingly broken through that old glass ceiling with determination and, to be honest, helpful employment legislation.



As a result, many are now employers themselves. Let's not put that progress back by creating a world where the next generation of women workers becomes too inconvenient and awkward to employ and find themselves legislated back into the home.



