Including men in maternity leave

Including men in maternity leave

I recently attended a women in business awards evening—one of my friends was nominated for an award and I went along, looking forward to hearing about inspirational women like her and celebrating how much we have moved on as a society and as business leaders. As the evening went on and each award nominees and winners were announced I began to feel more and more that something just wasn’t sitting right about the whole tone and couldn’t quite put my finger on what the issue was.

Yes, all these women were inspirational, and all had achieved success in their own fields and were also lauded for encouraging other women in the work place. Yes, it was good to celebrate this success. Yes, it was good that there was also a man there winning an award for how he had supported women in his business to work around children and return to careers after taking breaks to have children, but still… something wasn’t sitting well.

Then it came to me: all the focus was on empowering women in the workplace and enabling their return to work after a career break to have children and yes, of course all that is important, but if we as a society don’t include men in the same conversations, empower them to take a career break, and enable them to be flexible around childcare then the expectation remains on the women to adapt. This isn’t just a workplace conversation, it is a societal conversation. 

I remember clearly when I had my children, I worked around them and I was responsible for arranging the childcare, working around the childcare and ensuring my work life was flexible enough to do this—when I asked their Dad to change his schedule to stand in for me when I needed to attend a meeting, the response was ‘but I have a meeting?!’ as if I never had any of my own, and as if meetings can never be changed and that his was obviously more important (to put this into perspective, we were on an almost identical level in our career path before I had my children).

Now, I’m not saying all men are like this and I am hopeful that there has been a huge shift in attitudes in the last 20 years—in my business, I have many men who absolutely take equal responsibility for childcare and they are allowed the flexibility to do that, but I think on the whole as a society there is still the expectation that the one who needs the flexibility to return to work and be supported in this is the woman. I think we need to change the narrative somehow and this was missed at the awards event. I also fully understand that sometimes it is the woman herself who really wants to be the primary carer and let’s be honest, we are usually better at multi-tasking  (😊) so it’s probably easier for us to handle the juggling it takes to continue in a career while still being there for your children. But multi-tasking joking aside, there is a fundamental change needed with societal expectations around fathers equally adapting their working life when needed.

If some fathers still assume it’s the mothers responsibility and the workplace also has the same assumption that this is the norm, then women will always be juggling everything and therefore always be at a disadvantage in the workplace however understanding and accommodating their bosses are, because they are still shouldering more responsibility outside of their work life. This will absolutely impact their ability to rise to the top of their careers. It can happen: in Sweden men and women are given parental leave paid for by the taxpayers on a take it or lose it basis, meaning men are actively encouraged to split the parental leave allowed or lose the benefit—this kind of government intervention is actually forcing a societal change and it’s working. The government support also easier for businesses to allow that flexibility without it impacting on their bottom line too greatly. 

So, yes, the awards were great, the women nominated were inspirational and I don’t want to take away from any of that in any way. I would just like to see a change of narrative that includes both men and women in the same way so that it is more normalised and accepted for men to be taking equal share of parental responsibilities; it’s about empowering parents within a workplace and about changing the norm within our society. As for my friend, she is an inspirational lady with two amazing children, the only woman on the board of the accountancy firm she works for and deserved her nomination, but unfortunately she was pipped to the post by another equally inspirational lady who won on the night… maybe next year!