AUGUST 19 ― For all the praise we heap on mothers, while vilifying women who prioritise their careers, we’re surprisingly silent on the issue of pregnant women who face discrimination at work.
According to the Women’s Aid Organisation’s Workplace Discrimination Survey, more than 40 per cent of women say they encountered job discrimination because of their pregnancy.
Employers purportedly made the positions of pregnant staff redundant, denied them promotions, placed them on prolonged probation, demoted or even fired them. About one-fifth of women’s job applications were rejected or they had their job offers revoked when they disclosed their pregnancy.
What’s worse is that Malaysian women don’t seem to be aware of their rights as only one out of eight who lost their jobs or promotions because of their pregnancy lodged formal complaints.
There is no legislation against gender discrimination at the workplace, unfortunately. Prospective employers aren’t prohibited either from asking interviewees about their marital status or pregnancy plans.
Besides enacting the necessary laws against gender discrimination, we need to review our approaches to parenthood and work.
Currently, civil servants in Malaysia get 90-day paid maternity leave. Female civil servants are also allowed to take unpaid child care leave for a year at any time.
Private companies, however, generally only offer female workers 60-day paid maternity leave, although some give longer leave, such as Digi (six months), Nestle (minimum 14 weeks), and IBM Malaysia (90 days).
While it’s good to give mothers more time with their newborns, we should look at parenthood and childcare responsibility as a team effort between both father and mother.
It’s counter-intuitive to give working mothers extended leave while ignoring fathers, as this would only lead to female employees spending even more time away from work, thus potentially slowing down their career progression.
The UK offers parents up to 50 weeks of shared parental leave, 37 weeks of which is paid at 90 per cent of an employee’s average weekly earnings or £139.58 (RM732.55) a week, whichever is lower. The remaining 13 weeks of leave entitlement is unpaid.
Parents in the UK decide how to share the leave, which critics say will only lead to “business as usual” as mothers whose partners have higher pay will likely be the ones taking the leave.
Sweden has a much better system. Couples in the Scandinavian country get 16 months (480 days) paid parental leave. The father specifically gets 90 days on a use-it-or-lose-it basis, known as the “daddy quota”, which means that if he doesn’t take three months off, the couple as a whole will lose those months’ paid leave.
The daddy quota, which was first implemented in 1995, came about because women were still using 90 per cent of leave days two decades after Sweden, the first in the world, replaced maternity leave with parental leave in 1974.
In the 21st century, we should start talking about encouraging fathers to be more involved in childrearing. It shouldn’t be the mother alone raising the child during the formative years, while the father is forced to go to work.
Mothers also shouldn’t be the only ones taking time out from work whenever the kid falls sick.
Such a system only opens women employees up to discrimination when they opt for motherhood. Even if they are lucky enough not to encounter discrimination, staying away from work for a long time will make it more difficult to get back onto the career ladder.
So rather than tell women to do both childcare and her job (the Supermom is a myth that only hurts women), we should get men to be equally invested in raising their children.
This requires the government, the private sector and Malaysian society as a whole to have a mindset change about the roles of mothers and fathers, especially when young people of the current generation are already starting to have different approaches to parenthood.
My friend, for example, believes that it’s important for him to spend as much time as possible with his young daughter to create a bond. He’s fortunate that he can do it (and sometimes gets even more time than his wife with their child) because of job flexibility, unlike some of his male friends who have children.
Hopefully, more men will speak up and demand for parental leave so that we’ll have fairer child care policies in the workplace and more well-rounded families.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
