Gender discrimination

After a lifetime in the law, and not a small part of it as an employer, I have been thinking about the constant drip, drip of gender discrimination cases which come before the industrial tribunals.

Employers know that certain questions cannot be asked of a prospective employee, the main one being 'do you want to have a family? when asked of a woman of the appropriate age. The problem is that, even though the questions are not asked, the thought is still there. The prejudice is not limited to men. Anyone in a management position where some employees are women, will have the possibility of maternity leave in mind quite frequently. Indeed, it would be a poor manager who did not consider the possibility.

The objective of removing gender discrimination in the workplace is one we should all strive to achieve. In order to do it we must try to understand the thinking of the one person who has the power to make it happen, namely the employer or manager. These people are under pressure to get results. Employing a first class woman who has a couple of long maternity leave absences makes it harder to achieve those results. In pretty well every employment situation the bottom line is cost. A key employee's absence has to be covered, which means employing a temp. With agency cots a temp may be more expensive. In any event, the temp will not be the original employee and will not start out with the trust of the employee/manager, not to mention work colleagues.

It is impossible to resolve the problems created by the need for a replacement who may not be as good or may not have other attributes which made the absent woman so useful as an employee. As a society we can resolve the problem of cost. Unless the employer is a small business, only 92% of maternity pay can be recovered. This means that the employer subsidises the laudable objective of maternity leave by 8% of the money paid to the employee on leave. For small businesses the regime allows for a full refund plus a compensation payment from the Inland Revenue of 4.5% of the maternity pay. Why not apply that rule across the board and, perhaps, do some research into the hidden cost to employers of having an employee on maternity leave and pay that in compensation too?

This would put the cost of the socially desirable policy of giving new mothers support right where it belongs, on society as a whole. It would remove some of the fears which come to the minds of employers/managers when they are recruiting staff. Younger women would have less hidden discrimination to deal with and, just maybe, employer/managers would stop thinking the question 'do you want to have children?'

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious | digg | reddit | newsvine | furl | google | yahoo | technorati | icerocket