Maternity Leave

TEL AVIV — Advo­cates of gen­er­ous parental ben­e­fits for female employ­ees for­got some­thing:

With women now enti­tled to a year off for each child, Nicola Brewer, the chief exec­u­tive of the Equal­i­ties and Human Rights Com­mis­sion [in Great Britain], said employ­ers were think­ing twice about offer­ing them jobs or promotion.

She said that her con­cerns were under­lined when the entre­pre­neur Sir Alan Sugar said that many employ­ers sim­ply binned CVs of women of child-bearing age.

She now feared that plans to extend the right of par­ents to request flex­i­ble work­ing hours until their old­est child was 16 would only exac­er­bate the problem.

“There has been a sea change on mater­nity leave and flex­i­ble work and we wel­come that. But the effect has been to rein­force some tra­di­tional pat­terns,” she said.

The pri­mary func­tion of a busi­ness is to increase its value for its own­ers and share­hold­ers. In other words, it exists only to make money. Everything else — from being good “cor­po­rate cit­i­zens” to pro­vid­ing a pleas­ing work envi­ron­ment to help­ing women bal­ance work and home life – is sec­ondary. Any­thing that inter­feres with the pri­mary func­tion will be changed or elim­i­nated. (It’s not a bad thing unless the change is ille­gal or immoral – it’s just the way that busi­ness works.) If a group of employ­ees are not work­ing as much (or as well) as other employ­ees, then the busi­ness will fire them or avoid hir­ing sim­i­lar peo­ple in the future.

I worked briefly as a writer for a Jerusalem com­pany, and most of the employ­ees there were Ortho­dox or ultra-Orthodox Jews. As a result, most women were fre­quently preg­nant or recov­er­ing from preg­nancy. One mem­ber of a newly-created team was eight-months preg­nant, but our boss still decided to bring her on board. After two weeks, we she gave birth and went on mater­nity leave for months. So it was a com­plete waste. By the time she came back, we had built a whole depart­ment from scratch, and it was up and run­ning very well. She had no idea what we had done, and it would have been impos­si­ble to bring her up to speed.

If I had been the man­ager, I would never have hired her for the team at the begin­ning. But I must emp­hazise some­thing: I would not have been act­ing out of some irra­tional hatred of women or chil­dren; it would have been a cold, ratio­nal busi­ness decision.

And it seems that I’m not the only one who feels this way. As Vox Day, a lib­er­tar­ian colum­nist and blog­ger who is most astute when he dis­cusses gen­der rela­tions, com­ments on the same article:

I remem­ber when my mother was run­ning an HR depart­ment, and it was her prin­ci­ple to only hire women under the age of 30 for posi­tions that weren’t career-oriented. It didn’t mat­ter what the young woman said about her plans; she’d seen too many women who swore up and down that they intended to con­tinue work­ing sud­denly change their plans after get­ting married.

It may be sex­ist, but it is also real­is­tic. Fem­i­nism has indeed helped West­ern women in many ways, but the fan­tasy that sex­ual organs are the only sub­stan­tial dif­fer­ence between men and women has wreaked havoc on soci­ety in another major part of life in addi­tion to the work­place — the dat­ing arena.