Research has shown that when leave is paid women are more likely to take it. By comparison, unpaid parental leave schemes do little to reduce the disadvantage faced by women who need to take time off work when they have a baby.
Unpaid leave is also far less effective than paid leave in helping reduce the long-term disparity between male and female earnings (a gap of about 20 per cent), an inequity caused in a large part by the time women take out of the workforce to bear and raise children. Paid Parental Leave is a policy that reflects the fact that an increasing number of women are participating in paid employment, and it’s in everyone’s best interests to help them maximise their productivity.
These days, both individual families and the economy rely heavily on mothers, but the structures that support them as workers remain geared towards yesterday’s workforce, characterised by men at work and women at home looking after the kids.
In 1945 married women were 18 per cent of all women working 20 or more hours a week. By 1956 the proportion had risen to 32 per cent, and by 1971 they were 50 per cent of women in paid work. By 1996 76 per cent of mothers of teenagers were in paid work, as were 30 per cent of women with a baby under one, and 50 per cent of mothers of one to four year olds.
It is in the context of this new reality that the Labour-Alliance Coalition Government is set to introduce paid leave from the time of a baby’s birth or adoption.
