Maternity leave has been firmly thrust into the spotlight this week, after web company Yahoo!’s decision to elect Marissa Mayer as their new Chief Executive Officer. Ms Mayer is currently pregnant, which has caused significant controversy and has re-opened the debate on how long women expecting children should be allowed to take paid leave from their commercial property place of work for.
Ms Mayer will receive a substantial annual salary to adequately compensate her for leaving Google, of which she was the 20th employee in the computing giant’s commercial property headquarters.
A statement released by Yahoo! regarding the wage of their new CEO says; “Ms Mayer will receive an annual base salary of $1,000,000, subject to annual review.
“She will also be eligible for an annual bonus under the company’s Executive Incentive Plan with a target amount of 200 per cent of base salary.”
Yet for the high salary, Ms Mayer will have a steep price to pay. As well as receiving only 20 days of holiday per year, she has maintained that even childbirth will not keep her from her new job as, although she will not be turning up at Yahoo!’s commercial property headquarters on a daily basis, she will continue to work through her maternity leave.
As she stated; “My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I’ll work throughout it.”
Commercial property employees in the UK are entitled to take up to a year of maternity leave – 26 weeks of Ordinary Maternity Leave and a further 26 weeks of Additional Maternity Leave. Altogether, these categories are known as Statutory Maternity Leave and commercial property employers must grant expecting mothers this time off work on full pay or risk legal action.
Yet there is an argument that this right is in fact damaging female employability in commercial property workplaces, especially in this time of austerity. Employers are keen to save money in any way they can, and by having to pay Statutory Maternity Leave, as well as covering the wages of temporary workers brought in to cover the workload.
This could go a long way in explaining why employers are becoming less and less willing to hire women, possibly accounting for the rising number of women currently without employment in commercial property workplaces. In a recent survey, in which 10,000 British commercial property business managers participated, 26 per cent claimed they wished to employ more women. Last year, that figure was 38 per cent.
Additionally, a third of participants stated their wariness of bringing female employees into the commercial property workplace due to the risk of having to provide them with fully paid maternity leave soon after they commenced work.
It is not only in the UK that women appear to be constricted by commercial property bosses’ hesitance regarding maternity leave, however, as studies across Europe conclusively prove. Sweden, for example, has long been revered as one of the most family friendly countries on the continent, with expectant mothers entitled to a 16 month break from the commercial property workplace in which to raise their young children.
However, scratch the surface and some rather disturbing figures surface – Sweden, as well as generous maternity leave, has the greatest levels of occupational segregation in Europe. In other words, the majority of women, mothers or not, tend to hold positions in lower-wage public sector businesses, while men earn higher wages in the private sector.
This is by no means an isolated incident, as campaigner for better maternity leave in the US Dr Sylvia Ann Hewlett points out. In her study of Euro/American maternity leave rights in commercial property workplaces, she states that longer term maternity leave can often “backfire”.
She says; “German employers were quite open about avoiding young women when they could. A mother of two could potentially take six years off work.”
German commercial property employees receive a maximum of three years paid maternity leave per child, one of the longest terms in the world currently.
Dr Hewlett continues; “One employer told me he regarded all women of childbearing age as ‘wombs in waiting’.”
Although it is illegal for commercial property employers in the UK to question a woman about her intentions towards starting a family as part of the hiring process, it cannot be denied that in these times of economic difficulty, bosses will be doing whatever they can to save their company money. The real question is whether maternity leave is benefiting women – or whether it is causing a whole new set of problems for women in the UK entirely.
Do you believe that commercial property employers would be hesitant to hire a woman of childbearing age due to maternity leave obligations? Or do you think that it is generally accepted that maternity leave is a part of the commercial property business routine?
