If you don’t guess from the term, “maternal profiling” is the practice of discriminating against women on the basis that they have, or they are likely to have, or you think they are likely to have, children at some stage during their employment with you.
I found this quote particularly interesting:
“Everything has gone too far,” said Sugar. “We have maternity laws where people are entitled to too much. If someone comes into an interview and you think to yourself ‘there is a possibility that this woman might have a child and therefore take time off’, it is a bit of a psychological negative thought.
“If they are applying for a position which is very important,” he continued, “then I should imagine that some employers might think ‘this is a bit risky’. They would like to ask the question: ‘Are you planning to get married and to have any children?'”
This seems, to me, to look at the problem from completely the wrong angle. He’s saying: “Women should have to choose between working and looking after (or having) children”. Or, possibly, he’s saying: “Women cannot be trusted to be consistent or tell the truth, and will take off and have kids at the first opportunity, just to screw their employer over.” Actually, probably both.
But he’s not only saying those things. He’s also saying that “Men should have to choose between working and looking after children.”
Of course, his worldview does not admit of the possibility that a man might want to make that choice (and that’s part of the problem with the assumption that women can’t be trusted – the assumption that men can be “trusted” doesn’t take into account that they may actually want to make a different choice).
In other words, the problem is not that women have the choice to take maternity leave. The problem is that only women have that choice (and therefore women get discriminated against on the basis that they might make that choice). I’m not talking about the law here, as I’m not sure what the law actually is in the UK about men taking parental leave. I’m talking about the culture.
And just to make it clear: I’m not talking about the sort of leave that is necessary for the act of giving birth and the recovery thereafter – clearly, that sort of leave is only relevant for women, but that is less controversial. The leave I’m talking about is the time (usually at least 6 months) that a parent (and in our culture, usually the mother) might take to look after a young baby more or less full time.
It seems to me that if we opened this choice up to men – legally and culturally – there are two possible outcomes. This would not eliminate (or even, necessarily, reduce) maternal profiling right away, but I think it would go some way towards it. Of course, it’s likely that employers like Alan Sugar above would complain about how awful it was that you could never know if an employee (male or female) of child-bearing age might suddenly want to take time off to have kids, but if it applied to everyone, at least it would reduce the opportunity for discrimination. On that ground, at least.
[…] been thinking about parenting in various ways lately, kicked off by various posts. I’ve even written a couple of posts. These have mostly been to do with the roles of mothers and fathers, the societal […]