More Equality, More Babies
So apparently the White House is soliciting ideas to persuade women to have more children to raise the birthrate.
Does anyone else have that feeling you got at school when you opened the exam paper and the question you were 100% prepared for is there?
Do we have ideas? Oh yes, we most certainly do.
Make it possible (and appealing) for women to have a child and a career. Don’t force her to choose, because if you do many women will choose to leverage their intelligence, education & capabilities in a career.
This means paying her enough money to cover childcare costs and to leave her enough afterwards to make it worthwhile working. Most women don’t have the option of a childcare-providing partner.
So it also means providing an excellent and affordable Childcare system that covers the full working day
Stop viewing children and childcare as the woman/Mum’s responsibility. In a dual parent situation, it is the 50:50 responsibility of both parents. It simply isn’t possible to be fully responsible for the kids and to have a successful career. There aren’t enough hours in the day. Men don’t do both, women can’t either.
This means we need gender neutral workplace policies that treat women & men, Mums & Dads equally.
With priority number 1 being gender neutral Parental leave. Give Dads the same leave as Mums - it would change everything if a man is as likely as a woman to take months off.
Stop thinking of flexible working policies as ‘Mum policies’. Make working from home, hybrid working & flexible hours equally accessible for everyone.
And this has to be gender neutral policies in practice, not just on paper. So managers need to respond to a man requesting parental leave or flexible working exactly as they respond to a woman: which means no raising eyebrows and questioning his commitment to his career.
Finally, the most basic. Make women in the workplace feel safe to be pregnant and take maternity leave. Do not make them feel they will come back to a lesser role, or no role at all. Support them in every way you can. Be like the manager who responded to his Director’s pregnancy news with a promotion and a pay rise, to make sure she was perfectly positioned on her return.
Those who believe that controlling women and resisting gender equality will keep them in the home having and caring for children have got it very wrong. For many women, it will have the entirely opposite effect. Less Equality, fewer babies - More Equality, more babies.
It is natural for many women to want to have babies and families. It is also natural for many brilliant, intelligent, capable women to want a career.
The solution is to enable women to be parents and have careers. Which means we need to enable exactly the same for men.