Is That a Ceiling I See Before Me?

Pay audits are a start – but the real way to end gender inequality would be to increase paternity leave

I’m getting to that age now where friends of mine are starting to have children on purpose. Personally, I don’t want them. Certainly not at the moment – my flat is so tiny they would have to live in a draw under the TV and that would mean getting rid of the West Wing box set.

However, I happily appreciate that not everyone thinks like me – many people want children and increasingly I’m noticing (certainly among the people I know – who I grant you are not a fully representative spectrum of humanity) those that want children the most are male. A lot of women I know don’t want children – or seek to put off having them for as long as humanly possible – because of the penalties that come with them. I’m not talking about the sleepless nights and the nappies (although personally those are enough for me) I’m talking about the damage to your career.

A couple of years ago I went for a string of job interviews. It’s currently illegal to ask someone whether they plan to become pregnant, but you wouldn’t know that to speak to employers. There are many ways it can be asked: straight out, sly (“so you’re married?” followed by lengthy meaningful pause, arched eyebrows and sideways glances), or downright obtuse (“would you consider yourself to have a good work-life balance? Do you see that balance changing in future?”).

I refuse to answer the question out of solidarity and the belief (formed by years of working alongside extremely productive parents) that having children is no more disruptive – and, I’m told, much more worthwhile – than any other consuming hobby like binge drinking and recreational drug use. And let’s face it, no one ever asks you in an interview “do you often find yourself vomiting in the gutter?” It’s sexism, pure and simple.

And that’s before you even get a job and find out that your male colleagues are earning up to 47 per cent more than you in the case of some city jobs (that figure, from a recent EHRC inquiry into City earnings, includes bonuses). So Harriet Harman wants to bring in the equality bill, a bill that will address disparities in earnings through the naming-and-shaming of mandatory pay audits. The Tories are against it, business leaders are against it – of course they are, they’ve been getting cheap labour for years, slave owners didn’t want to give up slavery either.

But let’s go back a minute to something more fundamental – to the meaning of equality. Equality has to work both ways. At the beginning of this article I said that many men that I know want children. Many of these broody men say they would happily give up their jobs or go part time to raise children. Only they can’t, because their entitlement to paternity leave is pathetic in comparison to their partner’s maternity leave. If it’s a gay couple the problem is even greater. Men and women do not have equal childcare rights.

Surely the quickest way to kill both carrion-pecking vultures with one stone would be to make maternity and paternity leave equal? The current myth among employers is that women who are 25-45 are more likely to “let you down” than men. What if the law was changed so that anyone in that age range could be a potential “disappointment”? Sure, it would probably lead to a virulent new breed of ageism but it could radically reduce the opportunities for sexism. It would also test equality in all areas of life and prove that men really do want the caring role they have been prevented from for so long.

If the equality bill does make it through parliament and become law before the next general election (which is looking harder than a camel passing through the eye of a needle) – men and women’s pay may become more equal, but until we remove the real barriers to equality, people will always find an excuse for sexism – against either sex. It’s time we stopped viewing women as a liability and it’s time we stopped viewing children as an inconvenience to business. I may be no fan of them personally, but I was a child once, and so was the head of the IoD and the CBI.