How addressing the ‘motherhood penalty’ could solve the gender pay gap

As com­pa­nies around the world are urged to “break the bias” this Inter­na­tion­al Women’s Day (IWD), they must also look at the bar­ri­ers in place that make equal­i­ty progress painful­ly slow. 

There was a mea­gre 1% growth in the num­ber of women in senior man­age­ment roles between 2018 and 2020, as report­ed on 7 March by the Women in Finance (WIF) Char­ter. That comes on top of a decline in the num­ber of women in exec­u­tive posi­tions in the UK over­all, down to 13.5% in 2021 from 14.2% in 2020, as pub­lished in the FTSE 100 Women Lead­ers report last week. Mean­while, the over­all gen­der pay gap in the UK cur­rent­ly stands at 15.4% — an increase from 14.9% in 2020. 

To break the bias — the theme of this year’s IWD – we must break the bar­ri­ers that cre­ate it. Let’s face it, most bias­es against women are because our lead­er­ship and man­age­ment skills – as well as career com­mit­ment – are called into ques­tion because of fam­i­ly respon­si­bil­i­ties. Such ques­tions rarely seem to come the way of work­ing dads.  

“When I had dis­cus­sions with enter­prise cor­po­rates before Covid, the atti­tude was, ‘we can’t hire mums because we need them full time and they have to be on site all the time.’ Flex­i­ble and remote work­ing wasn’t an option,” accord­ing to one tech indus­try train­ing con­sul­tant. 

Indeed, 72% of women in the tech indus­try believe their careers are still suf­fer­ing due to child­care and fam­i­ly respon­si­bil­i­ties, accord­ing to a sur­vey of 100 female tech lead­ers con­duct­ed in March by Lon­don Tech Week. 

It’s a telling stat that quan­ti­fies how women are con­tin­u­al­ly fail­ing to climb over the bro­ken mid­dle man­age­ment rung of the lad­der across indus­tries, accord­ing to many who spoke to Racon­teur for this arti­cle. This stair­way to nowhere has cul­mi­nat­ed in a life­time gen­der pay gap of around 20%, which the Asso­ci­a­tion of British Insur­ers has cal­cu­lat­ed as the actu­al cost of the “moth­er­hood penal­ty”. 

Mind the gender pay gap  

By analysing an ‘unad­just­ed pay gap’, we can see the dif­fer­ence between men and women’s earn­ings in a busi­ness over­all. It’s impor­tant to get this per­spec­tive – an ‘adjust­ed’ pay gap looks at like for like roles, but is ille­gal and being addressed by most rep­utable com­pa­nies.  

The unad­just­ed gap usu­al­ly under­lines how most cor­po­rate influ­ence and wealth is still held by men. They sail over that bro­ken rung, while it crum­bles at women’s feet when our career paths con­verge with fam­i­ly. 

Tech giant Sales­force, for exam­ple, reports a 30% aver­age pay dif­fer­ence between men and women. This ris­es to 49% when you look at bonus­es, a sim­i­lar fig­ure for Face­book, which reports an 11% medi­an gen­der pay gap. But a num­ber of com­pa­nies, like soft­ware com­pa­ny Buffer and chal­lenger bank Mon­zo, are able to report unad­just­ed pay gaps in sin­gle dig­its.  

The com­mon denom­i­na­tor is the num­ber of women in senior roles — an issue for Sales­force, Face­book, and no doubt huge num­bers of big com­pa­nies. How­ev­er, it’s some­thing Buffer and Mon­zo are man­ag­ing to increase, and cru­cial­ly, is help­ing to shrink the pay gap. 

Get­ting more women into senior roles and fix­ing that bro­ken mid­dle rung needs “a fun­da­men­tal shift in approach” that sim­ply isn’t hap­pen­ing fast enough, as Avi­va CEO and WIF cham­pi­on Aman­da Blanc stat­ed on the release of the Charter’s report. An action plan is need­ed to curb the esti­mat­ed 30 years required to achieve gen­der par­i­ty at senior lev­els in this indus­try. That action plan includes the pub­li­ca­tion of C‑suite bonus­es, adver­tis­ing all jobs as flex­i­ble, full pay equal parental leave, child­care facil­i­ties and ben­e­fits pack­ages to sup­port women at key life stages, such as menopause.  

Policy and culture 

Recog­nis­ing where hard pol­i­cy can and should be used to negate that moth­er­hood penal­ty does two sig­nif­i­cant things. It acknowl­edges the prob­lem and sets a sus­tain­able, replic­a­ble prece­dent for rec­ti­fy­ing it, in a way that no amount of diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion (DE&I) train­ing, bias aware­ness or con­fi­dence build­ing could ever hope to do. 

These efforts need to be redi­rect­ed towards the ori­gin of the moth­er­hood penal­ty: parental leave, the ele­phant in the room and the obvi­ous first bar­ri­er that shapes women’s career paths for years to come.  

Indeed, the WIF Charter’s sur­vey of 100 of its sig­na­to­ries found that just two weeks of pater­ni­ty leave was stan­dard, com­pared with 20 weeks of mater­ni­ty leave — the base­line where the gen­der pay gap begins, argues Nic­ki Pritchard, man­ag­ing part­ner at exec­u­tive search firm Ander­son Quigley. She has just over­hauled the company’s ben­e­fits pack­age to include equal leave of three months full pay then three months half pay for all new par­ents. 

“It’s point­less if we’re not sort­ing out the under­ly­ing issues. The gen­der pay gap comes down to such a log­i­cal thing. You sit down with your part­ner, and you say, who’s mak­ing the most, and it becomes a no brain­er as to who should stay at home [on parental leave],” Pritchard rea­sons. 

“Unless we’re deal­ing with this at that lev­el, we’re nev­er going to see men tak­ing more parental leave.” 

If only rolling out equal parental leave were as straight­for­ward as Pritchard’s argu­ment. How­ev­er, it’s mired in both cor­po­rate and soci­etal norms. Equal parental leave essen­tial­ly dou­bles a company’s parental leave bud­get and there’s no guar­an­tee men will take it.  

There’s an “unspo­ken rule” that men shouldn’t take full pater­ni­ty leave, accord­ing to 62% of work­ing fathers sur­veyed by Vol­vo Car USA, with 67% believ­ing it’s a “badge of hon­our” for men at their com­pa­ny to take the least amount of pater­ni­ty leave pos­si­ble. Tak­ing paid time off where it’s avail­able might seem like a no-brain­er, but hun­dreds of years of the caregiver/breadwinner dichoto­my are hard to shake, and that fear of los­ing career momen­tum – the same risk women face when tak­ing career breaks to take care of chil­dren – is all too real and risky.  

“Women in the past were just expect­ed to take time off to raise chil­dren. Many times this was detri­men­tal to their careers because when they returned, they were up against men who took no time off,” notes Ben Rich­mond, the US coun­try man­ag­er for small busi­ness soft­ware firm Xero. “If we start to take a non-gen­der approach to parental leave, we can lev­el the play­ing field for women and move past the stig­ma that can be asso­ci­at­ed with tak­ing time off to care for chil­dren.” 

Xero now offers a gen­der-neu­tral pri­ma­ry carer’s leave of 26 weeks full pay, which Rich­mond plans to take when his first child arrives in July. While a sec­ondary leave pol­i­cy of six weeks still seems to be the most pop­u­lar option among new fathers in the com­pa­ny, Rich­mond hopes that set­ting such a pub­lic exam­ple will help turn the tables. 

Changing expectations 

Sim­ply offer­ing equal parental leave doesn’t change years of expec­ta­tions about men’s roles, acknowl­edges Han­nah John­son, glob­al exec­u­tive direc­tor at Blue State Dig­i­tal, a mar­ket­ing agency known for its cam­paigns around Barack Obama’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and for equal mar­riage rights. The com­pa­ny offers 12 and 18 weeks ful­ly paid pater­ni­ty and mater­ni­ty leave respec­tive­ly, with 100% take-up across new par­ents in the past two years. It’s a gen­er­ous pater­ni­ty pol­i­cy for the adver­tis­ing indus­try, in which parental leave poli­cies vary huge­ly. It also reports a sec­tor-wide pay gap of 17.8%, ris­ing to 25% in some indi­vid­ual agen­cies. 

“We more often than not default to women as the pri­ma­ry car­er tak­ing off 12 months ver­sus it being a dis­cus­sion and active deci­sion that ide­al­ly it would be. But there are lots of oth­er sys­tems and beliefs that have to change around a pol­i­cy for it to grow and become wide­ly adopt­ed. It’s now about under­stand­ing the bar­ri­ers to uptake and work­ing to break those down, too,” says John­son. 

That’s some­thing that fel­low mar­ket­ing agency M&C Saatchi is work­ing through as it reviews its parental leave pol­i­cy to “encour­age more equi­ty across all par­ents”. The agency cur­rent­ly offers 20 weeks mater­ni­ty leave at full pay, along­side a pater­ni­ty pack­age of two weeks at full pay and a four-day week for the next 18 weeks at full pay.  

Man­ag­ing part­ner Annabel Mack­ie says it’s a huge leap in the male psy­che to go from the expec­ta­tion of two weeks parental leave to six months, some­thing the pack­age is designed to bridge.  

“Crit­i­cal­ly, there is a cul­tur­al change that needs to hap­pen with­in busi­ness and with­in soci­ety. Busi­ness­es have to make that change hap­pen with poli­cies and more gen­er­ous pack­ages, but we need more senior sec­ondary car­ers – more often than not, dads – to take longer, extend­ed parental leave, and we need oth­er men to see these sec­ondary car­ers doing it, and it not neg­a­tive­ly impact­ing their careers,” Mack­ie observes. 

So long as dou­ble stan­dards around care­giv­ing and work pre­vail, so too will the gen­der pay gap. It will take bold busi­ness­es and indi­vid­u­als to step out from behind hash­tags and invoke change right at the heart of the issue.