Businesses pledge to battle discrimination against mothers

"Working Forward" asks them to take a pledge and offers the chance to "learn from the best" but will it amount to more than PR?

Businesses promise to tackle discrimination against maternity (PA Wire)

Big business has a rotten reputation in this country and it’s against that backdrop that the latest initiative aimed at cutting the quite disgraceful discrimination faced by women who get pregnant needs to be seen.

For the uninitiated, a group of leading businesses including Barclays, Ford, Royal Mail, BT Group, and the Nationwide Building Society are fronting a campaign under the auspices of the Equality & Human Rights Commission.

“Working Forward” aims to make workplaces “the best they can be for pregnant women and new mothers”.

Why is such an initiative necessary, you may ask? Well, that’s where it gets interesting. The EHRC touts figures which show 84 per cent of British businesses claiming that they support pregnant women and those on maternity leave. Despite this, some 77 per cent of mothers report having had a negative or discriminatory experience at work.

To address this businesses are importuned to take a pledge, demonstrate “leadership from the top down” and ensure “confident employees”. They are also urged to provide “training and support” to line managers, and here’s the clincher, to offer “flexible working practices”.

They’ll be able to draw on “the experiences of the best” while they're at it. One does rather wonder if the EHRC has checked out the tribunal records of those purporting to be in that category before holding them up as examples of good practice. Just a thought.

Look, the campaign's aims are laudable. They are also pragmatic. Businesses keep banging on about the so called skills gap that they face. Discriminating against women who have children - as large numbers do - only serves to deprive them of the skills they say that they need. It is ultimately self defeating and yet the majority of businesses do it all the same. The figures bear that out.

Their failures as regards hiring and looking after minority ethnic or disabled employees, failures I’ve written about before and doubtless will write about again, are different sides of what is the same coin. They all go to show that businesses have an awfully long way to go in respect of helping themselves as much as improving their dodgy reputations and shoring up social cohesion.

The trouble is it might just take breaking the habits of a lifetime for a legion of (largely male) managers to do what needs to be done. It takes a genuine willingness to be flexible, and to not do things like chaining people to their desks for 14 or 16 hours because project X just has to be completed regardless of whether Jane Doe can get childcare or not. Regardless of whether she might want and need to see her kids once in awhile. The same, it should be said, can sometimes apply to John Doe too.

“Working Forward” is a nice idea. PR departments will love it. But it needs to be backed up with more than just pretty words and promises while getting ministers (who adore initiatives that don’t require them to do anything) to cheer on from the sidelines. The very fact that Working Forward exists in the 21st century is actually an indictment of employers’ shameful past inaction. It would be nice to see a more progressive future emerging but I'm not holding my breath. We’ve been here before and people have been talking about the problem for years without anything happening.