The UK workforce today looks very different from how it did in 1980. Around 47% is nowmade up of women; 78%of women considered to be of ‘prime working age’ (in the 25-54 bracket) are in employment. And in some sectors, such as education and healthcare, the large majority of jobs are held by women. Attitudes have also changed: working mothers are the norm and more women participate in the labour force. However, women still take on the majority of housework even if they are employed full-time. Legislation has partially addressed this modern conflict between female roles at home and at work in terms of free childcare places to help mothers return to work, shared parental leave and the right to request flexible working. But beneath the simple picture of progress, the reality is that traditional roles and expectations remain in place. Gender equality at work remains fraught with issues: take up of shared parental leave has been low; men are reportedly nervous about asking bosses to workflexibly because of what it appears to say about their commitment to a career; employers continue to see women as more likely to be absent. A study by University College London looked at evidence from 8,500 heterosexual couples interviews for the UK Household Longitudinal Study. This showed that when both partners were in full-time employment, women werefive times more likely than men to be spending more than 20 hours a week on household chores. For all the changes, workplaces continue to be affected by a fundamental conflict in the lives of many of their most valued employees: women are still being left to manage the housekeeping. What effects does that have on the performance of organisations? Iffirms take this into account, and give women more flexibility, help with time needed for childcare, for supporting the family, would that lead to a better performance in business? These questions are addressed in a recent study I carried out with Benjamin Bennett, Isil Erel and Léa Stern. THE PAID FAMILY LEAVE BENEFIT We wanted tofind solid evidence of the actual implications of this friction in our new world of employment. That’s not so easy. Looking generally at employers who provide better terms and conditions for women could be misleading, as any indicators of improved business performance are just as likely to be the result of individual circumstances: successful companies offer better conditions, rather than the other way around. We needed a way to isolate the support for female employees factor. The opportunity came in the US with the introduction of Paid Family Leave (PFL) in several states since 2004. Paid maternity leave isn’t federal legislation, so the small minority of states involved provide a living laboratory for study. The additional element of support isn’t something that has occurred from within, as an extension of a particular culture or climate of success, but that has been imposed from outside. We studied the effects of providing PFL benefits on outcomes forfirms using a large sample of private and publiclytradedfirms in the US. One concern would be that providing paid leave for employees would be costly forfirms, in part because they have to accommodate and beflexible during the employee’s absence. The headline findings, however, are that businesses see an average 1.4 percentage point increase in their Return on Assets (an indicator of how profitable a company is relative to total assets), compared withfirms not affected by the PFL legislation. This means a US$3.5 million increase in the net income of a median sizefirm in the sample. PFL has a significant effect on both private and publicly-tradedfirms and the effect is stronger among publiclytradedfirms and amongfirms that operate in industries with a high female participation. Gains for companies are also greater when wage replacement programmes are more generous. The bottom linefinancial benefits come from the ways in which paid leave benefits allowfirms to reduce their costly employee turnover, increase productivity and facilitate the nomination of women to key executive positions. In other words, female employees feel more supported and appreciated, leading to more engagement and commitment to their firm. There is a greater sense of future prospects and promotion; that they are not just taking an inconvenient break but are part of employers’ ongoing plans. A constant concern with the introduction of PFL is that employers will be more reluctant to hire young women in thefirst place, screening them out during the hiring process to look for workers with lower benefit costs, and be less likely to promote younger women to senior positions. 40 |
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