Tonight:
5°c
Extra maternity rights 'cost women jobs'
Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor14 Jul 2008
The rapid extension of maternity leave is deterring employers from hiring and promoting women, the head of the new equality watchdog claimed today.
Nicola Brewer, chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, suggested bosses were thinking twice about female staff because women had the right to a year off for each child.
Ms Brewer, a former senior civil servant and herself a mother of two, emphasised that she wanted rights to be extended to men rather than removed from women.
Her remarks are sure to be seized on by business chiefs who have long criticised the new maternity laws.
Ms Brewer told The Times that her concerns were underlined when entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar said that many employers simply binned CVs of women of child-bearing age.
It is illegal for any employer to decide not to hire a woman purely on the ground that she may become pregnant, or to refuse promotion for the same reason. Women are entitled to nine months' paid maternity leave but that will rise to a year by the end of the current Parliament.
The right to request flexible working is also being extended to parents of children under 16. Ms Brewer said, however, that the Work and Families Act had "not freed parents and given them real choice. It is based on assumptions, and some of the terms reinforce the traditional pattern of women as the carers of children."
