Fathers will be able to take time off work and claim state benefits throughout the majority of the first year of their baby’s life if the mother returns to employment.
This will allow the main household earner, if the mother, to return to work after just a fortnight.
Years of my banging on about how we don’t have a gender pay gap, we have a motherhood pay gap, convinced a Lib Dem activist that something should be done about it. She tabled the policy at a Lib Dem policy meeting, it’s risen up the system and now here it is, to be enacted in law.
I wouldn’t say it’s quite the solution I would have chosen (my preferred one would be “tough luck, children have a cost”) but we really can trace this back to my blogging.
Influence eh?
5 responses so far ↓
1 Rupert Fiennes // Oct 12, 2012 at 10:04 am
Well, by penalising penalising young fathers as well as mothers, we might get more of the old crocks into work
Progress!
2 Vir Cantium // Oct 12, 2012 at 11:20 am
Yup, when it comes to the length of the list of excellent reasons not to employ someone, this does even things up a little between men and women.
3 Vir Cantium // Oct 12, 2012 at 11:21 am
More precisely:
“… between men and women of child-rearing age.”
That is, until another lobby group wins the same rights for grandparents…
4 Van_Patten // Oct 12, 2012 at 1:03 pm
Tim
Are you developing into Ritchie, in taking credit for things? A terrifying thought!
5 Gene Berman // Oct 12, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Rupert:
I puzzled over your repetition until, at last, I realized that you actually meant “by penalizing
penilizing…”
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