International Women's Day 2024: Parental Leave Policies and Tackling the Motherhood Penalty in Architecture by Emma Wood
7 Mar 2024
Unless you’re very successful social media hermit, you’ll be aware that March 8th is International Women’s Day, a date exploited celebrated by many PR departments as opportunity to put out heartwarming and inspiring posts recognising the female members of their teams. But IWD isn’t just an opportunity to celebrate our peers, it’s a reminder to reflect on the challenges that 51% of the population face, whether that’s male violence against women, health discrimination or workplace inequality.
Whilst the construction industry faces up to its responsibilities in the face of the climate emergency, workplace inequality remains a key issue and the architectural profession is not immune from factors that lead to women leaving the workplace, a phenomenon more accurately labelled ‘the motherhood penalty’. Figures published by the ARB show that although the proportion of female architects has increased in the last 6 years, women are still under-represented in the profession and a proportionally higher number of female architects leave the profession between entering university and qualifying[1]. The ARB does not publish figures on gender balance relative to age, but AJ Women in Architecture surveys reveal that having children is seen as a barrier to career progression[2] and anecdotally many of us can’t help noticing that experienced, senior architects who also happen to be mothers are leaving the profession, resulting in a lack of female role models in the industry.
So, what can we do about it? Thanks to Covid, Flexible working is the norm for many practices and several companies are trialling 9-day fortnights and 4-day weeks. Certainly, the profession is moving away from its unhealthy culture of presenteeism and overtime as many of us reconsidered our priorities following the pandemic. It’s a multifaceted issue, but as Joeli Brearly, founder of Pregnant then Screwed, succinctly explains “without dads taking time out to care for their children, workplace equality for mums is impossible”.
It’s widely reported that full time working women do a greater proportion of unpaid domestic labour at home compared to their partners [3], which inevitably reduces their capacity for paid labour meaning mothers are more likely to go part time than partners[4]. Dedicating an equal amount of time to caring for children from the outset will, hopefully, mean the mother is less likely to become ‘default parent’, i.e. the parent who takes on the bulk of emotional and cognitive labour or, simply put, the one who keeps a mental note of all the upcoming non-uniform days and the one who nursery calls when their toddler has vomited in the sand pit. Beyond giving families more flexibility and choice, recruitment discrimination against women would reduce if men were just as likely to take substantial time off and unsurprisingly children benefit hugely from spending quality time with both parents in the early years[5].
The UK government established Shared Parental Leave (SPL) in 2015, however, take up is pitiful[6]. While naysayers would put this down to a lack of interest, the experience of other countries would suggest otherwise. SPL in the UK is complicated and by requiring dads effectively take a proportion of the mothers leave, it often results in families being worse of financially in the short term. In the current cost of living crisis financial security will inevitably take priority over parenting ideals for most families.
Spain recently introduced 16 weeks of non-transferrable paternity leave paid at 100% of their salary, equal to the mother’s entitlement. The leave can be taken at any point in the child’s first year and can be used intermittently, in a block or to go part time. It’s too early to see the effect of this, but Swedish families have benefitted from increasingly progressive parental leave policies since 1974.[7] A 2019 a Swedish study showed that a woman’s earning potential rose by 7% for every month of leave taken by their partner.[8]
Collective Architecture have supported part time and flexible working since I joined the practice in 2007 and in 2014 the company introduced a parental leave policy that offers enhanced parental leave equally to both parents. This has enabled several members of the team to provide emotional and physical support to their partners, bond with their babies and allow their partner to return to work earlier to progress their careers. In 2022 the enhanced maternity pay available to me meant my partner was able to take an additional 4 weeks unpaid leave after his 2 weeks Statutory Leave. Overall, this left us slightly worse off financially, but the benefit of him being around for 6 weeks after the birth of our second child was invaluable.
But are enhanced parental leave policies affordable? Most architectural practices are SMEs and in an industry with low fees it’s a valid concern that offering Enhanced Parental Leave is simply a huge financial risk. This assumption overlooks the fact that companies can claim back 92-103% of Statutory Parental Pay so the only direct costs to the business would be any additional enhanced pay and the costs associated with hiring a replacement. A more realistic scenario is the considerable cost of recruitment and training when well qualified architects leaving in search of better employee benefits.
So, what’s the answer? There are many ways to support working mothers beyond shared parental leave, but following Spain and Sweden’s approach to offer dads and partners standalone paid leave at any point in the baby’s first year provides flexibility and financial security particularly at the point when a mother’s statutory pay runs out and, certainly in my experience, mothers are keen to return to their jobs. Frustratingly, Enhanced Parental Leave is one of the lesser discussed employee benefits amongst the profession; it isn’t something most employees think about until it’s needed, and most employers have no incentive to publish their policies safe in the knowledge that a prospective employee is unlikely to bring it up during recruitment for fear of discrimination.
So, this International Women’s Day I’m calling on practices to put their family friendly policies[9] on the table and consider enhanced pay for both mums and dads. Open a conversation with the parents in your practice and please consider advocating for your colleagues who it might benefit. Mothers make exceptional employees[10]; there’s no better training course for multitasking, handling stress and negotiation than parenting young children, so let’s turn the motherhood penalty into a motherhood opportunity.
[1] ARB EDI report 2022
[2] Architects Journal – ‘Almost 90% of female architects say having children puts them at disadvantage’ 2015
[3]The BMJ – ‘Women’s wellbeing and the burden of unpaid work’ 2021
[4] The 2015 AJ Women in Architecture survey showed 51% of female architects reduced their hours at work after having children compared to 21%.
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/so...
[6] Maternity Action briefing on the Department for Business and Trade report on the evaluation of Shared Parental Leave 2023.
[7] In Sweden each parent has 90 days of non-transferrable leave on top of 390 days of transferrable paid leave, fathers take 30% of paid parental leave
[8] New York Times “In Sweden, Men can Have it All” 2010.
[9] Family friendly policies include parental leave, neonatal care, time off to care for dependants and compassionate leave for bereavement and baby loss.
