Unfortunately, a new analysis shows these conflicts cause brutal disparities in earnings between moms and dads in the workforce. This highlights the increased hardships that women face after becoming mothers. Joeli Brearley, below, started the online return-to-work programme Growth Spurt. She testified that nearly 74,000 women are pushed out of their jobs annually due to pregnancy or maternity leave. This national trend exposes the pervasive and systemic issues that continue to disproportionately impact women in the workplace.
These results show us that on average, women with children are £302 per week worse off than men with kids. The analysis finds that weekly earnings for mothers are 33% less than those for fathers with kids. Hourly wages are no different in conveying this inequality, as women make just under 20 percent less than their male counterparts in the same position. ONS are the source of all the data used for this analysis. It sheds light on the unique and pressing economic burdens that working mothers experience.
Gender inequality is a huge issue, as Dr. Mary-Ann Stephenson, director of the Women’s Budget Group, recently emphasized. She noted that the pay gap increases drastically when women have kids. “The research highlights how the earnings gap really opens up when women become mothers,” she stated. This sentiment is echoed by Brearley, who noted the significant repercussions of flexible working roles: “Women disproportionately bear the career penalty attached to flexible working roles.”
This is complicated even more by the cultural norms and policies in workplaces. As a result, most mothers are left worse off financially. In practice, they usually need to take several months leave from their jobs, derailing their career advancement in the process. Brearley explained, “Our outdated parental leave system reinforces gendered expectations: mothers are encouraged, and often expected, to take extended time off, while fathers return to work quickly.”
“Motherhood can create a financial cliff edge for many women. It’s worth remembering that for many women the motherhood penalty and the gender pay gap conspire to create a pension pay gap, which pushes many women into pension poverty later in life.”
These disparities have grave and often deadly consequences. This year, Mums’ Equal Pay Day is September 1, the date mothers have to work beyond fathers’ equal pay date to be paid the same. This date is almost three months earlier than the national Equal Pay Day for all women. It highlights a tragic but pressing reality that moms who work are all too familiar with. It’s important that Mums’ Equal Pay Day is so much earlier than Equal Pay Day, Brearley remarked.
The Fawcett Society, under chief executive Penny East, have already welcomed this new way of analysing the pay gap. For one thing, they note that the actual magnitude of pay gaps is probably an undercount. As the organization points out, a third of parents are forced out of the workforce due to their caregiving duties. Sadly, these heroic cases are not entirely evident in today’s statistics.
Brearley noted that pervasive pregnancy and maternity discrimination are still major problems in today’s workplaces. She stated, “Yet we know that women are much more likely to have been forced to leave their jobs due to childcare costs, maternity discrimination and a lack of suitable flexible working.” Furthermore, she noted that “the majority of mothers say they’ve faced some form of discrimination or disadvantage as a result of taking maternity leave, from missed promotions to being sidelined at work.”