Out of office: I’ll be back from parental leave in 2020! And yes, I am coming back.

With Mother’s Day approaching, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a woman who has lots of different roles, ‘mother’ being just one of them, ‘employee’ another.

Yesterday was my last day of work before parental leave. I’m planning on going back to work in 8.5 months, and my husband will care for our baby for 3 months full time, when I’m back at work full time.

Over the last few months at work, I’ve been exposed to prejudices about women as mothers in the workplace. It starts early (like, as soon as you make that pregnancy announcement) and while some of it is subtle, some of it is tone-deaf obvious. Sadly, many other mothers and mothers-to-be have shared similar experiences.

I enjoy working. The chance to use my brain, to interact with different people, to stay focused on a project or task and get results – as well as earning money (duh!). I’ve wanted to try a different career for a while now, and about seven weeks into my pregnancy, I was offered a secondment at my current workplace that fit the bill – more customer-focused, more consultative, grittier and strategic than what I was doing before. A mix of strategy and policy work. I ummed and ahhed about it though because is it really a good idea to switch roles when you’re pregnant? (even my pregnancy bible said to think twice about it!) but I knew I needed to take action now.

It’s been a great thing, being able to take on different work.

But I’ve also had people say or do things that perpetuate the sentiment that women are there to reproduce, to be the caregivers for their children, and that work doesn’t matter to them. “You may not want to come back to work! You’ll be a full time Mum, now.”

Why is there this assumption that parental leave = not coming back to work? Or perhaps it means “She’s coming back, but she doesn’t care what job she does,” or “she needs to come back part-time”, or “she’s going to be so unproductive when she’s back!”

I met a pregnant Chinese woman the other week, who was on a casual employment contract. She told me her employer let her go as soon as she found out about the pregnancy. The employer was able to get away with it because of the casual contract, and a lack of this lady’s awareness about NZ employment law, even though this lady now knows it’s wrong, but she’s not going to fight it. And there’s the other woman I talked to in a Facebook group, who had extreme morning sickness – again, her shifts kept dropping off until finally her employer came out with it, and said she was no longer needed. That means no income during pregnancy. That means no parental leave payments from the government, which women should be entitled to, whether working full or part time.

There’s also the friend whose boss asked her to take her work laptop home with her, so she “could still do work – just bits and pieces – while on maternity leave.” That’s the other extreme – perhaps not seeing parental leave as a real thing that will take up hours and hours of important work, too.

We have a Prime Minister who took six weeks parental leave and whose partner cares for their baby full time. Yet many people’s mindsets haven’t changed. It’s all very well workplaces having flexible work practices (and it IS important – I appreciated all the time off I was able to get for obstetrician and midwife appointments) – but what do people really believe deep down?

Underneath the rhetoric about being a parent-friendly workplace – which often means a mum-friendly workplace anyway, fathers barely get a nod – what biases do people hold about pregnancy and motherhood in the workplace? These biases are what stop mothers from getting promoted, from getting the same opportunities (and pay) as their male colleagues. Are mothers seen as being quite happy to put their careers on-hold for a while, and do fathers really only need two weeks of measly unpaid parental leave, to care for their newborn alongside their partner?

Every mother should have a choice about work – when to go back, whether to go back, and they should have the same outcomes as men when it comes to their career. I only hope by the time my son grows up things have improved.

What do you think? Have you come across similar biases in your workplace or heard stories from friends, and how do you reckon we can work around these?