People running small businesses say EU plans for improved maternity leave will result in young women losing out on jobs – but does this have to be so?

TWO CANDIDATES, one job. If one is a young, just-married woman and the other a man in his 40s, which would you hire? Mark Fielding, chief executive of the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association (Isme), is in no doubt. Given our straitened economic times, he says, if businesses have to pay full salaries to women on maternity leave, many will react by employing men instead.

“If there are two candidates and one is a buxom young woman of child-rearing years and the other is a fellow, who is an employer going to hire when he or she knows that they will have to pay 20 weeks’ maternity leave?” he asks.

He is giving his views in the week that the European Parliament voted for 20 weeks’ fully paid maternity leave and two weeks’ fully paid paternity leave across the EU. Wednesday’s vote does not signify a change in the law just yet, however. The move has faced strong opposition from business interests and governments and is likely to be watered down by the Council of Ministers before going back to the parliament for another vote.

Women in Ireland are currently entitled to 26 weeks’ maternity leave and to State maternity benefit of between €225.80 and €270 per week, depending on how much they earn. They can also take an additional 16 weeks’ unpaid maternity leave immediately afterwards. Additionally, mothers and fathers can each take 14 weeks’ unpaid parental leave before a child is eight years old. There is no statutory paternity leave, paid or unpaid.

About half of Irish employers already top up the benefit to full pay, but Fielding says that most of his members do not, adding that requiring them to do so would encourage them to discriminate against young women.

To discriminate in this way is illegal under the 1998 Equality Act. If discrimination can be proven, an employer would have a case to answer before the Equality Tribunal. Nevertheless, many employers feel Fielding is simply voicing a hard economic reality.

Eilis Quinlan owns an accountancy practice, Eilis J Quinlan and Co, in Naas, Co Kildare, and employs seven people. Asked her view about the possibility of employers having to top up State benefit to pay employees their full salary during maternity leave, she says: “I think it’s nuts. At a time when businesses are desperately trying to stay afloat, to try and force more expense on to them is crazy. We are struggling very hard as it is. When someone goes on maternity leave you miss them as it is. You have to train someone else in. To have to pay two full salaries too would be just too much.”

She is a mother and grandmother. Her daughter has two small children and works outside the home, “so I know all about it. I understand people want women to have full pay on maternity leave, and I wish it could be so and that it could be 40 weeks, but it’s just not feasible for employers like me.

“Unfortunately if there were two candidates, one a young woman and the other a man, all things being equal I would employ the man. I know it’s probably wrong, but purely from a small-business perspective paying maternity leave is a burden.”

Adrian Cummins, chief executive of the Restaurants Association of Ireland, says his members are “put to the pin of their collar trying to keep businesses open. Our industry employs about 103,000 people, and business is brutal at the moment. I would have to strongly reject any proposal from the EU to force employers to pay women while on maternity leave. Wage costs make up about 38 per cent of our costs as it is. To increase that would be unsustainable.”

Sinéad Pentony, head of policy with the economic think tank Tasc, says it is a “tough one” to balance the immediate interests of hard-pressed employers with the long-term vision of the kind of society we want. “But we say we want more women at work and we also want well-loved and nurtured babies.”

Welcoming the European Parliament vote, she argues that the costs to the overall economy would be minimal once the legislation was implemented.

“Its costs would be fully covered across Europe if just 1.4 per cent more women entered the workforce, so expanding the size of the economy,” she claims. “It would facilitate more women to stay in the workforce. Women’s participation in the workforce has increased as maternity leave has increased. In the long term there are obvious social benefits. All the research shows that children are best cared for by a parent in their first year of life. There would be greater rates of breastfeeding, for obvious reasons.”

Pentony says the EU measure would particularly benefit low-paid households were it to encourage poorer women to stay in work after having children. Women tend to be in lower-paid employment than men, and it is lower-paying employers that are less likely to pay women while they are on maternity leave.

Resistance from employers to the proposed measure does not surprise Ursula Barry, head of women’s studies at UCD’s school of social justice. She points out that almost every piece of equality legislation emanating from Europe has been resisted by either government or employers.

“Employers’ organisations organised against the Equal Pay Directive and the Equal Pay Act in 1974, saying it was all going to lead to loss of jobs and closing of businesses across the economy, which of course didn’t happen,” says Barry.

In the 1980s the European directive on equal treatment for married women on social security was resisted by government on grounds of cost. Looking back, most people would agree that such measures were right and just, says Barry, and that they have served employers well by increasing women’s participation in the workforce.

Asked whether employers have a point in this instance, particularly given current conditions, she says that she is aghast at Mark Fielding’s comments. He is, she claims, encouraging employers to break the law. “Isme should not be legitimising that kind of behaviour,” she says. “There is no doubt that in a tight economic situation women are already more vulnerable.”

Síle Larkin, legal adviser to the Equality Tribunal, agrees. Although gender discrimination has not increased statistically in the tribunal’s employment-equality case files, anecdotally she says she knows it’s happening.

“If an employer needs to lay a person off, they are more likely to choose a woman of child-bearing years,” she says. “It’s happening all over the place. The cases are settling before coming to the tribunal, so it’s not translating into statistics. Women and their families are not an employer’s priority in a recession. The bottom line is.”