A pregnant woman working is news? Seriously? - Women's Agenda

A pregnant woman working is news? Seriously?

Fox Sports’ Lara Pitt will front up for the Dally M red carpet despite being six months pregnant

This is an actual headline that appeared on a website today. In 2014. A pregnant woman working. Can you even imagine? The article also ran in the Daily Telegraph today with a different headline “No Pregnant Pause for Pitt”.

Even as someone who is firmly ensconced in the world of gender equality and subsequently well- seasoned with the disappointment that often entails, I am shocked. A pregnant woman working is news? Seriously?

It’s not. I would like to warmly welcome whoever thinks it merits a headline to the 21st century. We obviously have some catching up to do.

In a nutshell, though, these days women being pregnant and working is actually far more common than women being pregnant and not working.

This research from the Australian Bureau of Statistics is a few years old now but on the basis of your beliefs, I figure those few years won’t make too much difference. 2011 is still a long way from the 60s.

In November 2011, there were an estimated 523,300 women in Australia who were birth mothers of at least one child under two years of age living with them.

Of those 357,500 women had a job while pregnant and 98% of these women worked in a job at some stage while pregnant. Of the women who had a job while they were pregnant:

88% were employees (excluding owner managers of incorporated enterprises (OMIEs)), of whom 253,900 (71%) had paid leave entitlements;
130,200 (36%) worked less than 35 hours per week immediately before stopping for the birth of the child;
Nearly 30% or 105,400 women stopped work 5 weeks or more before the birth. In contrast, 83,600 or 23% stopped work less than 1 week before the birth.

In light of that perhaps the most newsworthy part of this story is that anyone found it newsworthy to start with. That’s a story.

 

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