Up to 50,000 women in the UK each year are prevented from taking up their previous jobs once they return to the workforce after maternity leave.
The Independent reports that new figures from the British House of Commons library reveal that mothers who return to their jobs after taking leave face considerable discrimination. Of the 340,00 women who take maternity leave each year, 14% of them find their jobs under threat and some are told they can’t return to work part-time.
Others said they found it harder to get promoted once they returned to work and found that male colleagues with less experience were overtaking them in pay and opportunity.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary for the Labour party, and the first government minister to take maternity leave in 2001, called the issue a “hidden disgrace” with half of returning mothers stating that the job situation they returned to was worse than the one they had before they went on leave.
“The new figures show up to 50,000 women don’t have a job to go back to – often because employers think they don’t have to take new mothers as seriously. Many find their job changed with no consultation, many miss out on pay rises too” she wrote in she wrote in The Independent.
“We need national action to deal with maternity discrimination including tackling irresponsible employers who are breaking the law.”
Law firm Slater & Gordon also found that 25% of UK women returning to the workforce didn’t know their legal rights. British women must currently pay £1,200 (AU$2076) to take a maternity discrimination case to the employment tribunal, further impeding a woman’s ability to resolve maternity right disputes.
And employment discrimination is not just isolated to the UK. The Australian Human Rights Commission announced in June that it would conduct an inquiry into return to work practises after parental leave beginning this month and will measure the prevalence of the discrimination to ensure parents, and particularly mothers, are treated fairly at work.
It said there was ‘significant’ anecdotal evidence to suggest that parents, and women in particular, were being demoted, sacked or having their roles ‘re-structured while on leave or when they returned to work