« TESTING 1, 2, 5 | Main | THE 2005 BUDGET, AS BAD SCREENPLAY »

March 15, 2005

IS EXTENDING MATERNITY LEAVE A GOOD IDEA?

If the government passed a law tomorrow that mandated that anyone hiring a black person must enter a lottery in which there was a significant risk of having to give the new employee a bonus of £4200 and nine months off work, most people would probably smell a conspiracy against blacks. Yet, when the government imposes policies with identical incentives to hire women of a certain age, there are few dissenting voices.

The case against mandated paid maternity leave is obvious when one views it as a cost that businesses will have to pay for. Higher costs for any business practice will, for the most part, reduce its occurrence among those who can least afford to pay for it. In extreme cases, this leads to companies going out of business when they can neither afford these costs nor stop engaging in the outlawed practice. Paid maternity leave makes it more expensive to hire women and so will result in fewer women being hired.

This effect will not be universal, of course. Large businesses that cannot easily formulate anti-women hiring policies without falling foul of anti-discrimination law, and in those where those responsible for hiring have no personal incentive to hire efficiently, will not discriminate as much as smaller businesses will. Women applying for government jobs will not be discriminated against for much the same reasons. But for a government ostensibly committed to equality, it is suprising to see it enacting laws which will encourage discrimination against women in any sector of industry and commerce.

Or rather, it would be surprising, but this is politics. What sounds good and noble trumps that which works, and moral crusades trump simple economic analysis. The fact that laws intended to get more women into the workplace will make it harder for women to get into the workplace is irrelevant; the government has to be seen to "do something".

Some may object that women losing their jobs and going unpaid because of childbirth is unfair. And they're right. But as your mother may have told you, "life is unfair". Biology, in fact, is unfair. Nothing will change the fact that women take time away from the workplace because of childbirth and men do not. Them be the facts of life. It is not enough to identify such cosmic unfairness and use that as a blank cheque for any policies one likes, without having to weigh costs against benefits. Creating new unfairness and new manifestations of inequality is not the way to cure old ones.

Posted by Lewis at March 15, 2005 10:21 AM