Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

We need to reorganize the working world. This would mean ending the “motherhood penalty,” the phrase used by sociologists to describe the systemic disadvantages to women in the workplace when they have a child. These include disparities in pay, benefits, promotions and perceived competence (which makes up 80 percent of the gender pay gap), as well as pension inequality and pension penalties for part-time employment.[16] We need to end discrimination against pregnant women and women returning from maternity leave. We need truly flexible working for fathers and mothers. We need top-down policies and incentives that allow men to parent more while working, including part-time contracts and flexible hours. Crucially, we need much more investment in quality early-years childcare. We need to ask: Why do one in ten nursery workers live in poverty?[17] We need to pay caregivers according to their actual value, rather than the bogus and distorted market value that erodes the worth of care and love. We need benefits for carers such as carers’ leave for anyone in a caregiving role. We need longer paternity leave and, while we’re at it, we need to stop calling it “leave”: it’s not a holiday—it’s work. We need to look at shorter working weeks, shorter working days, a national living wage or care income. We need to weaken the pressure on men to be “ideal workers” in cultures of presenteeism. We must acknowledge reproductive labor by including care work in GDP.