Increasing maternity leave isn’t as progressive as it sounds

The labour-force participation rate for Indian women of working age is in the low 20s, placing the country in the company of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. The world average is 47% and China’s figure is 61%. Liberal maternity benefits might seem like a good way to attract women to the workplace and retain their services, but this line of thinking is wrong on two counts.

For one, Indian women who aren’t in the formal workforce are toiling away rather than trying to beat boredom. They fetch water and firewood from afar, care for children, the sick and the elderly, cook, tend livestock, work on their plots of land without being paid, and contribute to all home-based production that is generally attributed to men. The problem with women’s work in India is that it is invisible, unpaid and under-appreciated rather than non-existent.

The other reason is that the policy would actually set women back at the workplace. This would happen in two ways. First, in trying to make it easier for women to balance motherhood and a career, the policy would reinforce the societal norm that childrearing is a woman’s job and that men should not be expected to contribute to parenting apart from playing the remote authority figure.

Two, the longer women stay away to look after their child, the farther they will fall behind colleagues who don’t have these responsibilities. Some research suggests that the reason why Scandinavian countries, with their gender-affirmative policies, still have relatively few women in senior corporate roles is that the extended maternity leave available to them stunts their careers.

It is well-established that infants and toddlers need plenty of attention, not just nutrition, to develop mentally and learn social skills. For mouse pups, it is a matter of being lucky enough to be born to a mother given to licking its offspring liberally and often. Un-licked baby mice, it turns out, tend to be less sociable and frisky than those that have received their fair share.

For humans, this translates to parental affection and engagement at a child’s earliest stages of development. There is no reason why the burden of wholesome childcare should fall entirely on the shoulders of the mother. The father should be as involved in this as the mother. This requires a policy tweak that would grant paternity leave to new fathers. The mother and the father should take leave alternately and extend the period for which a newborn receives unstinted parental attention and affection.

Paternity leave should also be supplemented with childcare facilities outside the home. In colonial India, factories were obliged to provide creches at the workplace for the benefit of women workers. There is no reason modern service industries should not provide such facilities or pay for childcare, with the expenditure being eligible for a tax credit.

Organised childcare can and should involve senior citizens, drawing on their experience and expertise. It would free the young to work, secure in the knowledge that their children are being cared for, and give senior citizens agency, turning them from passive subjects of care into providers of a vital social service.

Increasing maternity leave without giving thought to these considerations may end up pushing women out of the workforce or setting back their careers. A combination of paternity leave and organised childcare facilities outside the home, involving elders, would work better for children, parents and society at large.