Don’t get me wrong. I support paternity leave. I didn’t benefit from it with my children and I wish I had.
Yesterday, the government announced possible changes to paternity leave. These add to the revisions soon to come in, as agreed under the previous government. Both aim to share responsibility among both parents and this is no bad thing.
But it will nevertheless impact most upon industries with a male-dominated workforce. Depending upon the size of the form or company, where men are producing or building something, paternity leave changes may be enough to delay a deadline. But the bus industry is different. You can’t delay the means of production. You can’t resell a bus seat once the journey is complete. It has to go, then and there.
For whatever historic reason, men still dominate virtually every aspect of the bus industry. Many more men than women drive and work in engineering departments. Though changing, management is significantly male dominated, though administration can vary. Were a system to be adopted that genuinely shares parental responsibilities, where would this leave the bus industry in planning & arranging cover? Especially small and medium sized enterprises. And what additional costs might this entail? Whatever the outcome, any changes need to benefit both parents and employers and that is never going to be anything other than a difficult balancing act in a seven-day-a-week, 18-plus-hour industry run by men.
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
On Paternity Leave
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I honestly don't think that it would make any difference at all to the industry.
IMHO and IME 'small businesses' tend to employ more men than women simply because they WON'T go and have time off for having kids. This excludes women from many businesses, meaning that it becomes 'male dominated'.
If men are just as likely to take extended leave after having children, it removes one of the big reasons for not employing women. Ergo you have more women in the workforce and things change for the better.
There's no reason why women can't drive buses, other than the fact that it is an industry that isn't very welcoming to women. It's a shame, I'd probably see less road-ragey drivers if Stagecoach Newcastle employed more women...
However I don't know how much difference it will make. I'm a father to a young baby and, whilst I was glad I had a month off immediately after the birth, I wouldn't want to be at home full time.
Men dominate the bus industry. Women dominate in nursing. Isn't this as much a need for cultural change as anything else?
In London there's been a big and I think broadly successful push to get women into bus driving - I think there's also been a (perhaps rather less high profile) attempt to get more women into the engineering side of things too. Hopefully in time more women will rise up through the ranks and make an impact in the higher echelons of the bus business in the capital.
It was one of the initiatives of Mayor Ken and TfL, and just kinda proves that where there's a will, there's a way. I don't see why one needs to be fatalistic about 'inevitable' male domination of the bus industry (...unless, of course, one prefers it that way?).
Maybe the bus industry will need to learn from other industries such as primary schools and nursing, where women dominate to a similar degree - and even with these proposed changes, long breaks for maternity leave will still be far more common, and therefore more of a problem for employers.
I suspect there may be a greater demand for agency drivers, both independent agencies and 'cover' drivers within larger groups.
Whatever happens, any predominantly male industries still get off very lightly compared with those that have a more even split, or those that are predominantly female.
Post a Comment