When I got knocked up, I was told that thanks to crazy new European rules I was eligible for a year's leave. A year's holiday! Hah! I was staggered by my good fortune. Who cared if I'd only be getting paid for half of it - somehow I'd manage. After all, it wasn't just a holiday - it was also about spending a year with my baby-to-be. Or like, whatever. A year off!
A childless male colleague found the news of my year off hard to swallow. Why should I get a year off, half of it paid for, while he, if he chose never to breed, would never be given similar perks? Why was that fair? He was quite logical about it, and - dizzy as I was with my year-off plans - it didn't seem like an argument worth having.
Actually, you will be amazed to learn, my year off didn't have quite the gap-year vibe that I'd looked forward to. I spent the first three months of it in hospital. After that I spent three months so entirely shattered from sleep deprivation that when visitors came round, I was sometimes too tired to lift my head from the sofa to greet them. Then a month after that I went back to work, five months earlier than planned, because it turned out that the first months of a baby's life aren't a great time to save money, and the money that was meant to last a whole year had been spent.
I wasn't ready, not by a long chalk, for the boy to be handed over to a stranger. And I wasn't ready to stop breastfeeding. But luckily, very luckily, my employers let me work from home part-time and, very luckily again, the baby's father was on hand to care for him while I worked. Which made it all extremely bearable, and a billion times better than the deal most British women get.
If my employers hadn't been so flexible (all praise to the Guardian), I would have quit my job, and the baby's father would have had to pick up the breadwinning baton. No big deal to the world at large, quite the reverse - another thirtysomething woman takes an off-ramp. But it would have been a big deal to me - I would quite likely never have got another staff job in newspapers. And of course there are an awful lot of women of breeding age taking off-ramps, which is why women are still getting paid so much less than men, and why there are so few senior women in the workplace.
The government's plans to increase paid maternity leave from six months to nine months sounds so eminently sensible that I'm rather astonished by them. Another three months of pay would have made a difference even to relatively-rich old me, never mind that it would only have been at the rate of £100 a week (rather than the 90% of pay that you get at the start of your maternity leave). The fact that, in the future, women may be able to hand over six months of this leave to their male partners sounds even more astonishingly sensible. Great for the fathers, of course, and for the babies, but also, if you're concerned about women being squeezed out of the workplace, really great for mothers - after all, the next best thing to being at home with baby, is baby being at home with daddy. Lots of women may even prefer it that way.
Would my childless male colleague approve of the government's plans? Probably not. Offices are all about fair deals for the individual, not about the greater good. But I realise now that it is an argument worth having. The bald fact is that if you object to the swing towards better maternity rights, you are basically saying: women can't have everything, so stuff them. And you are placing yourself in some rather unpleasant company.
Just last month "female boss" Sylvia Tidy-Harris was bleating on in the Daily Mail about how she would never employ a woman under the age of 45 for fear of her getting pregnant - or even a woman with young children, for that matter, since she'd be far too distracted to do her job properly. ("I don't have the same qualms about fathers," Tidy-Harris added. "But I would check at an interview that any man isn't in sole charge of his children.") Yesterday Tidy-Harris was back at it in the Telegraph, describing the government's plans to extend paid leave as "ludicrous".
Tidy-Harris hangs her hat on the old damage-to-small-businesses chestnut, but basically she's no different than a man I know who works in the Foreign Office who says that he never employs women (other than as secretaries) because "they're more trouble than they're worth" and play havoc with his rotas. People - there's still a fight to fight, and it's a good fight, and let's not forget it.
