Weighing the cost of a pregnant pause

A proposal to extend China's maternity leave to three years may be well-intentioned, but it has negative repercussions for career women

Wang Youjun, a people's representative of Beijing, the equivalent of an MP, recently controversially proposed extending maternity leave to three years. Chinese law stipulates that every woman is entitled to a minimum of 98 days of paid leave, and that includes those who violate the family planning policy. On top of the 98 days, new mothers get additional days off on the condition they meet certain requirements - 30 more days for late-age delivery, 15 for a difficult delivery, 15 for twins, etc. Of all the days, 15 can be taken before the planned delivery date.

Unlike the debate about the number of public holidays, Wang's proposal for more days off has not been widely embraced by the people, judging from online feedback. While everyone agrees that the first three years of a child is very important, the public seems to be acutely aware of the cost that longer, legally binding maternity leave would impose on both the state and the employers.

Sure, there are countries that offer three-year maternity leave. The Czech Republic and Slovakia are among them. It is not difficult to guess the reasons for such generous benefits: They are designed to encourage childbirth. And China, of course, has been under sustained pressure to curb its population growth.

It's ironic that the United States is not used as a customary yardstick of comparison in this debate. The US is one of only four countries with no national law mandating paid time off for new parents. A 1993 law does dictate up to 12 weeks of potentially unpaid but job-protected leave, but some states extend the benefit, even to same-sex partners.

I figure there is a cultural factor at work here. When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, California, a pregnant classmate of mine told us she was to deliver her baby over the weekend. The next Monday, she appeared in class, with a flat tummy, to take the semester-end test with the rest of the class. "The whole thing was a practical joke, right?" I was puzzled. "No, I had the baby on Saturday, and I rested on Sunday," she answered.

This would have stunned Chinese grandmothers into jaw-dropping silence. In China, a new mother is not supposed to leave her bed during the first month of her child's birth. She is not to comb her hair or take a bath. She is treated as the most delicate of flowers. I don't know whether my Berkeley classmate is typical, but I've heard of new mothers in the US taking to the swimming pool with their month-old infants.

I don't think the US model, whatever it is, is suitable for all countries. When the maternity-leave law is too stringent, it would coerce couples to postpone their child-rearing age or force one of the parents, usually the woman, to give up her job and become a full-time mother.

Economically speaking, the cost of maternity leave is shared by the state, the employers and the parents. It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction according to the level of prosperity and the specific economic policies implemented in that jurisdiction. Generally, the richer a place, the better its benefits. But lawmakers take into account many other factors. That is why the Hong Kong SAR offers 10 weeks of maternity leave but at 80 percent of the pay, less generous than the Chinese mainland.

Welfare is supposed to help people. But when the welfare policy is too generous, it may encourage people to be lazy, and lax implementation would induce cheating. Too much of a good thing may sound good on paper, but could be disastrous in reality.

A three-year maternity leave in today's China would not help women; rather it would severely hurt them and their job prospects. Even if the pay is not full and is completely taken care of by the state, employers would find the three-year gap unacceptable. Employers have to balance the cost of recruiting and training a new employee with the cost of losing a current employee for a certain time. For most businesses, three months would not tip the scale too much toward a new hire, but three years would sharply reduce the value of even a most valued employee.

In China's private sector, one is rendered irrelevant if she disappears for three years from a workplace. She has essentially written herself out of the workforce. Only the most insignificant positions could be preserved for three years and just filled in by temporary workers.

If Wang's proposal became law, the most likely consequence is employers' extreme reluctance to hire female workers. From what I have seen and heard, Chinese women in workplaces are highly competitive. They tend to outperform their male counterparts in many professions. Some organizations have to lower their cutoff score by dozens of points for a male candidate for the same position, but still they end up with more and better prepared women candidates. Women are excelling even in professions traditionally thought to be monopolized by men, such as composing music and conducting orchestras. That's what I heard at a classical music forum.

If we go back to the stage of education, there are more female students in China's colleges and universities, and they tend to have better grades. Yet, many Chinese employers instinctively adopt affirmative action to help the weaker sex, in this case, males, for the simple reason that women reaching the age of motherhood would vanish from their career for a lengthy period of time.

If it is a sign of progress that women are joining, and excelling in, workplaces, does it necessarily mean that women going back to be full-time mothers represents a return to the old days when women were relegated to be housewives? I used to think so. Someone who has to depend on her spouse financially would lose her equal say in the family affairs, I believed.

Then I heard the former US first lady Barbara Bush in a television interview in which she proudly said that it is a much more demanding job to be a full-time mother and it contributes to the society just as much, or something to that effect. That set me thinking that, in a time when every woman was supposed to stay at home, it would demonstrate women's strengths and values if someone decided to leave her home and join the workforce. But when every woman has a job, it also takes courage to say I want to be different because I see child-rearing as a more important task.

Furthermore, it does not have to be the mother who faces the choice of staying at home or having a career. The father should also be subject to this new window of options. When stories of American fathers who choose to forgo their career and become full-time parents surfaced in Chinese media, people were flabbergasted. But that should be the new normal in this age of diversity. Family and career are instrumental to most couples, but in varying ratios. Only those who are weighing the pros and cons of each choice are in a position to know which one is best for them. The bottom line is, one should not be pressured by custom or culture to make a choice deemed correct by the public but unsuitable for the couple.

The writer is editor-at-large of China Daily. Contact him at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 08/22/2014 page30)