Shared parental leave should be good news, but there’s always a catch…

A year’s worth of shared parental leave, where either parent could opt to take time off after the birth of their child – just imagine it!

It would be like some kind of Scandinavian utopia, where men and women were equal and we all watched Borgen.

Give it a few years – or the time it takes for hyper-masculine men to realise it’s not ‘sissy’ to take time off to look after your own child – and employers will no longer be able to discriminate against women of child-bearing age.

Men might, one day, be just as likely as women to sack off their job for up to a year, in order to look after a new baby.

Men might be just as likely to take emergency leave because their toddler tripped up in pre-school or request flexible working hours to tie-in with the school run.

In fact, it could even swing in women’s favour because, let’s face it ladies, our procreation window is somewhat smaller than men’s; imagine a world where men were discriminated against because they could literally have a baby at any time (I know, I’m just getting carried away now).

The government’s plan to introduce 50 weeks of parental leave from April 2015, shared between both parents, is of course good, if somewhat overdue, news (pun intended).

It has worked in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Germany, all of which appear above the UK in the 2013 World Gender Gap Index.

To me therefore, it is a no-brainer, and one of the most important steps towards equality in the workplace that I’ve seen during my working life.

Not everyone agrees, however.

The right-wing press has decreed this another attack on the ‘traditional’ (sexist) values of British society, suggesting that women will be ‘forced’ back to work too soon and that men are incapable of looking after another person under the age of 12.

Women fear that “new laws on maternity leave could see them returning to work too soon” wailed the Daily Mail.

Who the hell are these women?

Oh, its middle-class campaign group Mothers at Home Matter again, justifying (to themselves probably) their roles as stay-at-home mothers.

It’s fine to choose to stay at home to look after your children if you’re in the privileged position to be able do so, but shouldn’t that option be open to men too?

Unless of course, like Judith Woods, writing for the Telegraph, said, you don’t think they’re up to the job.

Women, she says, tend to have more empathy and more patience and are not nearly as grumpy when deprived of sleep.

Speak for yourself, Judith.

As if that isn’t patronising enough to all the men I know (or would count as decent human beings at least), apparently dad can’t be trusted to ‘mind’ the baby without forgetting to feed it or subjecting it to endless hours of online video games, so they should just bugger off to the office and leave mum in charge.

As you might expect, British businesses are are not 100 per cent behind the proposals; for them it means more admin and increased uncertainty (all those men they employed instead of women might now decide they’d like to be a bit more involved in their new baby’s upbringing).

The Institute of Directors called it a “nightmare” for smaller firms and other critics have cited surveys which suggest just one in 20 men will opt to take the leave.

I don’t suspect every new dad will be ditching the laptop and late nights at the office in favour of baby yoga and monkey music; we still have the small issue of the pay gap to sort out, and as long as mum earns less than dad, she will still be the one literally left holding the baby.

It’s a bit of a catch-22: the pay gap still persists – almost 40 years after the Equal Pay Act – largely because of maternity leave, yet women, because they often earn less, will still take on the majority of childcare responsibilities.

Speaking to the Guardian about the reforms, Equalities Minister Jo Swinson asked: “Why does a man who works flexibly and part time get treated differently from the woman?”

“It’s a symptom of how we do have cultural double standards in many workplaces, where for women to take flexible working or leaving early on a particular day to pick up the kids from nursery is deemed to be acceptable but for some reason we treat a man who is making the same choice differently.

“We do really need to think about how we address some of those cultural barriers in workplaces. We need to get parents thinking about this and talking about it.”

A change in attitudes like this will inevitably take time – I’m not even sure I’ll see it in my lifetime – but addressing maternity discrimination has to be a very big step in the right direction.

Just because something is branded ‘traditional’ doesn’t mean it’s ok – some golf clubs are still using that old chestnut today.