Scandinavian countries tend to pay the most maternity pay, with Norway giving 49 weeks of full pay (Image: Getty)
There is a special place in hell reserved for women who shaft other women. Kemi Badenoch’s conclusion that maternity pay is “excessive” and families need to take more “personal responsibility” is to my mind a toxic blend of patronising misogyny.
How can the wannabe Tory leader genuinely believe that working mothers, receiving 90% of their average pay for the pitifully brief six weeks, followed by £184.03 per week for a further 33 weeks, is over-generous?
These women are a vital part of the workforce. They have had their shoulders to the wheel and hands to the pump. They are not reclining indolently upon lavishly upholstered chaises longues imagining the world owes them a living. They do not need Badenoch or anyone else to tell them to take “personal responsibility”.
Most will have been agonising for years about the crushing financial burden parenthood brings. Many have postponed having children, despite their yearning to be mothers and those swirling hormones willing them to reproduce, because they fear financial privation.
Childcare costs in the UK are exorbitant. Fiscally literate women don’t require a memo from Badenoch to realise that juggling motherhood with a job or career is an emotionally and financially crushing challenge, requiring infinite mental and physical agility.
When my first baby was born in 1986, I was just 24. I’d graduated at 21 and been working full-time for less than three years. Statutory maternity pay was £31 a week. My then-husband was a junior hospital doctor earning a pittance. Our was swingeing. We managed what TS Eliot called “partly living”. We subsisted. Life was limited and frightening. If anything went wrong, we didn’t have the means to fix it.
Of course, every day was illuminated by overwhelming love for our beautiful daughter. But the sheer panic when the ancient boiler packed up and an unexpected bill arrived, when our already over-stretched funds had run dry, has never left me.
We must not dream of making motherhood even more of a financial ordeal for working women. It is vital that women like Badenoch, who have climbed the career ladder, are prevented from hurling obstacles in the next generation’s path.
Kemi: you should be focused on nurturing Britain’s female workforce not on treating your productive sisters with contempt. I am concerned about this unwarranted harshness and empirical lack of empathy or understanding. Working mothers deserve respect and support – in fact, our future as a buoyant nation depends on them.