The idea that gender should dictate the amount of parental leave you get – or that parental leave wouldn’t be designed in a way intended to give all new parents and their children the support they need early on – is frankly pretty barmy. But that is the reality for many families.
For a long time, especially in the legal world, parenthood has been seen as something that can get in the way of building a career—especially for working mothers. But having kids and going after your career goals shouldn’t have to be an ‘either-or’ choice.
A large part of the problem has been unequal maternity and paternity leave. While policies like shared parental leave have been positive steps forward in principle, take up has been low across all sectors – in large part due to the complexity of the system.
So at Lewis Silkin, we’re one of a growing number of firms who have taken steps to improve this aspect of life in our corner of the (legal) world. As of April last year, all our partners and employees, regardless of gender or sex, can now take up to 52 weeks’ leave, with 26 at full pay, after the birth or adoption of their child. And this applies across our offices, not just in the UK and Ireland, but in Hong Kong too.
Many organisations still embed their enhanced leave and pay within the statutory schemes (e.g. maternity, adoption, paternity) which means they have to be taken in continuous blocks (or, in the case of shared parental leave, in up to three blocks). We wanted to move away from this and allow all our new parents the same freedom to time their leave (and pay) in a way that works for them, their family and their career. Our scheme allows for paid leave to be taken in an unlimited number of discontinuous blocks at any time over 52 weeks.
One feature of our scheme which has been key to uptake is that leave and pay do not have to be shared with the other parent (where there is more than one parent), meaning that an employee can benefit from leave and pay regardless of the leave and pay choices of the other parent. This is in contrast to the shared parental leave scheme which, as the name suggests, involves parents sharing the mother’s/primary adopter’s leave and pay entitlements.
We have also tried to think about wider issues affecting new parents: for example, our scheme also includes target reductions for fee earners (and a similar concept for non-fee earning staff) returning from leave; an additional 12 weeks fully paid leave for new parents of children requiring neonatal care; and we have no fixed cap on the number of antenatal/adoption appointments parents-to-be can attend during work time. We want our new parents to use the scheme and we want them to know that we are trying to make it as easy as possible to do that.
We’ve done this because we want to provide a supportive and inclusive place to work, where everyone can do their best professionally and still have a full life outside the office—including raising a family, if that’s what they want.
We also want to play a role in helping to break down those barriers which stop people taking time away from work, and contribute to the shift away from traditional gendered parenting roles. All new parents deserve the flexibility and freedom to be present in the critical first year of their child’s life.
I’m delighted to say that since we introduced the new policy, women have tended to take the full 52 weeks’ leave, and all men have chosen to take 26 weeks’ leave (some as one block of leave, some in discontinuous blocks). Lots of the feedback we’ve received has been really powerful, with one male colleague saying ‘Having so much paid time off work has meant that these early months of [my child’s] life have been an indescribably wonderful time in our lives. Not a day has gone by in which we haven’t said, out loud, how grateful we are for LS’s new policy!’
Making this change at Lewis Silkin is one of the work achievements I’m most proud to have contributed towards. If you haven’t overhauled the parental leave policies in your firm yet, this is a call to arms. We’re more than happy to help others do what we’ve done – if you get in touch we can share our policy wording, how we costed it and so on. It’s not every day we can make a change at work that you know 100% is good for gender equality, for family life, for children, for society. Let’s seize the day!
Jo Farmer is joint managing partner at Lewis Silkin
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