Maternity leave in Bangladesh has just been increased to 120 days. This seems like an advance in civilization and so on -- but it's important to note that maternity leave can, in fact, be too long. The other way of putting this is that the world's a complicated place and the moving parts sometimes militate against the very goal we're trying to reach.
The first and most obvious point is that of course some amount of physical rest is necessary after giving birth. As the saying has it, it's like pushing an entire and whole orange out of a nostril. Or as the other saying goes, if men were the people who gave birth, we'd all be only children.
But how much? Clearly, it's beneficial to both mother and baby to have some considerable period of nursing, even of pair bonding. So, yes, we'd like that to be able to happen.
But we've also this goal of a more general economic equality across society. There is much complaining about the gender pay gap for example, the difference in what men and women get paid on average. Back when work was all about that muscle power that men have more of, perhaps that wasn't so much of a problem. Now we're all moving to indoor work with no heavy lifting then why should there be a gender difference in pay? Yet there is, even in the richest and most feminist countries.
Well, why? In my native Britain it's very clear. There is no gender pay gap but there is a motherhood pay gap. It's not just me saying that, they gave the Nobel for Economics to Claudia Goldin recently for actually proving that rather than just saying it as I do. One of the things that contributes to that pay gap is the amount of time mothers take off work after giving birth.
This is a complicated little thing though. In the US there is no legal requirement for any kind of paid maternity leave at all. Professional women do get it as part of their contracts, the general working class might get a couple of weeks off -- unpaid -- and if they want more they've got to quit their job. The gender pay gap, compared to other rich countries, is quite large in the US.
On the other hand, in Korea, there are 65 weeks of maternity leave. Yet the gender pay gap is significantly higher than in the US. Sweden has only 13 weeks reserved for the mother and a low gender pay gap.
In my native Britain it's very clear. There is no gender pay gap but there is a motherhood pay gap
That is, it's complicated. The general assumption is that if you take “too much” time away from work then your future wages are going to be lower. And this is generally true in those OECD countries too -- there's no gender pay gap among the young, before people generally have children. The pay gap rises the more children each woman has -- mothers of three have a larger pay gap than those of one.
There are oddities -- Italy has a very low pay gap but that's because mothers with children are much less likely to return to work. In our numbers here those not working at all are not included.
Now, of course, this is obvious to anyone who has the good sense to sit down and think for a bit. Your granny could tell you this as you made her a nice cup of tea. It does escape a lot of politicians of course -- presumably they're so busy running the country they've not got time for tea with granny. If you leave work two or four times to take a couple of years off with each of your children you're going to fall behind in work experience, pay rises, and promotions. Really, who would have thought it?
Now to move away from being serious into being jocular. This is one of the grand lessons of economics. There are no solutions, there are only trade offs. It is not true that ever longer maternity leaves are better, not if we also want to worry about the gender pay gap.
For any set of worries -- about mother and child, fairness, pay equity, simple physical reality, and so on -- there will be an optimal balance. Also known as the best we can do given all the different things we're trying to worry about at the same time.
That is, always be worried about people who insist that “more of this will be better.” True, it could be, but it does almost always mean that we also get less of this other thing over here. And how much less of this other thing are we willing to trade for that more?
Economics is known as the dismal science and this is one of the reasons why. We cannot, in fact, have everything. We've got to choose what mixture -- that optimal balance -- of what we can achieve. It's very, very, annoying of course but it is true.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.
