On Maternity and Paternity Leave.

Singapore's leaders are waking up to the fact that soon they will have no-one left to lead. By this, I mean that Singaporeans simply aren't having enough children: they virtually halve at every generation - and, as any schoolboy mathematician will tell you, it doesn't take an awful lot of generations, at that rate of decline, for there soon to be no Singaporeans left at all. Something has to be done.

So, the government has proposed a number of initiatives to improve the situation. I shall focus on the implications of one of them, in this post. The government has extended the statutory period of maternity leave from 12 weeks to 16 weeks. This is great for mothers who wish to, and need to, spend more time with their newborns. It is great for the babies, too. It is not so great, however, for employers - particularly smaller employers - for they have to arrange cover, by generally less well-informed and competent staff, while their new mother is away from work. This can be expensive, is inconvenient and may affect the business. Thus, employers won't like this change very much.

Then, again, even 16 weeks is too short, really. What is needed is a much longer period of maternity leave (as in many European countries), but this would only heighten the problems for Singaporean companies which, traditionally, don't really care very much about the well-being of their staff.

This creates a big problem for women throughout Singapore. Employers may come to look on a female employee as a nightmare waiting to happen. They may see a female name and drop the CV in the bin. Why? Because down the line, all they can see is the incurred expense and inconvenience of maternity leave. Employers who think like this will tend to avoid employing young women and will only open the doors to post-menopausal women. It may create a strange kind of ageism in which OLDER women are preferred to younger ones. It would be a curious reversal of present trends.

While the government is intent on improving the situation for mothers, it seems to have forgotten fathers. Dads now have earnt the right to a week off work, sometime, during the year, to help care for their child. A week is a bit pathetic, really. What is needed is for men to have paternity leave. This would give new dads the chance to get to know their children - and their children to get to know their dads.

Paternity leave serves two purposes: it allows dads to be dads - and it ensures that mums will have jobs. You see, if dads get 16 weeks paternity leave, too, then there will be NO difference to employing men or women in the workplace. Employers would have no reason to discriminate between men and women: for both would come with the same potential cost. Indeed, equal maternity and paternity leave for men and women is the ONLY way that a sex divide in employment prospects will not develop in the Singaporean job market.

This, of course, gives rise to a general principle which should apply in all matters relating to employment: whatever breaks or allowances that women get, men should get, too, so that there is no reason to discriminate between men and women in the workplace. It seems the eminently intelligent thing to do and resolves many problems, at once. However, somehow, I don't think it will be implemented. Other considerations will probably still take precedence over the resolution of the population issue - and so the population of actual Singaporeans will continue to decline.

We shall see what is done.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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