Maternity Leave as ‘Right’ or ‘Risk’? How Employers Justify Support or Resistance

This blog post is based on an article published in Social Policy and Society by Helen Kowalewska.

Maternity leave is a cornerstone of the welfare state and a long-established right in the UK and nearly all high-income countries. Yet despite formal entitlements, many women still report being sidelined or penalised for taking maternity leave. Why does this gap between policy and practice persist?

In my new article, I explore how employers make sense of maternity leave-taking in practice, drawing on interviews with 37 British managers across sectors and company sizes. Rather than simply asking whether they support maternity leave or not, I investigate the reasoning underpinning their views. What emerges is a more complex picture than a simple cost–benefit calculation. While economic concerns are prominent, employers also invoke normative and moral arguments to justify their support – or lack thereof. These justifications shape not only who gets hired or promoted, but how women are treated before, during, and after taking maternity leave.

Employer Views on Maternity Leave

The study identifies three broad orientations among employers. The first group – risk-averse – frames maternity leave as both financially and morally ‘risky’. Some are openly discriminatory: “I would discriminate against a pregnant applicant… I wouldn’t say anything to her face, but I wouldn’t recruit her.” These employers justified their views by citing lost productivity and financial strain, particularly the ‘hidden’ costs for which they received no government support, including recruiting replacement staff and agency fees.

Yet beneath this economic framing lay deeper moral and normative discomfort. Risk-averse employers saw maternity leave as open to abuse, accusing women of misleading managers about their return intentions to ‘game the system’. Their accounts further revealed an unease with broader cultural shifts around caregiving and gender roles. A contradiction emerged: while criticising women who take leave and do not return for violating ideal-worker norms of constant availability and commitment, these employers also condemned women who returned to work for failing to meet idealised expectations of being a ‘good’ mother. Put simply, women were penalised whether they returned to work or not.

A second group, labelled business-first, instead approached maternity leave through a lens of strategic pragmatism. Discrimination was more selective: while tolerating leave-taking in routine or lower-level positions, they problematised it for ‘critical’ roles, such as client-facing, senior, or specialist positions. This essentially created a two-tier workplace.

Discrimination against high-skilled leave-takers ranged from the overt, such as occupational downgrading, to subtler forms, like denying requests for flexibility while granting them to junior staff. Business-first employers often framed these selective accommodations as pragmatic responses to operational pressures. However, their accounts also reflected a deeper belief that senior roles are fundamentally incompatible with the perceived emotional and cognitive exhaustion of early motherhood: “You have two fantastic candidates and one is about to go off – you pick the one who is not going to go off for a year and come back exhausted, especially for the senior roles.”

By contrast, value-drivenemployers expressed consistent and proactive support for leave-taking. These employers expressed an ethical commitment to support employees’ well-being. Leave was not simply a policy to comply with, but an opportunity to cultivate an empathetic and flexible workplace culture.

Differences between Employer Types

Interestingly, these three employer orientations – risk-averse, business-first, and value-driven – appear to be patterned by organisational context, managerial role, and personal characteristics. Risk-averse and business-first managers are mostly in smaller, private-sector firms, where leaner workforces, minimal HR infrastructure, and tighter financial margins potentially amplify concerns about costs and the logistical challenges of maternity leave. Risk-averse employers also had limited prior experience of managing maternity leaves, suggesting that inexperience may fuel misconceptions.

Value-driven employers are more commonly in larger organisations, which typically face greater public scrutiny and have more capacity to absorb leave-related costs. Further, many employers in this group are HR and people-focused managers, whose professional responsibilities centre on employee wellbeing, culture, and legal compliance. Crucially, most value-driven employers were women or mothers. This suggests that lived experience of balancing a career and motherhood or dealing with potential discrimination plays a significant role in shaping a more empathetic and supportive response.

Another distinctive feature of value-driven employers was the emphasis they placed on workplace relationships. Many referenced strong, trust-based relationships with employees that blended personal and professional connections and appeared to deepen a sense of moral obligation toward employees who take leave.

Policy Implications

The findings suggest that although maternity leave policies are designed to guarantee universal entitlements, access to meaningful support remains uneven. Employers’ attitudes and their underlying ideas and assumptions about business constraints, morality, fairness, and cultural expectations around gender and caregiving shape how maternity leave is experienced in practice.

How can policy close this gap between formal entitlement and lived reality? The findings suggest that a first priority is to better support businesses – especially small companies – in managing the ‘hidden’ costs of maternity leave beyond statutory pay, such as finding cover workers. Without this, concerns about affordability are likely to continue fuelling resistance. A second priority is to promote well-paid, non-transferable parental leave for fathers. Repositioning all workers as potential caregivers can help shift the perception that maternity leave is a ‘women’s issue’ only. Additionally, improved training, guidance, and peer-learning opportunities could help dismantle misconceptions, particularly among employers with little experience managing leave.

However, the importance of personal, trust-based manager–employee relationships signals the limits of policy alone. Cultural change is also needed. Initiatives like employee resource groups, inclusive leadership training, and visible modelling of supportive behaviours can help build empathetic and flexible organisational cultures whereby maternity leave is not merely tolerated, but is actively supported.

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Reference

Kowalewska, Helen. 2025. “Economic, Normative, and Moral Reasoning in Employer Attitudes to Maternity Leave.” Social Policy and Society: 1–14. doi: 10.1017/S1474746425100845.

About the Author

Helen Kowalewska is a Lecturer in Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath, UK.