Gender neutral parental leave can balance the industry’s gender disparity and retain more mid-level talent as the pressures of raising a family is shared more equally between partners.
While balancing work with caring responsibilities remains difficult for everyone, parental leave is a major barrier to career progression for female talent.
The Advertising Council of Australia’s (ACA) Create Space census data found that 56% of women with children believed that parental leave had negatively impacted their career progression compared to 3% of men with children.
And despite Australian advertising being a majority female industry, 1 in 4 female middle managers are likely to leave the profession due to a lack of inclusion.
In the first of ACA’s Create Space Webinars, Hannah Sturrock, national head of engagement at Advertising Council Australia, said: “There is evidence of a retention issue for females."
Hannah Sturrock, Janin Bredehoeft, Jessie Yu and Gavin McLeod during session one, Create Space Webinar.
“In junior roles we start with almost 70% female employees, but this drops to 46% at executive management level," she said.
“A popular misconception is that female representation at senior levels will simply catch up in time. However, gender disparity will not be a self correcting process, mid-level women will not gradually progress to senior roles without us doing anything.
“This is because female talent has the highest risk of leaving the industry altogether.
"We may be employing more women, but we're less successful in recruiting and retaining women all the way to the top.”
Sturrock noted that when looking at what cultural influences might be preventing women from progressing into senior roles, parental leave was the major one.
“This key milestone in many women's career journeys is essentially retarding their promotion and pay. This is a key issue our industry needs to address if we're to make an impact both on the representation of women at senior levels and that feeling of inclusion.
“We're seeing that a large proportion of women in mid-career are likely to leave our industry due to a lack of inclusion. And that's in comparison to 1 in 10 middle career males.
“So we're asking the industry to work towards gender neutral parental leave policies as well as integrating return to work support.”
According to WORK180, 95% of primary care parental leave is taken by women and only 5% by men. Moreover, only 46% of businesses offer any paid secondary care leave at all.
Jessie Yu, diversity, equity and inclusion account manager at WORK180, said: “Shared caring and gender neutral parental leave is about removing damaging gender stereotypes and de-stigmatizing men in these hetero contexts being able to undertake that parental leave.”
Therefore, utilising gender neutral parental leave will encourage more men and relieve pressures from women.
Janin Bredehoeft, research and education executive manager at Workplace Gender Equality Agency, said: “What it really takes is for men to take paid parental leave, it’s a key enabler for women to then return to the workforce in the best capacity they can.
“For employers, it's not only important to design gender neutral paid parental leave policies, that removes primary and secondary care labels to encourage men to take the leave as well, but extending leave from 12 to 24 months and making it as flexible as we can.
“Moreover, we know that once women and men return to work, we need to support them as an organisation with non-leave measures such as external services, coaching, but mainly enabling flexible work to help them balance their new work and private life."
Other sorts of return to work support employers can offer:
- Extending the eligible length of time within which parental leave can be taken
- Keep-in-touch days
- Job sharing
- Part time options
- Breastfeeding and lactation breaks
- Flexible meeting schedules
Bredehoeft: “Small organisations often say, they cannot afford to pay for extra parental leave. But there is so much you can do to support your employees to create a culture that women and men can thrive while they also have children.”
While cost is the main barrier for employees to increase paid parental leave. The cost of losing talent is higher.
Yu said: “The cost of replacing an employee can be anywhere from half to two times their annual salary, and losing a star team member can cost two to three times their salary.”
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