No prize for spotting the leading question Why should I pay for you to have children? The use of emotive language or the way a query is made can lead respondents to answer in a certain way.

This question was put by the European Parliament office in Malta promoting a seminar on maternity leave extension. Other suggestive questions advertising the event could have been: Would an extension in maternity help raise Malta’s fertility rate? Or, maybe, Would longer maternity leave improve women’s participation in the labour market? But the choice fell on the one about paying women to have children.

The question elicits negative reactions, such as: True, why on earth should we pay for you to have children? It’s a question which leads one to think those asking it have already made up their minds.

So, at the Why should I pay for you to have children? seminar, one had first to deal with the psychological pre-conditioning the title presented. Only after that could one start thinking in as unbiased a way as one possibly can about the advantages and disadvantages of maternity leave extension.

First, we must agree that children are an asset our society needs badly because our fertility rate is one of the lowest in Europe. So it is not as if this maternity leave extension business is about funding broody women whose biological clock is ticking away and are so eager to have a cuddly baby in their arms.

The issue is clear. We need to have more children. Countries which were in the same position as us and incentivised parents to reproduce are getting good results. So by extending maternity leave, we will all be paying so that women can have more children because our society needs them.

In a situation where we are concerned about an aging population and the cost of pensions, increasing women’s participation in the labour market as well as our birth rate has become vital to economic sustainability. As we are today, we have a low level of women’s participation in the labour market, with the concomitant problems created by the dependency ratio of our population.

We must also agree we are losing out a lot on what we, as a country, invest in women’s education and training. When a woman gives up because of inflexible work conditions, down the drain goes the return the country ought to get from its investment.

We have to understand we not only need to have more children but we need also more women in the labour market.

Thus, we must not put women in a position where they are constrained to choose either one or the other. It is imperative we implement policies and set up structures which encourage and make it easier for women to have children and remain in employment. One of these policies is maternity leave. But Malta offers the shortest maternity leave among EU member states.

There are, of course, downsides to this proposal. No doubt, what first comes to mind is the private sector, especially small enterprises, upon which our economy depends so much. Business surely cannot be expected to pay for this maternity leave extension on its own. We have listened to the problems encountered by this sector of employers and this would be an added burden to an already very difficult situation.

Presently, the cost of maternity leave is shouldered by the employer. There are countries that deal differently. For instance, there are governments which use funds from the health vote, others from social security, others from unemployment funds, depending on the emphasis put on the maternity leave requirement. This may be on the health of the mother and baby, on social needs or on the link with employment.

The government should consider shouldering the cost of more maternity leave. This, not only because it is too heavy a burden for business to carry alone but because the government should look at the proposal from the social and economic perspective and long-term planning and regard this as an investment rather than a cost.

Some of the benefits include more women in the labour market and, thus, more workers paying tax and national insurance contributions, higher return on the investment in women’s education and higher productivity. The fertility rate may rise, which, over the years, will translate into a bigger workforce and stronger sustainability of the social benefits and pensions.

The UN CEDAW report on Malta (issued October 2010) states that there is concern “about the situation of women in the labour market, which is characterised, in spite of women’s high level of education, by a persistent high female unemployment, the concentration of women in low-paid sectors of employment, the wage gap between women and men and the fact that a significant number of women leave the workforce after childbirth.”

An OECD (2006) study found that in countries where the maternity leave provisions are longest, women’s employment rates are also highest, with over 70 per cent in Denmark and Sweden. This is well above the OECD average of 57 per cent. Ours is way below this.

Dr Dalli is shadow minister for the public service and government investment.

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