83.5% of women want Jordan’s maternity leave restrictions removed — study

AMMAN — Maternity leave supports women’s retention in the working world and is key to economic prosperity, said Mayyada Abu Jaber, founder of Jo Womenomics.

“Given that the society still believes that care giving responsibilities are primarily on women, paid maternity leave gives enough time for the family to find daycare facilities and make the necessary arrangements to ensure both spouses can remain economically active,” Abu Jaber told The Jordan Times on Saturday.

Jo Womenomics is an independent non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting mindset change towards women’s greater economic participation. 

The organisation also supports women by developing the social, political and economic infrastructure necessary for women’s empowerment.

Speaking about paid maternity leave in Jordan, Abu Jaber said there are restrictions on maternity leave access. For instance, a woman needs to prove she has been an employee and has had a social insurance record of no less than six successive months before her delivery, she noted.

“This restriction has jeopardised women’s participation in the labour market,” Abu Jaber noted.

She said that maternity leave should be considered a health issue, noting that in the social sector, if employees are injured from a work-related cause, they are eligible for the salary even if they had only been working for several days. 

She referenced Jo Womenomics’s most recent survey, where 83.5 per cent of respondents said that all maternity leave restrictions need to be removed.

The recent opinion poll by Jo Womenomics, conducted through the Feminist Integral Centre for Research and Innovation (FICRI), a project funded by the Dutch embassy, also showed that 79.7 per cent of its respondents said that maternity leave decreases their fears of losing their jobs during pregnancy.

Furthermore, it indicated that 66.6 per cent of the sample of women surveyed believed that changing the law would encourage the private sector to maintain work of women. 

Almost half of those surveyed, or 48.6 per cent, believed that the current law is forcing women to leave their jobs.

According to the opinion poll, 80.7 per cent of respondents agreed that paid maternity leave encourages women who wish to be pregnant to stay in or enter the work force.

“Women are a huge part of the engine of the local economy,” said Noor Qasem, a Jordanian working mother. 

She added that having access to paid maternity leave significantly increases the likelihood that women return to their jobs.

Heba Faisal, another Jordanian working mother, told The Jordan Times that because she only worked four months before delivery, she did not have access to paid maternity leave.

“I was all alone. I did not want my husband to take even a few days off, so his salary would not decrease,” she said, adding that without eligibility for paid maternity leave, she is not planning to have her second child.