Maternity benefits (MB's) form the mainstay of social policies aimed towards ensuring gender equity and diversity in organizations, and ensuring a family friendly workplace. Although the impact of MB’s on women’s participation in paid work, their relative wages and career development have been widely studied, important limitations remain in this line of inquiry. First, most of the previous research has focused on the official design of MB’s in the workplace, treating implementation of MB’s as organizational decisions (‘rules in form’). As a result, the social and workplace factors affecting individual use of these policies (‘rules in practice’) remain relatively understudied. Second, with a few notable exceptions, we still know little about the perspectives and lived experiences of women workers who are the ostensible beneficiaries of these policies. Consequently, our theoretical understanding of the role of these policies in creating motherhood as an identity in workplace is limited. Finally, almost all empirical research on the impact of MB’s has been done in developed countries in Western context. Little is known about the design, implementation and impact of such policies in developing countries, even though many of these countries continue to lag in implementing policies aimed towards gender equity in workplace. This is a particularly important gap in previous research since parental leave practices, attitude towards women workers, and gender role expectations are social constructs likely to vary across different societies.
Based on an ethnographic study of women physicians in Pakistan, this study explores various dimensions of administrative burden associated with maternity benefits. Specifically, we analyze the psychological, emotional and time costs involved in accessing MB’s, the influence of intra- and extra-organizational actors on implementation of MB’s, and the role of MB’s in the complex negotiations surrounding motherhood at work. In doing so, this article makes the following broad contributions to the research on the intersections of gender equity and administrative burden: First, this research highlights that need to account for the role of local organizational culture and broader social context in implementing gender equity policies. The organizational decision makers—most of whom are men—use MB’s as othering devices to severely limit the benefits that women workers receive and to stigmatize them. Similarly, the family structure and patriarchal attitudes prevalent in the society also limit women’s reproductive choices. This has important implications for the conceptualization the equity footprint of MB’s. Moreover, this study also highlights intersectionality based heterogeneities in the impact of MB’s. Specifically, we found that social norms prevalent in the society, family structure, attitudes of the family and job status serve as important mediators of the way in which MB’s are experienced by women doctors. Therefore, these findings suggest the need to incorporate lived experiences of working mothers and account for heterogeneity based on family structure, type of organization and job status in design and implementation of maternity policies. Finally, being one of the first empirical studies carried out on MB’s in a non-western Muslim developing country, this research extends research on working mothers to the context of developing countries.
The administrative burden of formalization, regulations and red tape
Administrative_Burden_Masood_and_Nisar.pdf 