Maternity Rights and Mothers’ Employment Decisions

The report presents the results of the latest study in the Maternity Rights Survey series, which has been monitoring take-up of maternity benefits and mothers’ post-birth employment decisions since the late 1970s. Earlier surveys in the series monitored mothers’ employment behaviour at a time of unprecedented increase in maternal employment. For this study, just under 2,000 face-to-face interviews were conducted with mothers whose children were aged between 12 and 18 months and who had worked at some point in the 12 months before the baby’s birth.