Maternity insurance key to promoting new family planning policy

China has loosened the family planning policy and decided to allow all couples to have two children. The aim, among others, is to increase the country's fertility rate in order to ease the pressure of the fast aging population. But the question is: Will the goal be fulfilled?

To start with, there is no specific regulation on maternity leave for women who want to have a second child. And since the social welfare insurance mechanism does not have any provision for maternity insurance, employers have to bear the entire cost of granting maternity leave, including salaries and insurance. This could prompt employers to overlook women when it comes to promotions and higher postings, which, in turn, could force women to not have a second child and sacrifice their careers.

Besides, since employers have to bear the cost of providing maternity leave not once but twice to women to promote the new family planning policy, they may refrain from recruiting and promoting women of child-bearing age even if they are qualified and experienced. This is certainly not what the new family planning policy is aimed at.

Also, women with higher education get married later than other women. As a result, they give birth past the national average age. Moreover, women in general are tying the knot later than expected because they spend the first few years after graduating from college to build their careers. This could prompt employers not to recruit women for fear that they might soon get married and seek maternity leave.

There is another, bigger problem. Some women do not want to have a second child, as many surveys and news reports have suggested, and quite a few do not want to have even one child. Such women are preoccupied with building their careers and, thanks to Western influence, weigh their lives differently, in economic terms. This could serve them well in the workplace and keep their familial responsibilities to the minimum but will definitely not help increase the country's fertility rate.

That apart, many women do not want to have a second child-or even one child-because of the already high, and still rising, cost of raising a child. Some others don't give the idea of having a second child serious thought either because they have to resign from their jobs to do so or cannot fall back on their or their husbands' parents to take care of their children.

None of these is conducive to promoting the new family planning policy. So, just allowing all couples to have a second child will not necessarily increase the country's fertility rate.

All this shows that women, irrespective of whether or not they want to have a second child, face a lot of pressure in the job market. And their predicament cannot be attributed to employers alone, because in the absence a proper social insurance mechanism, they have to bear all the costs of granting employees maternity leave.

Therefore, the government should make maternity insurance an integral part of the social insurance system if it wants to minimize the problems posed by the fast aging population. Such an arrangement will help ease the problems of employers as well as woman employees, and also help reduce gender discrimination in the job market.

This is all the important because the cost of labor is rising and China is widely expected to lose its demographic dividends in the coming years.

The author is a professor in women's studies at China Women's University in Beijing. The article is an excerpt from her interview with China Daily's Zhang Yuchen.