The broader aim of the study was to capture the relationship between these women's 'secular' education and their religious (and secular) social identities as young, urban, middle class working women in a Pakistani higher education context. This paper reports the findings of an exploratory, qualitative study with Pakistani women to explore how Muslim women studying English in higher education contexts in Pakistan engage with feminist thought. We explore the concept of indirect discrimination in this context, and use concepts from the field of social policy to consider whether excluding fathers from occupational schemes can be objectively justified in the context of social norms moving towards greater equality in shared parenting Using a recent employment tribunal example, we show how legal uncertainty over possible use of anti-discrimination law (to challenge father's exclusion from occupational maternity leave schemes) abounds. We support this by examining the eligibility, the statutory remuneration and the need for maternal consent to access leave. We argue that the new law is unlikely to encourage more fathers to take parental leave – it appears to provide parents with new rights and choice over how the leave is taken, but in practice, 'the discretion remains with the employers' (Javornik, 2014a Mitchell 2015). Thus in many workplaces an incentive for the mother to take leave remains. The Achilles heel of this intervention is that it doesn't apply to occupational schemes. Second, it creates a right only to the statutory minimum leave and pay. The new legislation purports to bring equality into the workplace and the home, however, the government has not created a new right here – it is merely allowing parents to split an existing right, making the chances of parents (voluntarily) sharing leave slimmer. In this paper, we aim to explore whether shared parental leave is in fact likely to challenge gender inequality through shared parenting. 'the “gender penalty” that women suffer from taking time out of the workplace with their children’. Shared parenting is expected to reduce the gender opportunity gaps, i.e. The policy also aimed to 'create a new, more equal system which allows both parents to keep a strong link to their workplace' - by men spending more time caring. The Children and Families Act, of which the new Shared Parental Leave regulation is a major feature, is a well-meant piece of legislation, intended to give parents more job security and more control over family life. Here, the Government clearly focused on heterosexual couples. The involvement of both parents in childcare was defined as ‘shared parenting,’ with the aim of promoting such practice to dismantle the gendered division of work (Javornik 2014). New shared parental leave, enacted by the Coalition Government in 2014 and analysed in this paper, aims to help working parents reconcile work+care and to ‘enable working fathers to take a more active role in caring for their children and working parents to share the care of their children’ (Modern Workplaces Consultation: Government Response to Flexible Parental Leave Proposals, 3 November 2012). Over the past few years the UK has introduced some significant changes in childcare policy that may mark a fundamental reorientation in the policy outlook.
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