Maternity Leave Policy and Work-Family Balance: Evidence from Working Mothers in Ghana

Abstract

Increasing women’s participation in paid employment is a fundamental step towards women’s economic empowerment and national performance enhancement. The benefits of increasing women’s labour force participation extend well beyond improving the economic status of women themselves. For the past five decades, gender inequality in labour force participation has proven to negatively affect economic growth. Therefore, increasing women’s labour force participation is important not only to tackle persistent gender gaps but also to enhance economic growth and accelerate national progress on development goals. However, women generally face the challenge of combining maternal duties with work usually after childbirth. With an attempt to ease women of their enormous responsibilities after childbirth, a number of regulations, including the ILO conventions and the Ghanaian Labour laws provide women with maternity leave after childbirth. Despite this attempt, women still struggle to obtain work-family balance after childbirth. This paper therefore examines the prevalence of the maternity leave concept among selected organisations in Ghana and its implications on work-family balance of working mothers.