All these issues can be mitigated for the right clients if you understand some traditional and proper risk assessment.
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If someone is entering mat leave; do they have capacity to cover their expenses and meet their commitments without foreseen financial hardship - assess it correctly and you will be OK.
I disagree that it is always as simple as that. I am a 'casual' employee. This is a pain in the butt with the banks just in itself. Despite my 'casual' employment basically being the same as part time - with a few less hours a week. I have minimum working requirements for my job, and earn an hourly rate and a commission. Now add in maternity leave (entitle to 12months unpaid). The banks won't listen to me saying "I WILL go back in 6months". So they discount any pay I may get from my casual job.
The banks also refuse to allow me to include my baby bonus as income. It is a payment over 13 fortnights that amounts to about the same as my casual income I would recieve from work. But because it is only going to exist for 6mths they won't even consider it (and won't even consider considering it, before I actually recieve the first payment, regardless of the fact that I would be entitled to it from a certain point in a pregnancy whether they baby is born alive or still born).
Also, my family tax benefit actually increases when I am not working (because I don't have an income), but again the banks will not consider this until I am actually recieving that amount of money.
Overall, my personal REAL financial situation is actually slightly 'better' when I am on maternity leave then it is when I am working.
But the banks look at me being pregnant as a liability instead.
On top of all this, the banks decide to allocate us the cost of an extra 'dependant' - (and I won't even get into how flawed I think the banks are in calculating how much each dependant costs, in my REAL experience, the more kids you have, the cheaper it actually becomes in terms of cost per head).
I have had to go through getting a mortgage twice while pregnant - but luckily that was before these new laws, and I was able to do so without meeting face to face with any brokers or bank managers, so they couldn't see the massive bump in front.
Now think of other women who may be pregnant, but who are choosing to put their baby up for adoption, or who are acting as surrogate mothers. Can you imagine the hoops these women would have to jump through to 'prove' that the baby isn't going to be a financial liability to them - if it is even possible to 'prove' such a thing, as under current laws, the woman carrying the baby WILL be the mother until such a point as the baby is actually born and the mother then signs over all rights to the child in question.
What about women who are newly married? Are the banks / brokers then going to enquire if they intend to have children in the next 1-3yrs? What about single mums on casual wages? What about 30-something newly divorced women with a job, three young children, a bit of cash, but no assets to her name? What about the young pregnant widow, with big deposit who needs maternity leave very shortly.
Women of childbearing age are going to be discriminated against. I have seen it happen in the workplace, I have experienced it myself in the workplace (by a female employer no less) - and that is with laws that are in place to try and protect against that kind of thing. These laws 'encourage' discrimination, so of course it is going to happen, it already was happening to a degree, now it's just going to make the situation even more pronounced.
