Maternity insurance key to promoting new family planning policy

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.