Making parental leave pay for SMEs: the founder who’s tackling a major career blocker for working parents
Jun 10, 2024 8:00:00 AM
Hello, I’m Ed Gaze. I run an insurtech broker dedicated to helping startups launch innovative insurance solutions. I created JustParent because I saw the need to make enhanced parental leave both accessible and sustainable for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). One instance which really hit home was a friend who said she felt that she was being discriminated against for being a 30-something married woman when applying to tech start-ups. She stopped applying to SMEs and joined a Big Tech company instead. With 36,900 SMEs in the UK that employ 50-249 people each, the scale of this problem is huge and it’s clear something needs to be done, but the government is unlikely to be able to afford it.