The head of the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission has hit the headlines by suggesting that attempts to extend rights to women at work have gone too far, and are now damaging their career prospects.

Nicola Brewer said she was worried that current legislation giving women maternity leave for nine months “has had the unintended consequence of making a woman less attractive to employers.”

Brewer also said she feared plans to extend the rights to request flexible working until children were 16 could further hamper women’s employment prospects.

Alan Sugar famously claimed that many employers binned the CVs of women of childbearing age. But this is the first time laws and plans designed to promote fairness between the sexes at work have come under attack from the very organisation fighting to improve the lot of women.

So what is the view of recruiters who are in the front line when it comes to putting forward women to employers?

A Recruitment and Employment Confederation survey in 2005 found that 78% of recruitment agencies had been asked to avoid hiring pregnant women or those of childbearing age, with one in eight bowing to pressure from clients when registering or putting applicants forward women for jobs.

So have the rules introduced in April 2007, which extended maternity leave to 12 months (nine months of which are paid), actually made women less attractive in the eyes of their clients? And are further changes in workforce flexibility going to make things worse or better?

“I would think Alan Sugar was right,” Toni Cocozza, managing director of DP Connect, told Recruiter. The main problem is the fear that if interviewers ask women questions about their circumstances — for example, whether they are going to take their full entitlement to maternity leave — this could result in a law suit, she explained.

“When people aren’t allowed to ask those types of questions, even when those questions are burning in their minds, it does build up barriers,” she said. According to Cocozza, the result is that clients “tend to make up their own minds”, usually to the woman’s detriment.

Cocozza said she has sensed the maternity leave regulations were stopping clients taking on women, though she said: “It’s not something they want to discuss.”

She added that in contrast, the proposals to extend the right to flexible working to women with children under 16 were unlikely to lead to more discrimination, and were “not a bad thing”.

“Employers can talk about the request with the employees,” she said. And because the business can be fair to its employees by providing flexibility, the proposal is a positive thing because it stops good people leaving, she explained.

Greg Latham, managing director at Encore Superior Staffing Solutions, said he had not experienced any extra pressure from clients not to take on women of childbearing age as a result of the changes in maternity leave.

However, he warned the introduction of more and more flexibility for employees would at some stage force clients to review their employment policies, and at that time women, would lose out. “It will make it women less appealing to employers.”

He said smaller clients, in particular, find it more difficult to find cover when women are on maternity leave and suffer much more from the disruption.

“It’s a commonsense approach when the burden on employers becomes too onerous,” he added.

However, Andy Hogarth, managing director of Staffline, said the changes to maternity leave had made no difference to the attitude of his clients, and nor had the agency experienced any pressure not to put forward women of childbearing age. “There’s absolutely no discrimination at all because of that,” he said.

David Heath, global director of people capital at Alexander Mann Solutions, said the firm did not see maternity leave as an issue that got in the way of the career development of its own female staff. Indeed, he said the company had a large number of female employees in key positions throughout the business who had taken periods of maternity leave.

“Women form a valuable part of the workforce and we feel that in an ever-more competitive employment market, if an employer discounts all women who ’are likely’ to take maternity leave, they are making a serious reduction to their talent pool,” Heath added.

Brewer’s comments have exposed sharp divisions among recruiters. And with the government set to extend paid maternity leave from its current nine months to 12 months by the end of the current parliament, the intensity of those divisions can only grow.

As the effects of this change and other government proposals feed through, perhaps the one thing the industry can agree on is that it will lead to greater placement opportunities.