At work there are sometimes events organised outside of work hours in the evenings.
There's an expectation that people will attend these. It's not workloaded or contracted but it's still expected. For example, if there's an invited speaker, it'd look terrible if no-one turned up for their talk so there's an expectation that people will show up.
When these events are organised, there's a group of colleagues who have children who are incredibly quick off the mark to say that they can't make it because of child-care commitments. Fair enough.
However, the burden then falls on child-free people (like me) to make up the numbers. There's an assumption that us child-free people, or at least some of us, will always be at these events.
I have said before that I'm not able to attend events outside of work hours (without giving a reason) and I've raised the issue that events outside of work are an EDI issue anyway so shouldn't be happening. However, the expectation that us child-free people are there persists to the point where some of us (including me) have had comments on our willingness to engage/be collegiate.
I don't know what my AIBU is really, I just wanted to rant about this and see if anyone else has had a similar experience and how they dealt with this.
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AIBU?
Work things happening after work, expectation that child-free people will make up the numbers
145 replies
PiddleOff · 23/10/2019 10:12
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