Edwina Currie on why only a third of 'top jobs' are filled by women <headdesk>

handbag my DH and his female colleague are the employer. They are both partners...

and sorry but the idea that you can just find the exact employee with the right expertise and experience (to take over a partner role), who the clients will accept, and who will just so happen to want to work two days, is...naive at best.

The reality is that my DH can no longer sustain it. He will have to let his colleague's clients' work go. His colleague can't possibly cover it all and keep them happy on three days. She will lose her clients sadly. This will obviously impact upon her long term future.

Tis hard.

"So to suggest that 'given the choice' most women would decide to stay at home is simply not backed up by enough evidence. Given the choices on offer today, which effectively preclude one partner from having any real choice at all (the dad)"
EXACTLY.
This sums up the problem IMO. When I went back to my (high flying, sole breadwinner) job, I was asked constantly by colleagues and clients if I was coming back part time. No man, on coming back from two weeks paternity leave, is asked the same. The assumption is that I would want to be with my child and the assumption is that men won't. This has to change. But until it does, women will continue to give up work, damage their careers etc because the institutional view is that women have to have the choice to work less, although it will damage their careers, but men don't.

When really, working less or more flexibility should a) not negatively impact career and b) should automatically be as available for a man as for a woman.

Can you not see though, that this view that women have kids, take loads of time off, put loads of pressure on everyone else is perpetuating the situation that women with children can't be 'trusted' to be in positions of responsiblity as they won't take it seriously anyway.

wordfactory if your dh's colleague was offered 3 days a week surely it's up to the employer to find someone to do the other 2 and not pile it on your dh. It isn't his colleagues responsibility surely to minimise the impact of her part time working on other staff.

bonsoir loads of employees take the mick, men and women, and given an inch will take a mile. It is a people problem not a women with children problem IMHO.

I suppose to the employer the logical conclusion might be not to employ any women in the first place unless they're past the menopause as they may get pregnant and then want time off. The selfish cows.

Tribpot and FrillyMilly - I'm with you too. Just think how much easier life would be for all of us if childcare were regarded as a national issue, something that should be universal and affordable. It would stop the dilemma that single parents face: either stay on benefits and be socially stigmatized or go back to work and lose a lot of your income to childcare.

It would also stop the issue of childcare coming up in interviews..

tribpot I will help you with your coup d'état but I think childcare needs to be state controlled and run as not for profit. Childcare needs to be everyone's issue not just working mums. It forces mums out of the workplace, it forces parents to work long or unsociable hours, it forces those without childcare issues to pick up the slack, it ensures the childcare workers are low paid and encourages a high turnover of staff.

Trills it is possible to have flexible working with shifts too. Just takes a bit of creativity.

"As for dropping hours, my DH, good feminist that he is, fully supported his closed working partner in dropping to three days. However, he is the one suffering for it!!! He is having to take up the slack for her, do jobs alone that once they would have done together, see her clients on the days she is off...he is on his knees TBH. How much longer he can do it, I do not know."

wordfactory - my DP has gone through all sorts of good feminist phases and done all sorts of things to allow his largely female workforce flexibility over their domestic responsibilities. Having had his fingers burned many times, he is somewhat hardened these days...

Flexible working should be available for all workers whose role doesn't involve shifts where a certain number of people must be physically in the building (e.g. nurses have to be there, any office job you don't have to be there, you just have to get stuff done).

Measure how well someone is doing by their achievements, not by their clocking-in.

Not just mothers, not just parents, everyone.

tribpot makes some very good points.

As for dropping hours, my DH, good feminist that he is, fully supported his closed working partner in dropping to three days.
However, he is the one suffering for it!!! He is having to take up the slack for her, do jobs alone that once they would have done together, see her clients on the days she is off...he is on his knees TBH. How much longer he can do it, I do not know.

Good posts tribpot.

Despite me being the highest earner and higher up the career ladder I am still the one who has gone part-time because of certain circumstances. DH is in a male dominated workplace with few part-timers/opportunities. He is also much much closer to retirement than me, so any drop in income would affect his pension to a much greater degree than me (final salary pension).

However as he will be retiring shortly he will be doing the majority of childcare then!

But it is still a compromise and I have still done the compromising, because it was easier that way (and more expected).

I felt inspired to revisit a good thread from a few weeks ago to reproduce my manifesto for my upcoming coup d'état as follows:

• cheap, affordable childcare
• the option for all parents (indeed all workers) to take a period of time out or reduce their hours without this being seen as adopting a "part-time" attitude to their careers
• much more support for men to make non-traditional choices (and at the very least the 'nudge' they already get in Sweden by being mandated to take 3 of the months of parental leave themselves)
• childcare recognised as a feminist issue not just because it mainly affects women (the reporting in the mainstream media is a bloody disgrace) but as an issue affecting parents
• free chocolate for all.

Himalaya - I think I should also say about the 3+5 couple, it is much more acceptable for her to drop to 3 than for him to drop to 4, and both be seen as ambitious (and this in an organisation that positively supports part-time working, at one point I had four part-timers in my team and all of them were men, all had taken a cut in hours to take on caring duties). She will still take the hit of having been off the 'real' treadmill whilst her children were young, but her situation is probably (somewhat) more recoverable than his would be if he'd done the same thing. Because there's 'no reason' for him to move off the career track whereas she has a (just about) socially-acceptable justification.

But even in an organisation with pretty forward-thinking views, her career will suffer more than his for having children. If you put that against the backdrop of most organisations in this country where such things would be out of the question, and you wonder how on earth we ever managed to get 30% of women into top jobs at all. Perhaps we forget how far we've come in a relatively short space of time. But this battle is far, far from won.

Tribpot - I think that's right. Good post.

Wordfactory - I think the conundrum you are talking about is that women are not across-the-board more caring, more selfless, less ambitious than men and yet we end up with these hugely divergent life choices.

• the root of it is the balance of ambition between husbands and wives. If your partner is just 5% more ambitious than you they can tend to diverge - e.g. As Tripbot said not considering going to 4 days, so the woman ends up going to 3 days. And the thing is smart, ambitious women tend to be attracted to smart, ambitious men. So even though they are smarter and more ambitious than most of the men in the population, when it comes to deciding who is going to take the career hit on having children if their husband is 5% more ambitious they can still end up on the mummy-track.

On top of which, we do read relatively often on MN of couples where the dad would like to be the SAHP but can't because his work won't allow him flexibility or where, as the higher earner (a self-perpetuating circle of justification) he cannot afford to take the career hit than would come with going part-time. I've mentioned on another thread that I work with a couple who earn the same salary and the woman has dropped to 3 days a week, the man stayed on 5. (Despite the fact the woman is doing nearly as much work in the 3 days as he is in 5, and her project / role is more important). Why not both drop to 4? I don't think he would ever consider it, despite the fact she has the greater potential in my view.

So to suggest that 'given the choice' most women would decide to stay at home is simply not backed up by enough evidence. Given the choices on offer today, which effectively preclude one partner from having any real choice at all (the dad), which ensure that the cycle of lower pay spirals the lower earner out of the work force, which almost mandates a set of criteria of what's required to be successful that precludes anyone with carer responsibilities from being able to fulfil those - this is not a level playing field upon which parents are making a free choice.

And with an increasingly ageing population we probably should acknowledge the other carer responsibilities that may be coming to knock us down as well at some point. It won't just be children who need looking after but elderly relatives too. Surely there is no biological imperative which makes it more natural for women to care for the elderly than men ... yet the burden falls mainly on women again and will continue to do so whilst juggling caring and career is a women's problem and not a people's problem.

I think the very real situation that back-to-work mums find themselves in is the bad pay offered by part-time work. Employers get away with it because they know they can. Back-to-work mums are often desperate for employers to overlook the fact they have kids and if they find work that fits in with their childcare obligations they are so grateful. They can't afford to be picky about it.

I often think that despite all the current disapproval of teenage motherhood it would be better to have your kids young and have time to concentrate on your career without the career break in between, and with a sense of what's important in life.

I'm glad it was different for you wordfactory as it's bloody depressing hearing all the rubbish the women I know are having to negotiate. It's nice to know it is not across the board :)

frilly I think that's the case with the people I know really. Only one is high up enough to have any real say on her role.

That's interesting.
Perhaps things are changing culturally.

I had my DC thriteen years ago and everyone just assumed I would go back to work. It was expected that an educated woman with a top end career would do so.

I think another issue that becomes apparent when discussing this issue is it is those lower down the career ladder or in low paid jobs who would find it most difficult to return to work and therefore progress to top jobs. If you are in a well paid job or wealthy enough to afford a nanny then the career opportunities are greater. You only have to look at threads on here to see many do not return to work as they can not justify losing pretty much all their income to childcare.

Of course you will be offered your old job back, it's a legal requirement that you are offered your or an equivalent job. The problems occur when you try to negotiate flexible hours. I constantly get questioned on why I'm going back to work. After his paternity leave no one asked DH if he wanted to go back or if he found it difficult.

Ah well that is very different to my own experience.

Of my girlfriends we were all offered our old jobs back. Most never returned. Some of us tried for a while but found the juggling too difficult...they just weren't the sort of jobs that were sufficiently flexible (lots of client facing time, imposed deadlines and travel).

In the end I carved out a whole new career and life for myself that was flexible and allowed me to be the sort of parent I wanted to be.

A quick survey of the women I know who are currently on mat leave:

1 x solicitor made redundant whilst on maternity leave
2 x professionals being dicked about in terms of the location they will return to work in I.e. something new that isn't compatible with childcare
2 x high fliers trying to negotiate 'flexible' working so they can pick up their child a couple of nights a week from nursery
1 x me, demoted on my return to work.

Only one that has been positive is a manager at a charity. Another 4 are going back to what they were, one possibly to redundancy.

I think the pressure is coming from society and as such employers perhaps feel justified in their poor treatment of mothers as they'll be going off anyway.

abigail if you had asked me that fifteen years ago that is exactly what I would have said too.

However, now having had the benefit of experiencing the conundrum, and most of my girlfriends experiencing it too, I just don't think it is so. Or at least it is not as simple as you make it sound.

The reality is that when a couple both have highly demanding jobs a decision has to be taken regarding childcare. There is nothing to stop those couples hiring a nanny. Some do. But many women simply will not take this step.

And this isn't because society says they shouldn't. Or because they can't afford it. It is a far more slippery mix...

I don't think it is a conundrum at all wordfactory. Society tells women all the time to do what is best for their children. In fact society tells women all the time not to be selfish. The same messages aren't there for men. Or the messages that they get is that it is important to provide for a family i.e. work.

In addition to that the workplace is set up for men. Not for women and certainly not for child caring. It suits men to keep it this way so that they get the majority of wealth and power.

No matter what top job you do, you can't do that and provide full time childcare. Somebody has to look after children and far more often than not, it isn't the men. So if the men aren't doing the childcare and want a career and the women want a career also then childcare has to be out sourced. The messages about completely outsourcing childcare aren't great either. So in the end it comes down to compromise and because of the way the workplace/homelife is set up, women, more often than not do the compromising. They are the ones whose priorities change. And it is wrong and more men should be stepping up to the plate. But it goes back to losing status/wealth/power.

And it's ceratinly not true about girls not being ambitious enough.

Girls do better at A level, they take up more place at university and most professions recruit a very even number of male/female at base level. Most expect to have DC. And most expect to return to work. But they don't...