Should we more honest about the impact of children in careers ?

[mids2019]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-13184193/Lily-Allen-insists-choosing-motherhood-pop-stardom-love-children-ruined-career.html

Is Lily Allen being honest here and saying something that a lot of women (and possibly men) realise but don't openly admit to?

I think in a fundamental sense she has a point in that for women celebs and athletes having children if not logistically 'managed' can destroy a career. For women athletes the reality is for many having children is normally done at the still end of a career with the understanding at an elite level pregnancy and early years child reading can be difficult while meeting the extreme demands of competitive sport. You could argue Taylor Swift may or may not have had the career she had if she had given birth to a couple of children (possibly losing a little career momentum because of being out of the limelight for 2 or 3 years).

On the more mortal level having children can push you back on a career path as part time working may put you back relative to your peers and as children get older it becomes more difficult to move due to schooling and children friendship ties. Having children means there may be less opportunity to 'put in the extra mile to further you career by gaining a 'hard working' reputation.

Should we be more honest about this in society and admit even in 2024 there are sacrificed to be made having childen? Are these sacrifices something we can put down to a lifestyle choice of do we need to continue to press to remove any career disadvantage having children may bring?

All jobs can't be part time, but more jobs can be part time than are.

@Brefugee
And pp said that we assume women want the same as men. to that i can only say #NotAllWomen and #NotAllMen. Because we are all individuals with wants, needs, desires etc
Of course, all men or all women are never equally affected by a problem but there are issues that disproportionately impact one sex more than the other. It is vital we acknowledge this as it is fundamental to understanding the problem and what can be done to help. Pretending that there are no trends at a population level and that we are all just individuals operating without sex based biological and societal influences and pressures is ludicrous and unhelpful.

I find the whole situation so depressing. It keeps me up at night on a personal and societal level.
I was a deputy head and left after my second child. Absolutely no way I could continue with the workload and time away from home, was refused part time. So I quit my profession (for lots of other reasons as well, many linking back to the fact that teachers are treated like crap and probably because we are mainly women).
I started a new job in the civil service. Huge pay cut. But it was remote working, flexibility, no stress. I was happy and keen to progress my new career and get back up to deputy head pay. There's a new mandate that we must spend 60% of our time in the office. I live 2 hours away from my nearest one so now I'm going to have to quit or drastically reduce my hours as kids are still at nursery and I do pick up and drop off. My husband doesn't because we live very rurally and he has a good job for a local business that would not tolerate the kind of flexibility he would need. It sucks, and he would love to work part time and do more childcare, but the fact is if we risk his job we would be screwed as there are just no opportunities around here.
There's no way I can apply for promotion now. I just don't know what I'm going to do. Meanwhile my husband has just been offered a huge promotion at work with the opportunity to gain a qualification he's always wanted as well.
I could have been a headteacher by 35 and now I feel like my career is over.

Yes, and I think mothers/women who are considering becoming mothers are sort of the canary in the coalmine here, if that makes sense? As both are amongst the groups who the existing models most obviously don't cater well for. But what we're seeing now is a wider backdrop of more people withdrawing or reducing their labour from a system that increasingly doesn't work for that many people at all.

So I wonder if our best bet as mothers might come from leveraging a more general trend/problem to our advantage. In the same way that eg disabled people have been able to benefit hugely from the general increase in remote working, even though it wasn't specifically aimed at them and there weren't really that many fucks given about how they were excluded.

Maybe you get a harsh response to your posts because they sound very judgemental. Saying, "personally, I refused to let this happen" sounds like you think other women are just being weak. Some of us railed against this when it was happening but only when you have a child do you realize what your partner is going to be like and whether your child has additional needs, etc.

at no point have i said that women are not disproportionately affected by becoming a parent (wrt workplace)

Why would i? I have been fighting it in my personal and professional life for at least the last 30 years.

I'm a 2nd waver - i don't believe in gender stereotypes, i do acknowledge that people want different things. That some women are happy to be the default parent, to go part time, to be sahp, to have a career and delegate childcare elsewhere etc etc.

I am a pragmatist: we have to speak up. We have to talk. And we have to make the people who can make a difference speak up and act.

But tbh I'm a few years shy of retirement. I fought my battles with a bit less help than i give others. Maybe i'll just stop now because - meh.

IME where i worked (right after ML, i was fired from my previous job when i got pregnant for being pregnant - i spent my first pregnancy in and out of court until i won. But i didn't get my job back.) i was the canary. I sang my fucking lungs out but all the women were younger, and beginning their life journey.

As bit by bit they got married, bought a house and then started families I remember well the first one applying for PT hours and being turned down until I fought her corner with HR and she was allowed. For her to say to me - because by then my kids were older - oh it's ok for you to go to the cinema you don't have a baby.

Nevertheless i persisted and as the waves of young women got older, some went PT some left one stayed FT, and the company to their credit promoted some of us, and didn't stop recruiting women and men.

I sometimes think what some women actually want is total flexibility on the side of the employer, to fit around them. Which is fair enough because that's what most "flexible" employers want but the other way round. When i reality what we should be working towards is a middle way. Including men.

We also have to accept that some jobs require FT work. Some require presence in a workplace but can be PT or shared. Some require presence and are inflexible on hours, some not. We should be getting workplaces to embrace the possiblities, surely? and accepting that, possibly, if we want children, our firefightingArmy/barrister/banker career is going to be very different, at least for a few years?

yet look at the outrage and dismissal of WFH on here (and everywhere) which is possibly the most progressive thing to have happened to working women ever.

I work in the public sector, our pay scales are far below equivalents elsewhere, but we have flexibility and genuine support and understanding of work / life balance. not just for the women, our male CFO took 6 months paternity leave. two of our exec committee job share. my manager works part time, i do compressed hours. it works. we are productive, professional and are responsible for a fundamentally critical function for society and the economy, and we deliver in the face of enormous challenges.

my sector is leading the way in better, fairer and more equitable working, and we get hammered, in the press, by the government and by people on mumsnet

I love this post and the other posts that have replied in a similar way. I would tell my girls that it is impossible to do everything, that if you are choosing certain careers then you need to be in a team with your spouse and make choices together about whether or not those careers are sustainable if you want to have a family. However I also feel the current commonplace practise of children in full time nursery from early on, then breakfast club, full day of school then after school club, then 2 parents too tired to enjoy their family life, is not fair on anyone ( I accept for some this is a necessity for financial reasons but many of my fellow parents are not doing this for economic reasons).The 2 most equitable families I know are where the husband has done his equal share of everything, including being flexible with his career so his wife can achieve her own goals.

It's really sad that women still feel like this .30 plus yrs ago when I had my ds it was unusual in how involved my dh was in everything. All the childcare , shopping housework planning etc really was shared fairly.
We both worked full time
I just thought it would become the norm .It seems to be worse .
I kept getting told I was lucky we both said no luck involved just basic common decency to support each other.

I think attitudes on this subject have regressed, you only have to look at other threads to see that there is an additional battle of not many women liking, having children so you have the resistance to accommodating Mothers in the workplace is even greater - it's Men and Women against the advantageous provisions!

Would it though?

Women/man (although it is often the women) are being encouraged to put they children into nursery's even when there is no financial benefit to the family unit.

However you actually dress it up. They are doing this because it is more fulfilling personally to them to have a career. Not actually because financially beneficial to the country for them to work.

Our biggest problem as a country is not enough homes and we don't produce our own power, food and consumables. More homes would give more financial choice. More manufacturing (energy, food, consumables) in the uk would mean more money staying in the UK and more cost of living stability
.

I also think that you have to still be prepared to ‘walk the walk’ on this even once you have passed the young-family stage yourself.

A few years ago I needed to engage a freelancer for a project. The main part of the work would need to be done the following year. I had worked with her before and knew she would do a good job. We had an initial discussion and then she revealed that she was pregnant, so would be out of commission for six months.

It would have been really easy to let go of the arrangement at that point. The timing of the main task still just-about worked, but it meant that she wouldn’t be available for any preparatory work or liaison.

I did stick with her and she did a good job.
Would someone else have dropped her at that point? Quite possibly.

As for PT working ....

This is a bit of a game.

I have seen successful applications for part time working from women after ml where they are fully qualified and respected members of a team in the NHS.

Technically a request for PT could be denied but in my sector of the NHS this doesn't happen often.

The NHS is massive though.

I think the NHS is a slightly different case because it is so huge that it can absorb some of the managerial inconvenience of pt working.

I was turned down for pt working after maternity leave in a senior public sector role, in a position that was very similar to @Ellovera2.

I took a public sector job last year, almost entirely WFH and it’s shit for my career. My job depends on creativity, partnership building, networking. An awful lot of public sector jobs are like this. And that’s just lost with WFH. I did a similar role prior to WFH and the difference in how much I have learnt and contributed comparing this job to that is stark.

The jury is out on how it will affect women’s careers. I suspect that those who go in to work and build those relationships, and get all that added extra that you get from being in the office and are seen will be those who progress.

My experience of work is that those who are promoted are those who are known and liked by the interview panel. And you get liked from personal connections.

Yes I agree.

I had two children young, prioritised them and built my career once they were on school.
We then decided to have another child who has significant Sen. Whilst learning to manage that my dad was going through end of life and my mother became terminally ill. I was trying to balance caring for both of them and navigate the diagnosis system for my son. Son struggled in childcare.

I was also working 25+ hours in a stressful high pressure job. Dh worked long hours in a stressful job. Both our mh deteriorated, we had no support the best we could have done was hire a cleaner but tbh I doubt it would have made much difference.

In the end I had a break down and was unfairly dismissed. I became a sahp for a few years while I supported my son, and my parents died. I went back to work when ds was 5 I work 15 hours a week in a customer service role. It's a lovely stress free job but it's not a career and my pension is fucked (currently trying to rectify that)

A bit derailing but please can primary schools be pragmatic about getting parents to pick up sick children?

I had called a meeting with a lot of senior staff in my workplace all of whom had earmarked time for my presentation. I then had the phone call from school saying my daughter had a headache, can I collect. Collected daughter who was perfectly fine upon collection. Meeting cancelled obviously.

For a lot of medical colleagues there is a real impact if a parent is called to a school especially in niche consultancy specialisms where there is no cover. I don't think we should be cancelling patient lists (many if whom have waited considerable periods of time) if a childhood illness is not severe.

Schools being to happy to get parents to collect offspring does have an impact elsewhere and doesn't help professional reputations discouraging women from going down certain career paths.

Obviously if a child is in serious pain or has an obvious injury the get the parent in but not for headaches , tummy aches and sniffles

Oh this is so worth discussing, so thank you for the thread.

I think that the crux of it for me is that the "having it all" ideal is actually really unhelpful. I wish that I knew how much I'd need to step back in my career but I also wish I hadn't been so ashamed of that when my dcs were small. I think I saw a lot of women managing to have a really great career with young families and wondered what was wrong with me 😩

In my case I think it was also that I was made redundant on mat leave with dc1, so never intended to take a big break from work as I did end up doing.

Anyway, I did get back to work when my youngest was in preschool and then realised how luck I'd been at home with my babies! I'd spent all those years thinking I was a big failure and a dowdy mum with no purpose. Then realised how much I hated being away from them! I didn't like my dcs being in wraparound care all week or holiday club all the time for example. Yes, the dcs were absolutely fine. It didn't do them any harm or anything, but I didn't like it and neither did they.

I decided to get a school hours job which we luckily can afford. I do worry about my pension for example, but I'm working on that and living frugally so I can pay more into it. It is worth it for me to have less money but more time with dcs.

Before I had dc1, I never thought I'd be where I am now. I fully intended to go back to work ASAP after dc1. Never wanted to be a SAHM or anything like that - swore I'd never. I am still not a SAHM but I'm as close as possible as I work only the hours dcs are at school and can make it to their drop off and pick ups every day.

but could the child's father pick up on that occasion? That's what i mean when i said that DH and i accepted that we would each, and as a family, sometimes have different priorities. So for me i would have been very clear to DH and the school that on that particular day, the default parent was DH. (or childminder, or grandparent or whoever you have available)

Other times i took the hit. Other times i paid our hideously expensive childminder even more to step in. the shifting sands of family priorities are something we need to think about too.

@Brefugee

Good point.

The reality is in my limited experience is that medics are often married to other medics so the problem is just transferred. It seems as you say to be the women that take 'the hit'.

I suppose the general point is that there may not be someone permanently at home or doing a job where it is easy to drop everything. It may not be the crux of the argument but I think sometimes schools should think.

I think it's an important conversation to have. Most women lose out to some degree, if they have children. If they opt to be a SAHM, they lose out on their income and pension contributions. It may be harder to get back into the workplace at a later stage and even if they do manage it, they may end up on a lower rung on the career ladder. They become financially dependent on their husband/partner, sometimes with very negative consequences. They may become subject to sneery remarks from people (often other women!) for prioritizing parenting over working.

Working and parenting can be very pressurized - trying to juggle two very different jobs and sometimes feeling like you're not giving your best to either job. Working part-time is often seen as a good compromise but even that comes with a price - pension contributions will be lower and full-time workers often have an advantage over part-time workers when it comes to promotions, big projects, important clients etc. I worked part-time myself and I still had my share of hurtful comments - things like, "Oh, I don't know how you do it - I couldn't leave my babies with strangers" etc. etc.

Irrespective of whether you work full-time or part-time, your career may be impacted by taking Maternity Leave. A lot of women take a year off to stay home with their babies. Two children or three children will mean two or three years out of the workforce. Out of sight, out of mind.......

I will be having a full and frank conversation with my DD if/when she decides to start a family. But I'll support her 100% whatever choice she makes.

Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a brilliant (but long) piece in The Atlantic 12 years ago. Look it up online. She left working for Hillary Clinton at the State Department in Washington because one of her kids was struggling but her views and ideas apply universally. That’s to say, not just to mothers in high powered careers. Sadly, nothing has changed in those 12 years other than hybrid working for some roles since covid. It’s a really good article if you can get to the end but she basically says the only way to change this conundrum is to change the way society is structured ie by men, for men.End of. The Scandinavian countries make the best job of it. France isn’t too bad either. But the majority of employers in the U.K. and U.S. treat mothers abominably imo, despite all the virtue signalling. And I’m speaking as a divorced mother of four who works full time. It sucks.

Also, where a child has special needs, it may not be possible for the mother to continue working. So they don't have any choice in the matter. Perhaps there's the odd father who stays home with a disabled child, but I'd guess the vast majority of caring parents are mothers.

But in that case you need to be clear with your DH/partner that x-date/time it will not be you. And tms/he must do it. And that the school know (or the school is sensible that when they can't reach Contact1 they automatically go to Contact2. (not like our primary who called me Twice in Korea despite: a call, a letter, an email and my DC saying "call dad")