What was life like in the workplace if you are a woman or bringing up a young family in the 80s?

[Martinii]

I was only a small child in the 80s, so I can't really remember it.

There's always people saying how wonderful the 80s were, and you can't deny the music, films, and fashion were great. But that's always from women who were either a child or teen during the decade where life can be fairly carefree (like any decade as a young person).

I'm watching Working Girl, and it made me think how women were expected to wear skirts, tights, heals, etc. My mothers experience of bringing us up in the 80s as a single mum wasn't rosy, and I know she wouldn't look back in great fondness (except maybe the music).

So if you were working (as in an adult rather than a teen doing shifts for pocket money) or you were bringing up a young family, what was it like?

I enjoyed the eighties. Things felt freer in some ways. It was a time of transition. There were lots of new music, fashion and different ideas. Punk had a big impact. But it was also a time of industrial decline and very sharp poverty. Billy Elliott shows the reality for some communities.

@Martinii Think I can deny the fashion was great 😂

🤣🤣

I think it depends where you worked.
I worked for a large company, modern office block, air conditioned etc, squash courts, subsidised restaurant, bar and lots of staff events. Women were treated on an equal footing as men. I remember being given a 25% pay rise one year.
I applied for a couple of jobs with other firms and had some shocking interviews with some total chauvinists. As soon as I sat down I was asked when I intended to have children!

There were lots of fashions, many very innovative. From punk to new romantic. Now kids seem to dress much more safely. Then there was far more experimentation with fashion by lots of kids.

I worked in banking in the late 80's.

Women seemed to never come back to work after a baby.

We had to wear tights , no trousers allowed and heels were the norm as was the fashion but I don't think expected.

Sexual harassment was just something we were expected to put up with. Having my breasts openly discussed even in front of customers was not even something I could complain about. Being called a slag because I turned down the advances of the office sex pest. This was done in front of my line manager and still nothing was done.

All management had to be called Mr Surname and never their first name. Management often referred to staff by their surname only.

Sometimes the sexist attitudes worked in your favour. I once got a promotion out of the back office because the assistant manager told me he wanted a pretty blonde on the welcome desk as he thought I'd increase sales leads.

These old fashioned attitudes seemed o die out almost overnight where I worked due to the senior manager retiring and a more relaxed " call me Dave " type approach adopted by the new younger senior manager.

Being drunk at work was fine as was smoking until the ban came in.

When the bank closed at 3pm we pretty much sat around doing bigger all until 5pm when we all dashed out of the door. If for some reason, usually a balancing problem , we had to work late , even by 15 mins we all claimed overtime.

The sexism and sexual harassment was still an issue right up until I left in 2006. I hear it's much better these days though.

Saying this I do have very fond memories of those days. I made some good friends and it was a pretty stress free environment until the whole culture changed to a more US style corporate one in the mid to late 90's.

It was v unusual for women to come back after having a baby.

Not my experience.
I started working in a bank at the start of the 80s and worked with 3 or 4 women who were mothers (and obviously back at work).

People did smoke at their desks and in the staffroom though - it was horrible.

@BreezyWriter I take your word for it paid maternity leave was not statutory until later. However I literally didn't know anyone who was dismissed for being pregnant in the 80s, that sounds more like the 60s. Although I vaguely remember the Maria Brown case, maybe most employers were more generous and fairer than that? It just wasn't statutory.

Also I was really pleased with my maternity entitlement in the early 90s, and I remember feeling lucky that my employer was generous, it felt fresh and new, and that other employers might not be so good. I would have thought that things would have improved further in the last 30 years though, but they don't seem to have much. It is all very well being able to take a year off, but if much of that is unpaid many women won't be able to afford to take it. And this is still the case I think.

I agree about the (vile) smoking! The clothes thing wasn't an issue: men had to wear formalish clothing, not necessarily suits, but jackets and trousers, shirts and ties. Women were expected to wear ”smart business-style clothes", so not denim or casual clothes like trackies. Quite a lot of us just wore black trousers and a jacket, with a shirt or jumper, not a t-shirt. I was quite surprised to see a young colleague turn up for a formal meeting in a skirt suit, black tights, and Doc Marten's shoes - but they were polished black leather, so why not? In the 90s and 2000s, the problem was stopping the kids turning up in belly tops and flip-flops - all the office chairs were on wheels and didn't mix with bare feet.

@NewName24 I think it was more common to stay at home with children until they went to school. There were no childcare vouchers, so only well paid mothers, or those with free family help could afford to go back before then.

Women with children worked, but few women with babies, some women did return when DC started school. In fact, the bank I worked for offered a career break. You could have up to 5(?) years away from work and be guaranteed a job at the grade you left on. That scheme ended decades ago, sometimes I think we've gone backwards.

I'm 70 and was groped on a train this week. Old man felt my bum as we were queuing to get off the train. I was so suprised, well you don't expect it at 70, that I just turned and gave him a puzzled look and he apologised.

Most women I knew went back to work after maternity leave. Different when I had one in the 70s but by the 80s it was much better. I worked in a police station, admin not an officer, and I can't remember anyone not coming back, I took the full year off but some came back earlier.

Ìt wasn't a year in the 80s. My oldest was born in 2001 and it was only 6m then.

There was no statutory maternity leave in the eighties. In the nineties it was 3 months. Some places did offer decent maternity leave in the eighties, but it varied widely.

sorry wrong thread

My DM's experience:

She went back to work 6 weeks after having me despite a very difficult birth and raging postnatal depression. She and my DF needed the money.

There was very little childcare available, minimal private nurseries and the council one opened for such short periods during the day it was pointless for working mums

There were no registered childminders - She was lucky as we lived near Norlands who did 24 hr childcare with the trainee nannies. It was amazing.

After that she got by with a friend who was a foster mum and loved having kids around, a succession of art students (I loved art) and dumping me at the riding stables all weekend. Plus my dad who was more modern than a load of supposedly modern dads and did everything.

She was a nurse and used to go shopping at the market in her nursing uniform as the traders would give her cheaper prices. This was partly because it was known nurses weren't well paid, and partly because of the 'sexy nurse' stereotype. Just ick, but it saved a lot of money on shopping.

This is my memory too - I didn't work with any women who had children

Oh and two people were discovered ..hum..

The secretary was sacked and the boss kept his job - may have been early 90s

Oh we had morning and afternoon coffee breaks - in a dedicated coffee room as well as hour long lunch breaks in a subsidised canteen

My mum's experience of the police:

They came into A+E everynight bragging about how they had had a good time beating up miners/Greenham peace women

Her boss was married to a v senior policeman. He beat her up regularly.

When she got stopped for speeding she hitched her skirt up and got let off.

When I started (CS) the office was all female similar age to me. There was a lot of bullying and a lot of sex talk (there were a lot of young men and the girls seemed to have lots of one night stands. No desktop computers, faxes went through a special office, typing pool, computing was through batch on a mainframe (probably less powerful than a modern watch). Clothes best described as smart casual. Work itself was dull.

Being CS I was able to change streams and retrain while still being paid though their own training program.

When I had the children they went to an in house crèche which had been set up by some of the women in an empty building on site. It later became so popular it was moved outside the fence and became a commercial venture.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/mumsnet_classics/3033411-For-those-of-you-who-worked-in-an-office-in-1960s-1980s

I started work in 1979 but didn't have children until the 1990s.

Women were definitely not treated as equal and the sexism was off the scale, but it sometimes worked in our favour and I really enjoyed the social life that went with working for a merchant bank the city. Long boozy lunches (often paid for by the company or the clients) were the norm and the money I made in my job was excellent with big bonuses (although it was definitely less than the men were paid). We dressed in smart skirt or dress suits (always wore a smart jacket) and heels, always looking glamorous as we would be seeing wealthy clients most days who would enjoy been seen out having lunch with a glamorous woman and would then happily give us their money to invest - like I say, the sexism sometimes worked to our advantage.

By the 1990s I was no longer working in the UK and where I was there was still no real employment legislation (there is now) and so was dismissed when I was admitted to hospital to have my first baby. They thought they were being generous by paying me 3 months notice at that point. It was easy to find another job after those three months so it didn't matter that much to me as having been in a well paid job, I had savings too.

A couple of the girls I knew took some of the sexism seriously and for them it wasn't fun - you needed to be able to stand up for yourself and know where to draw the line. Most of it was just banter and easy to ignore or let it go, but for some of the more junior staff it could be a very threatening environment.

After the millenium the offices seem to become much more serious places to work and most of the fun had gone out of it. The long lunches and the drinking dried up along with the big bonuses. I left and changed career but do look back on my days of living in that world as some of the best of my life as it was great fun.

The type of careers that my school mates went into when I left (private) school in the 80's were banking, nursing, teaching, a couple went on to become doctors and a few into the military (particularly nursing in the forces. Our school had a lot of girls from military families).
I went into high street banking. There were no female managers, even though I was working in city branches. You could smoke in the office, which was particularly horrible as our branch was built into a hillside so the back of the branch had no external ventilation. Going to the pub on a Friday lunchtime/somebody's birthday/payday and then serving on the counter afterwards. Calling your manager Mr or Sir.
Apparently it was even worse in the 50s. A friend's DM worked for a building society and she couldn't get a mortgage in her sole name despite being the employee. It had to be in her husband's name.