To think £100k pa is NOT 'the squeezed middle'?

[ArsenicFaceCream]

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The article is very confidently attributing the definition to Danny Dorling, but did he really name this figure?!

These women are fools.

Greengrow, a question, who cleans your house & looks after your kids? Who watches the sports days & school plays? Who listens to how their school day was & helps with the homework? I'm willing to bet it isn't you.

So before you denigrate people like me ("low paid & drifting" I believe your words were) that have chosen to give up a career for their family, I now work as a part time housekeeper for people like you, just think please.

Money in the bank & a fancy career isn't everything in life.

When my life is over I'm not going to wish I spent my time in a high powered office wearing smart suits. I'm going to be so grateful I got to spend time raising my family.

All children want is love & attention, how does that fit in your daily schedule?

As an aside, my & DH's combined income pa is around £27k & we receive no benefits, not mainland UK. £100k pa?! That sounds like a lottery win for us.

PD James or JK Rowling? She sounds more to me like Katie Hopkins tbh. I mean honestly, what sort of privilege do you have to be dealing with to say inequality is a good thing?

There's a difference between attending school plays and cleaning a house. I'm sure that Greengrow and her Ex-DH manage the first between them. The latter, she probably has a cleaner, so what. No one has ever got to the end of their lives and rushed they'd done more cleaning either.

I have for a long time wondered whether thewordfactory is JK Rowling but I've asked her before and she says no.

Pigletjohn is definitely Sarah Beeny though

I've just caught up on the thread.

Chunderella you seem to be saying that £100k jobs don't come to those who don't have professional parents to steer them in the right direction.

How can you say that when you then say you went to Oxford and qualified as a solicitor having grown up on a council estate?

Greengrow is James or Rowling??

How did you arrive at that idea?

JK Rowling is quite a socialist as I understand, plus Greengrow just said she had written 30 books (so a hell of a lot more than JKR) and chose her career path at 10 on the grounds of the money it would bring in. Writing is not a good career path! Of course some people are very successful, but the vast majority of would be writers make no or very little money from their creative endeavours.

My middle class professional parents did talk to me about careers. My mother suggested careers for balancing with being a SAHM (ie being a teacher like her) and my father told me to avoid his career because he thought it had become over specialised and boring (he was a very very successful accountant) and discouraged me from going into law (I thought that being a barrister sounded fun) because he thought it would make me too aggressive given his experience of successful women in the area (he was otherwise a very supportive and quite feminist father).

I have a feeling that my father was a little like Greengrow, in that he did not enjoy his childhood in poverty (qualifier - my working class dh laughs at the idea that my middle class grandparents were ever truly short of money, it's all very relative) and decided pretty early on to go into a career that would lead to financial success. He always told us that he was very lucky to be successful, well remunerated and very happy with his career. The only issue for us as children has been trying to live up to his achievements!

I thought the grinny face made it obvious I was joking. Evidently not.

Oh. Sorry Apa. I thought it was a bit leftfield

I think what Chunderella is saying (I might be wrong) is that it's rather unfair that some people will have to be extraordinary in order to be successful.

kippersmum I don't think that Greengrow has "denigrated" low-paying jobs, it seems obvious that her view is women should pursue big jobs with audacity (like men do).

Audacity is a great word

Everyone in this country is rich
Earning over £16k puts you in the top 4% income of the global population
There is no abject poverty in this country, almost everyone has access to education, healthcare and shelter.

I think what Chunderella is saying (I might be wrong) is that it's rather unfair that some people will have to be extraordinary in order to be successful.

That's life though isn't it. Unless you come from old money you're likely to have worked incredibly hard for it.

I'm not speaking as someone from a privileged background. As posted previously my dad was a forklift truck driver and my mum was an office cleaner. I went to a (rubbish) state comp and was given precious little careers advice. Actually, part of the reason DH and I work such long hours is so that our DCs have the best headstart in life we can give them (although I'm very fortunate in that I'm now my own boss and spend the vast majority of my working time at home.)

I don't work incredibly hard for my money, it's simply I have the natural ability to do the work. I've not studied hard or undertaken further training, I've never worked unpaid overtime. Jobs like this do exist.

Perpetuating the myth that it's only possible to earn a lot by working far more hours than your contract because everyone does it etc. is just as good for employers as salary secrecy.

No worries arsenic, all my grins make so sense in real life either

Argh, no sense.

Maybe I should go back to sleep...

jakesmith whilst I agree with you in principle, that poverty in this country doesn't even touch on poverty in say Sierra Leone or Mozambique it still costs an awful lot to live in the UK. There are estates where people live in dreadful poverty for most of their lives in this country although agree will always have access to the NHS and some sort of schooling.

Gaia my DH is also very good at what he does and it just happens to pay pretty well. He does work hard but then so does someone doing a double shift in Burger King for minimum wages, he may be just as tired but his job is far more rewarding both intellectually and financially.

I don't think working hard necessarily involves long hours, though it can.

Today, for example, is a really big day in the publishing calendar and I have been working towards it for quite some time and will put quite a shift today.

But it's all fun stuff. Done in nice surroundings with nice people offering me coffee and muffins

It's fairly easy to put people into categories, but usually we are more complex than that. it si not true I have "denigrated" anyone. I have said I love to see women rising to the top and earning a lot. However I write extensively about what makes people happy and that is the levels of sertonin in your brain and the like - you enhance those by things like moving around, being outside, sunshine and good natural foods. I have also repeatedly said I put good health and mental health above everything. Yes, easy to say I am only interested in money but that is actually totally wrong. Easy to say someone is a bad woman who earns a lot so must neglect their children as a result and who is not fulfilled but again that is not so.

Also not true I picked my career for money. My parents said pick careers you will enjoy and that was wise and I say the same to my children. My career is fascinating and intellectually satisfying. However I have also made it fairly well paid too. Good to have both surely?

(The 30 books are only to do with my profession, not much money in them really. I was just adding to the discussion that many of us have done lots of different things and if you are adaptable in terms of career you tend to do better).

On the issue of whether women who work (never men of course - they are Gods who can do no wrong in the eyes of so many) don't clean the house enough - well that's subjective. I do the cleaning every summer when our cleaner returns to her original homeland and I think that's a very good reminder of how lucky I am to have worked hard enough to employ her. My son cooks the meals every night for him and his younger brothers so I would say about 4/5ths of the cooking is done by a man. A lot of the people who come to do stuff in the house are male- I had a window cleaner in a few weeks ago. I had a man out to fix something this week. As for going to school events apart from last week for the 25 years I've had a child at school i don't think I've ever missed a parents' evening or concert actually because i choose to prioritise it and I send the children to fee paying schools which recognise women have careers so put things on in evenings not during the day on the whole and because I chose a career when I can organise my own diary rather than one where I have to be in school or whatever job when the boss says and might be unable to take time off for a carol service.

In other words money and power and success can give children a more not a less balanced life and a nicer life so it's sensible to recommend that type of career to a teenage daughter rather than a low paid job. However I don't push children in any career. It's entirely up to them. If your happiness is found as a forestry worker (some of the happiest in the UK because you are outside and moving all day presumably and largely in charge of yourself) then that's a very valid choice.

extraordinary success which leads to extraordinary income gives people choices (something that's been mentioned a number of times on this thread). I think putting it out there that if women achieve extraordinary success they won't see their kids is both unhelpful to the advancement of women in the workplace (it puts people off) and not true.

For example, we choose to outsource as much of the mundane bit of running our home as possible. so we prioritise quality time with the dcs over cleaning, cooking, errands and gardening and outsource these to cleaner, housekeeper, and gardener. Both dcs are now in school full time but up until last month I have worked 1/2 days a week at home. now I choose to leave work 1/2 afternoons a week to pick up the dcs from school and dh or I choose to do the drop off in the morning (leaving our full time live in nanny/housekeeper at home). my job involves a lot of travel at certain times of the year but the stress and toll is on me rather than the dcs. They are young but to date i haven't missed sports days, shows etc and if I had to their father would be there. I cancelled a trip to New York last Xmas as I was paranoid I would be snowed in at JFK and miss the nativity play. They remain centre of our lives and my starting point with anything work related is how does it impact them. most women of my seniority and income level operate in the same way. not everyone has these choices.
life isn't perfect - I am off sick again today because the stress of the last few weeks including last week's 11000 miles round trip in 48 hours (aimed at minimising time away from the dcs) has resulted in the flu!

greengrow let's say an average secondary school year group, half of them decide they want to reach the top in their profession and all decide to aim for the high paid careers. That's about 90 kids per school across the UK every year. Are all of these going to reach the top and earn great salaries? I wasn't aware that there were thousands of unfilled higher management or skilled professional posts desperate for people to come along with the right qualifications. I thought there were far more well-qualified graduates putting in hundreds of job applications but ending up making ends meet by working in supermarkets/restaurants etc. I agree with aiming high but the reality is that only a small percentage will ever achieve the top roles.

This thread is more about the fact that in real terms we are poorer, particularly those outside the salary scale for benefits of any kind - income is the same, or nominal 1% pay rise in some sectors, but in real terms the purchasing power is going down due to inflation. DH and I earn more jointly than we did 5 or 6 years ago, but our disposable monthly income is the same despite getting rid of paid-for TV, downgrading the mobile phones, cutting out a couple of extracurricular activities.

i'm finding this debate absurdly interesting. my 15 year old has just done some sort of computerised careers test and part of the output includes salary expectations for different careers. she is definitely interested in that aspect though it's clear she doesn't really understand what it means as it all just seems like a lot of money to her.

I have ended up well paid, but by chance rather than design in that I left university without any idea what I wanted to do and after one false start fell into my current job and turned out to enjoy it and be good at it. it was then a matter of luck that it turned out to be well paid as well.

The careers advice at my girls school back in the dark ages was to aim for Oxbridge because you'd meet a better class of husband there! And my parents were academics so no real experience of "real jobs" (with sincere apologies to any academics reading - I realise this is unfair but my father's job in particular always seemed to be more of a hobby than a job and the fact that he does no less since retiring rather confirms for me that the salary was never in any way a motivation).

My youngest child will start school next September and my oldest child will move on to senior school. I will then hopefully be in a better position to look at work opportunities / re-training, although I am already thinking about it now. Dh is quite a high earner and works long hours and is often away. He could not have got to where he is if I hadn't been at home and looking after the children. My previous career involved me being away for long periods too. It wasn't really possible for us both to do that. I also felt differently after I had my first child and I wanted to spend time with her. It's not easy to achieve the right balance when they are so young. I have certainly not found it to be easy anyway. I think there needs to be more focus on helping women return to work after they have spent a few years at home with their young families and not just emphasis placed on women returning to work as soon as they've given birth. It is sad to write off huge swathes of intelligent women just because they took time out to bring up young children. There must be so much unrealised potential out there, of intelligent women with a lot to offer, but unsure how to 'get back in' as it were. Not to mention all the years of training and qualifications wasted. Thanks for the link novice. There seems to be a lot of useful information there. I will have a better look when I haven't got a 3 year old hanging off my shoulders! Hope you're feeling better soon