Working mums get all the shit and end up with no career

[farewellfigure]

Hi. I really don't know if I've just a bee in my bonnet or whether workplaces in general really are unfair and women get such a raw deal. It's all very emotional at the moment as our department has just announced that 2 out of 10 of us will be made redundant in the next month. I'm applying for an admin/assistant role in my DS's school and I really hope I get it. I'm actually really excited but I can't help pondering over the fact I will become the cliché of a career woman who has to give it all up.

Anyway, at work, there are 3 designers who are part time, and 2 part time writers. We are all mums who had careers... we were managers, department heads etc. Then we had babies and came back part time and weren't allowed to be managers any more. And how about the men we used to manage whose wives had babies? They are now managers, department heads etc. It drives me NUTS. In DS's school, there are so many mums who had careers, and are now dinner ladies, TAs, admin assistants etc, it's just not funny. Not that there is anything wrong with any of those jobs whatsoever. But it just seems so unfair to me. I know having children is a choice, and I chose to do it. And I chose to go back part time. Yes... all my choices because I actually wanted to see my DS a bit every day and have a relationship with him. But basically I waved good bye to my career and now it looks like I'll have to wave good bye to the job as well.

There are 2 young women in the office who will probably get to keep their jobs when the redundancies come because they are young and full time and 'fresh'. WIBU to say to them, 'When your time comes, and you choose to have babies, come back full time. Put your DCs in nursery all day every day and keep your management roles. Otherwise you can kiss good bye to your high-flying careers and do what all the other overlooked mums end up doing'. Bitter? Me? Just a wee bit. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and maybe a bit of perspective! And I'm giving myself a . Is that allowed?

I agree with another poster who is viewing it as career maintenance.

I am extremely fortunate to applied for promotion on maternity leave & was successful. I applied more because it was part time as opposed to the promotion which I view as a lovely bonus.

To be perfectly honest, being a parent & having parents who are not getting any younger I envisage bring p/t until maybe the last 10yrs of my working life to boost my pension (final salary) although we have a small mortgage anyway.

I personally went back to work after having my DC and my mum helped with childcare. I also had a very local career job (rare as hens' teeth) so I was lucky.

When they were mid primary school and took a couple of years out and was, largely, a SAHM.

By the time I went back, I was sufficiently senior to be able to manage my diary to be fairly flexible and juggle family and job needs. So I work long hours, including some evening and weekends, but I can also juggle to leave early when they need me or work at home a couple of days a week in the holidays. That means, for me, the early pain in persevering with my career has paid off for me and the DC. For the record DH has had a very "traditional" commuting 9-5 role throughout.

I now run an organisation that employs about 50 people, so not huge. We have lots of part-time workers and when recruiting, I ALWAYS consider whether a role can be reduced / flexible / condensed hours / job share. Many can. Some can't. That's spread across all levels. I support as much as I can and I expect commitment in return, from all my staff, not just mums. And it almost always works.

I get so frustrated by these threads.

"We" want equality - yet "we" get pissed off when passed by for promotion or face redundancy based on parameters of business value because "we" have taken 2 to 5 years off work and/or been part time and thus accumulated less work experience.

Quite frankly the entitlement of some female colleagues at work astounds me. Bitching about not being promoted when they've spent 3 out of 5 years on hugely extended maternity plus working part time and complaining about being passed over in favour of others who in that time have amassed additional skills and added more value.

It's all about choices and consequences. Suck it up.

Yellowtulips - your post assumes that someone with "more" work experience is necessarily better at the role and therefore entitled to the promotion. I quite frankly don't buy that as a fixed rule. Sometimes it will be the case, but sometimes it won't be.

And in plenty of roles all the "softer" skills which mothers develop can be as valuable, or more valuable than having spent x hours on doing the same or similar tasks again and again in the work place.

and actually, I would apply my comments about part time working equally to men as well as women

I don't find that experience leads to promotion at all, it is "leadership qualities", "drive", "innovation" that I hear quoted - a part-time worker can have these in spades.

wear I also have an undergrad who does after school and some holidays but between exams and her need to get an internship over the summer I'm facing 10 weeks of uncovered childcare before September. As DD1 is only 5 I really didn't want temps swinging in and out of her life but I'm getting desperate.

Wearenotinkansas- if you're going to claim that there are particular 'softer' skills which parents develop, then surely that applies to working parents too. I see where you're coming from, because I felt that becoming a mum helped me to develop greater patience, stamina, time management skills and so on. However, I developed these as a working mum just as much as i would have done if I'd stopped working.

At the end of the day I don't think this is rocket science. Employers want the best person for the job. Anything else is a costly mistake.

Reading other people's experiences here makes me realise how lucky I am: I work at a university and they're great on flexitime, plus they take equality and diversity very seriously. My office is all women and nobody gives a fuck about presenteeism, which I know is not the norm. We're in at 9, we leave at 5 and lunch is mandatory.

Lines - I agree that people will develop these skills as a working parent. My point was that you can't assume that someone isn't suitable for promotion just because they haven't worked full time for the last 5 years or whatever

Weare - it's a generalisation yes, but true in most cases.

On the flip side of this thread - whilst I'm in rant mode - it's ironic to see the same women who chose to belittle and scorn my choice to return to work (when DS was 4 months @3 days then 6 months @4 days then full time) as being a shitty mother and ramming down my throat how great being a SAHM is to tell me now how "unfulfilled " they feel 10 years down the line. How they deserve more wrt to their life having ditched their careers.

To be clear I'm not anti SAHM - I am just pissed off with people not thinking about the impact of choices and then playing the poor me card.

I don't find that experience leads to promotion at all, it is "leadership qualities", "drive", "innovation" that I hear quoted - a part-time worker can have these in spades.

That's true but how many of us have had new managers that knew less about the job than the people they were managing? Often they get short shrift from the team.

Leadership is one thing but often people just don't respond to managers with less experience.

I'm sure it can work but not in all industries. I work in large teams so part time management or senior roles are virtually impossible. There's often no question on ability but if you need decisions and your manager is off then it just doesn't work. You can delegate but then the deputy will be doing the same job for less money, which then brings you back to equal pay issues.

In that situation, why not share the role?

Share the role? Well it might wash in the public sector, but why pay one person to fill the hole another should provide .

It's not just salary but cost of employment- pension, NI etc

Two staff on £25k do not equal one person on £50K.

No indeed, the two staff are better value as they both work harder - often getting more done than a full time person (whose productivity is on the wane at the end of the week) and are very likely to stay in post and stay committed as they are pleased to have the flexible arrangement.

When I had DD and asked to return to work as job share (with a colleague who wanted to go part time) I was just told the standard "That doesn't meet the needs of the business". Basically because no one had ever done it before, they were worried it wouldn't work. I'd written a full proposal but I don't think they even looked at it.
DH was self-employed and could not reduce his hours without damaging the business.
So my options were to go back full time and do the 60-80 hours or leave. I left because child care costs would have negated such a chunk of my salary that I would have been left with a part-time wage and NO time with my DD.
After working my way up for 15 years, I left the industry I knew so well and started a completely different role in a vastly different field and I love it.
DD is 7 now and I have worked part-time since she was one, gradually increasing my hours as she went through nursery and further once she was in school. I now work 20+ hours during school hours.

However much I love my job and the fact that it enables me to spend more time with DD and not have to pay for much child care, I do regret the loss of my career. My employers before were a big name in their field and portrayed themselves as so progressive but the HR men Dept would not even consider a change to the traditional setup.

And whilst I have my steel pants on if anyone else talks about the "soft skills of motherhood" that have value in a commercial workplace I will actually vomit.

I've got a little bit of sick in the back of my throat just typing that phrase - sorry tmi

The issue is we don't do enough to encourage women back into the workplace in the first place.

Part time does not have to be 3 days a week. Working 5 days at reduced hours for example can enable a mgt role. Or working full time but from home 2 days a week to schedule around childcare.

I mention these as solutions I've in place for members of my team to enable them to continue to work.

Brandy - sorry but that's not my experience at all of "job share".

You get two people who spend 30% of their time catching up and getting up to speed and a loaded frustrated staff who don't know who the hell to speak to.

I catch up (well I did - am full time now) in my own time, so my employers are getting extra from me, not less.
Obviously there will be good and bad employees just as there are good and bad managers.

As a full time worker I strongly resent the suggestion that two part time job sharers must be intrinsically 'better' simply because they won't be 'waning' at the end of the week.
For heavens sake. A good worker is a good worker, end of. It's pretty insulting to suggest that part timers are somehow magically going to be better.

Yellowtulips - I don't see anyone on this thread condemning you for going back to work after having your kids (and if we are playing top trumps "who went back first" after DD2 I went back when she was 2 months). And this thread isn't about SAHMs moaning about being unfulfilled. It's about whether part time workers are treated fairly.

The point that is being made is that lots of employers unfairly penalise people who work part time, or don't support them sufficiently to make it work properly.

The kinds of examples I have seen include a male boss suggesting that a returning mother requesting part time work should have her fte salary cut because "she was no longer as valuable", management meetings regularly scheduled post 6pm, having my admin support cut as I needed less when I was working part time (although I was generating as much income as a full time employee), my part time employee being overlooked for a pay rise when pro-rata her performance was as good if not better than her full time colleagues, a colleague being told by the head of the organisation that he "didn't approve of part time workers".

And at the risk of making you chuck up over your laptop, I do think the "softer skills of motherhood/parenthood" do add value - and I have worked in some pretty cut throat commercial environments.

I think sometimes it's hard, if you're a well-educated, intelligent woman in whom a lot of time and money has been invested to admit to yourself and others that you don't want, for perfectly good, sane reasons, to make the sacrifices to get to the top.

Abraid, I completely agree.

I think there's a lot of women out there with a high degree of emotional intelligence that have figured out that battling it to the "top" is actually a pile of shit and doesn't make them happy. It's perfectly wise to decide to yourself, "I don't even want to climb to the top of this ladder".

I also think that it's time that the school system reviewed itself. Why should it have those hours that don't suit? Could three long school days be better for everyone than five short ones? Why not have Saturday morning School, like in France?

Given that I'm doing one of those "can't be done part-time" roles I'm pretty sceptical that all those roles actually are impossible to do part-time

"he is basically the boss because he was 'the next in line' and the Board couldn't come up with a good enough reason to 'not give him a go'."

This is the core of it IMHO - men just need to wait it out, and someday they're "next in line", because the assumption is that progression is by default theirs, and you need to find a good enough reason not to do that

For women, the assumption is that progression is not theirs by default. They have to earn it. And any reason that comes up is enough to deny them.

Now, this doesn't apply everywhere. I work somewhere it doesn't, currently. But I have seen this pattern so often.

Lines

As a full time worker I strongly resent the suggestion that two part time job sharers must be intrinsically 'better' simply because they won't be 'waning' at the end of the week.
For heavens sake. A good worker is a good worker, end of. It's pretty insulting to suggest that part timers are somehow magically going to be better.

What you miss slightly in your post is that almost all of the PT workers commenting here will have worked FT too. We know how we worked when we were FT and how we work PT.

I know that my employer gets better value from me by paying me 80% for 80% of a working week. I am much more efficient and focused because I know that I have to leave on the dot of time and also because my working days are shorter, I have a greater drive to get things done before I leave. I also feel that I have to demonstrate good performance in return for being "allowed" to work PT. Similarly, when I was a teacher I worked 4 days a week for one year and spent the 5th day each week doing planning and marking. That meant that I was able to give more time to my planning and marking without having to fit it round personal commitments in the way a FT teacher does. I also took on exam marking which improved my teaching and I couldn't have done that without having the spare capacity that PT working gave me. Also being fresher and better rested really does help in some jobs.

That said, I also don't piss about on the internet for a good portion of every day like some of my colleagues, but I didn't do that when I was FT either.

What slightlyeggsstained said.
And sorry , but he idea of motherhood bestowing lovely soft skills of patience makes me gip too. That's really didn't happen to me! If anything, I am more " cut to the chase and get the fuck on with it" simply cos I am a lone parent and I have somewhere to be at 5 pm. I dont have time for office tea and cake, or team building. I want to do my job and leave.
And, again men have children too. Does being a father make them more able to apply their soft skills? Maybe, but I doubt it would go on their CV.