To think that women are the ones whose careers will suffer during lockdown

[RomeoLikedCapuletGirls]

So many of the working mothers I know, despite being with husbands, are the ones who seem to now be left to struggle with the problem of how to do childcare whilst WFH.

One of my friends works full-time as does her DH and whilst her DH has his own room to work in she is struggling to look after the kids and work remotely too. She does such a good job but is exhausted.

I know the reason is that he earns loads more than her, but isn’t this the issue in the first place? Men earn more (why though? Ambition, childcare, expectations, age?) so women will be the default child-carers. They also seem to be doing more of the homeschooling.

I know biology in the early years also plays a part, but it’s incredibly frustrating how precarious women’s new place in the working world is and how men’s jobs are usually more important.

I’m certainly not blaming men (except for those individuals who actively hold sexist opinions towards the idea of their wife working) but rather the collective situation where it’s easy for people to slip into these traditional roles

Yes but we should be challenging this "easy slippage". It's as is people but women is particular sleepwalk into a traditional wifely role and awake many years later when the damage is done. We need to make decisions more consciously, including (as a pp said) when choosing a career path. Sadly it's women who need to take the initiative because, dare I say it, most men are pretty happy with the status quo otherwise.

@MaskingForIt totally agree, I've got an aunt who has a little part time job in a newsagent and her husband earns big bucks. She will not go back to work even though her kid is now 30? And she needs to because I say big bucks but he's been in and out of work and they're not millionaires by any means. She won't do it, loves her lifestyle as it is.

Sorry but women HAVE to change their mentality when it comes to the workplace, in many cases we lack ambition, confidence and drive to push for higher earning jobs and then are all to eager to give them up when pregnancy occurs because they were not that important to us anyway.

I'm an employer and see this all the time. Women mainly come for the admin jobs, men for sales - why is that?

Because they need a provider. Pretty obvious really.

Why is it obvious? She was childless and very capable. Do you think women somehow subconsciously think of the future and assume they will be childcarers and therefore look for higher earning men?

Sadly it turned out she couldn’t have kids.

I guarantee I would be the lower household earner if I followed my dh into construction. I physically could not move the same volume of materials he does, it’s honestly quite back breaking work at times and very few women have the physical strength to work long days in the cold and rain and wind as he does. I’d imagine very few women with four GCSEs to their name earn what he does no matter how hard they work at their jobs but he is able to equal and often exceed my professional salary. It’s an interesting one, if he was a woman with a similar academic background he might work in hospitality or as a carer instead (generalising of course!), also long hours and hard work with some degree of skill required but the pay is not on the same level.

Many women have a kid as an alternative to their boring jobs. Obviously they love and want their kids too but please don’t say that going part time didn’t appeal. So many of my friends have done it. Get the high earning male to quit his job then and do the childcare then live off your low wage. Loads of men would love their wife to earn more. Crikey I know mine would!

Sadly it's women who need to take the initiative because, dare I say it, most men are pretty happy with the status quo otherwise.

I fear you might be right. I envy the singularity of men’s work. They work then switch off. I would be happy with that.

in many cases we lack ambition, confidence and drive to push for higher earning jobs and then are all to eager to give them up when pregnancy occurs because they were not that important to us anyway.

I suppose my question is why and how can that be changed beyond telling women to buck up and ignore their biological urges. Where does career confidence come from?

Maybe some women like a little non stressful jobs and like to prioritise their children. I do and don’t like to be looked down upon by career women. Find women with big important jobs really amazing but also quite nasty to me as I’ve got a not very clever job. Please don’t pretend this doesn’t happen. I am not a feeble, thick nobody. Also some men would love the option to go part time and get away from their jobs for a bit but they don’t have this choice as the women take the option in most cases.

I suppose my question is why and how can that be changed beyond telling women to buck up and ignore their biological urges

It's a really good question and there may be no answer because biology is ... unprogrammable (not the right word but sort of what I mean). I am the main earner and have a successful career in the City plus kids. BUT I suspect I have ASD (my eldest is diagnosed and the consultant remarked I seemed to show key traits myself) so I'm very good at compartmentalising. I go to work, I switch into work mode, I come home, I switch to mummy mode. I think many women can't do that or would find it painfully difficult to "reprogramme". I don't have a heart of stone, the first days back after each maternity leave I felt like I had had a limb cut off, my heart literally ached for my babies. My husband is a fab dad but he didn't feel any of that when he went to work.

YANBU OP and I’ve been saying this all along.

It’s ok for posters to come on and say make the kids father do more but how do you strong arm some one in @RomeoLikedCapuletGirls

When a family splits the woman still in this day and age takes the majority of the child care. She will often be already on reduced hours to accommodate the kids, this already puts her in a compromised position. Add on to that kids have already been off so much which class closures , isolating and she is literally clinging on to her job. She will be one of the first to go when redundancies happen as they will always choose people who can be their every single day with out fail - and that’s mostly men.

Two of my friends have been made redundant. They both worked part time and were the first to go. Both female.

No idea how that poster was tagged!! Sorry!

You’re unreasonable to say ‘women’ when you mean ‘mothers’. There’s a big difference.

Sometimes there is nothing you can do because we can’t change our biology.

I had a start date for a fantastic career. I had beat 500 people to be accepted into a job that gave you a masters degree while on the job then placement after. I would have earned more than my DH. I found out a few weeks before my start date I was halfway through a pregnancy. Total shock.
My lovely DH offered to give up his career and be a SAHP (we already had completed our family with 3 DC previously and now needed newborn care) but after a difficult birth with complications I wasn’t in any physical state to leave my baby a few weeks old and throw myself into this new challenge. I needed months to recover.

So now I’m in a different role and DH is the high earner still. Female biology will always cause issues I believe. You can’t hand over carrying, birthing, recovering or breast feeding to a man. However much we’d like to.

There needs to be much higher uptake of parental leave.

So many threads on here have the woman taking maternity leave for a year, getting into the pattern of doing all the housework and childcare (including all the overnights because the man is working), while the man has almost no impact of a new baby on his work.

Then when it comes time for the woman to go back to work, she finds that she can't juggle it all and often drops to part-time. The man greatly resents any imposition on his working life, because it feels like the woman is asking him to do 'her' chores. The woman often feels that he's not doing it the right way anyway because he doesn't know how to look after the baby. And he doesn't appreciate how hard it can be because he's never done it.

If the man took the last 3 months of parental leave at the end of the woman's mat leave, I think things would be much better.

Some really weird opinions on here. Every household I know, the woman is taking on the majority of the homeschooling.
As am I, yet I earn more than dp. But I'm in a male dominated career, so I still earn less than my male collegues.

I'm an employer and see this all the time. Women mainly come for the admin jobs, men for sales - why is that?
Really? I have worked in sales roles before (where I didn't believe in the product I was supposed to sell) and no it didn't suit me that well because I couldn't do with the bullshit I had to come out with. The men working there didn't seem to have so much of a problem with the bullshit.

You have a point when it comes to families that have children of primary school age, but plenty don’t and plenty of men have lost work because of the pandemic.

When it comes to parents of young children it may well be that the woman’s career or job is sacrificed more because they are the lower earner, but it’s worth acknowledging that they are the lower earner because they had the privilege and the benefit of being the parent that got to stay at home and care for the children. This is something that most of us want and choose, so I don’t think it should be spoken about as if it’s a terrible thing. Women benefit from the choice to be the lower earner in a family as well as facing a disadvantage long term.

in many cases we lack ambition, confidence and drive to push for higher earning jobs and then are all to eager to give them up when pregnancy occurs because they were not that important to us anyway

That is because we’ve been conditioned since birth that the men are the gatherer hunters and women are the home makers. It’s not that we intrinsically lack ambition - we’ve been told since birth this is just how it is and that we can’t have it all.

I do think things are starting to change. I’ve noticed a lot of young females denying sexual inequality exists, which I think they will have a shock when they get in their 30s, have children and realise it does. Which hopefully they will then make an effort to point this out to their daughters much earlier academically wise. This is the driving factor why I put my Dds in to all girls schools starting from primary.

I was born in 79. Gender roles were still very much ingrained then. I’m hopeful that is changing.

Stay123 that isn’t just a ‘female’ thing though. Many men would choose to be a SAHP of society didnt frown up on it so much.

In our generation it really in ingrained that men go to work and women stay at home.

This is a feminist issue.

There is concrete evidence that women’s employment has disproportionately suffered during lockdown.

The second shift has become the dual shift.

I don't really recognise this "longing to look after your kids" thing. I am PT, technically - I work 4 days - but I am perfectly happy to leave them and indeed practically skipped back into the office after my mat leaves. I have driven and grown my career substantially since my first child. Honestly I feel more influenced by the expectation that I "must" or "should" want to scale back work after kids because I wanted to nurture them soooo desperately, than by actually feeling it. I guess I'm just a biologically defective woman?

I also didn't want to spend my entire life feeling exhausted and drained, which is partially why I went to 4 days. DH is a great dad (and took shared parental leave with both) but they do run to me first, and ask more of me.

And there are other factors than who works more/harder. DH is in a very well paid field (IT/financial services). I've reached the same approximate level, but I do earn less. If I were in his field I would be able to match his salary. Many wellpaid fields are in STEM or in finance, financial services etc and the talent pool is male dominated, for all kinds of complex reasons, not least that it can be a very hostile environment for women and you are forced to "prove yourself" every day.

All the research is showing that women are being disproportionately impacted- with quite stark figures.
It's a combination of the roles women tend to do, the gender pay gap and societal expectations around the roles men and women undertake at work and in the house.

It's very, very, worrying.

This is why I was quite frustrated with people shouting for schools to be closed and now the dozens of threads criticising people for using key worker places at schools. People don't seem to understand the impact this will have on women's participation in the labour market. Like it or not, being able to send your child to school can be a key factor in keeping women working.

@SueEllenMishke

All the research is showing that women are being disproportionately impacted- with quite stark figures. It's a combination of the roles women tend to do, the gender pay gap and societal expectations around the roles men and women undertake at work and in the house.

It's very, very, worrying.

This is why I was quite frustrated with people shouting for schools to be closed and now the dozens of threads criticising people for using key worker places at schools. People don't seem to understand the impact this will have on women's participation in the labour market. Like it or not, being able to send your child to school can be a key factor in keeping women working.

Absolutely

in many cases we lack ambition, confidence and drive to push for higher earning jobs and then are all to eager to give them up when pregnancy occurs because they were not that important to us anyway.

I suppose my question is why and how can that be changed beyond telling women to buck up and ignore their biological urges. Where does career confidence come from?

It's mainly due to societal expectations around gendered behaviour. Men are called assertive whereas women are called bossy for example.
We 'learn' from a very early age what behaviour is acceptable and what jobs men and women do.

Lots of workplaces are set up to favour full time workers who are not bound by school pick up times. What can really help is more men in senior positions taking responsibility for childcare.

As PPs have already said, it's an inevitable result of a sexist society which tells men that they are providers and that housework/child rearing is mainly for women, and tells women that the ideal is to be able to stay at home with kids and a man will provide. Faced with this (which already means that many women earn less than their male partners), it's not easy for a woman to put things in place to ensure career equality once children arrive. And men aren't going to do it themselves because why would they, they are told that childcare is women's work and is of less status than men's work.

Personally I have managed it (we both work FT, 1 child, mat leave was split 6m/3m, we earn very similar amounts - when nursery was shut we WFH in a separate room in shifts to make sure childcare was split 50/50). But this is mostly down to luck and I'm under no illusion it's possible for everyone. Not everyone can earn the same as their partner, of course - male or female. But it's a societal problem - men need to step up from the start and unfortunately it will be women who have to make them. (NOT saying it's women's fault - it isn't. It's very difficult.)

Another big issue is that many women don't realise just how sexist society is until they have children.

I deliver a lecture on this topic every year and I generally have a mix of ages. Those without children are often incredulous when we start to discuss these issues and think we are exaggerating.

There needs to be much higher uptake of parental leave.

Yep, agree with everything you said. But how many women would actually agree to share parental leave with their partners?

Yep, agree with everything you said. But how many women would actually agree to share parental leave with their partners

I think you’d be surprised.

But it also depends on the fathers involvement and ability with the new baby. Many men are happy to sit back and let the woman ‘get on with it’ so tbh most women wouldn’t trust the father to look after a new baby all day.