So where does it go wrong for women?

[Falalalafishfingers]

I'm sure this has been asked a 1009 times!
Read so many times in threads that it makes more sense for woman to give up work/ cut hours as dh/dp earns so much more. This suggests that men are already earning more pre-children?
So where does it go wrong? My guess is university.

@Falalalafishfingers

I'm sure this has been asked a 1009 times! Read so many times in threads that it makes more sense for woman to give up work/ cut hours as dh/dp earns so much more. This suggests that men are already earning more pre-children? So where does it go wrong? My guess is university.

I met my husband at uni. I got a 2:1, he got a 2:2z we earned similarly until 30 ish, when he changed careers to IT in the city.

When I had DC1 (of 3), I was 31, hated my job, and in London it would have cost almost my income to have him in nursery. I couldn’t bear to go to a job I hated, and stayed at home. I think if I had loved my job I would have gone back part time and it probably would have been better for my mental health and family finances! But I was very lucky we could just about to afford it, and allow me to have the choice.

It’s hard. I tell myself you can’t have everything. For me, I always felt equal... it was having children that made the difference.

Refusing to attend a meeting at 1:30 because you had scheduled your lunch break between 1 and 2 is unprofessional.

And scheduling meetings at lunchtime is annoying. If you work full-time you often have no choice but to use your lunch break for essential appointments, so if someone plonks a meeting into it, it's massively inconvenient.

@Silenceisgolden20

If you think having a child is 'sacrificing' your life then you shouldn't be having children. Your life changes.

Exactly, that’s one of reasons I’m not having children. My DH and I are both ambitious and support each other’s careers. After seeing my mum be so financially dependent on my dad growing up, and putting up with his shit behaviour because he had the ‘big job’, I decided I would never let that happen to me.

@MaskingForIt

Women chose men who earn more than them.

Women want to stay home with their babies and so fall behind in pay/progression.

This would all be solved if women wanted to date low-earning men and were willing to work full-time after maternity leave.

I've got three friends 15/20 years younger than me. We all work in a field that's reasonably well paid (though barely, by mn standards!). All three are with partners who earn less than them and do the bulk of the child and home care after mat leave. Two of them have been promoted whilst having a 1 year old, another it's likely to be promoted in the next opportunity.

I earned more than dh until we hit 30. At 30 we were both pissed off with our meagre earnings and asked for a rise. Dh got his pay rise. Mine was approved by my immediate line manager but blocked at 2 levels above. Dh handled his pay rise request by saying pay me what I'm worth or I'm fucking out of here. I did a market rate analysis with stats and a business proposal demonstrating how I could add even more value .

I then decided to get pregnant instead.

It’s a consequence of living in a patriarchal society. It’s as simple (and complex) as that.

I find these threads really interesting, I think because my decision to take the risk of leaving my job for a few years is just so culturally not the norm for me. I don’t have a single friend who has made the decision I’ve made.

I had a very comfortable, pretty well paid job with a great employer that created a maternity package of in effect full pay for nine months, just for me. I’m pretty radical in my feminism, I really see the enormous forces against the advancement of women in society. My partner does far above his fair share in all aspects of our lives and I wouldn’t tolerate any less.

I just don’t know how to get past my desire to raise my own children. I just so badly want to be there and see them, play with and teach them. It’s hard at times and often boring, but I’ve only got one shot at this. My heart broke at the thought of sending my one year old into a nursery, I couldn’t do it.

What would benefit me the most would probably be a cultural shift of actually valuing the raising of small children, as well as a different perspective of work life balance. So a person has to work straight for 50 years and can’t have any time off? I’m raising my ‘two under two’ until the youngest has basic speech. I’ll have 35+ years left to work after this and society is telling me I don’t stand a chance? It’s ridiculous. If a man had a goal he wanted to train for and achieve that wasn’t paid, I don’t know, sail around the world for example, he’d be welcomed back to the workforce with open arms. It’s just misogyny.

This would all be solved if women wanted to date low-earning men and were willing to work full-time after maternity leave.

Which is essentially what I did! I earn 4x what DH does. I'm FT, he's PT. It hasn't gone wrong for me.

Men get ahead in that gap between university and having children because if you are a woman who wants children, you leave university and are aware of your fertility window and you prioritise (unconsciously or consciously) having children in the fertility window over making money. Also employers treat you (unconsciously or consciously) as if you’re going to “go off and have children”

I am fairly sure (looking at my two, 24 and 18) that you can raise very happy, fun, intelligent, well adjusted contributing members of society even if you are not a SAHM. The reason women are SAHM is either because they want to be, or because they could not earn enough to make the childcare pay.

I think you are treated differently as a young mother. In spite of going back to work immediately and being way more organised (and frankly, better) than my peers, I still lost 7 years of salary progression through motherhood. Meaning it took me 7 years to be at par, salary wise, with the parallel childless alternative version of myself, in spite of never actually giving up work. I hope there is not such blatant preferential treatment given to non-mothers these days, I certainly don't think it exists at my current employer.
So it's the attitude of the employer, or just plain down to women wanting to be SAHMs because they prefer it that way.

Refusing to attend a meeting at 1:30 because you had scheduled your lunch break between 1 and 2 is unprofessional.
Christ on a bike, have we time travelled back to 1950s levels of pomposity?

Husband then gets bored as they fell in love with an intelligent professional they now have a mum and cook at home, so they sleep with their assistants.

I wish women would bloody stop giving up all their intelligence and careers because of a family.

Patronising twaddle.

Women don't suddenly become unintelligent and boring just because they've decided to become the main child carer. Most do that because for some bizarre reason they want to be around to raise their kids more than a full time job would allow.

And then when the kids are older they go back to work and yes, their earning power is reduced but it's a price worth paying.

(But don't forget to get married first if you choose to take this route).

Many reasons. I had 'return to work' seminar after my maternity leave run by an external company. The lady who presented provided a rather sad and shocking stats..more than a half of women returning back to work in what you'd call a high flying industries like finance, law etc give up their job within a year after returbing from maternity. There is a complete lack fo support for women returning back from maternity. Women who used to earn good money are expected to work long hours, it is just not really compatible with having a small child. So a lot of them give up.

I did exactly this too and had similar thoughts. You've just expressed it far better than I did.

That’s at least what I was doing when I was in my twenties. I met my H at 27, had three DC and only just got a decent job (at 36) where I can now start to catch up. But there’s a Paygap compared to men my age

It starts at birth, OP - there’s lots of research about it. There isn’t a sudden turning point at university; it starts in infancy, from the different adjectives we use to describe baby boys vs girls, the toys we give them, the behaviour we praise them for, etc. Gendered expectations of children has been shown to affect their self-perception and confidence by early primary age, so it’s no surprise this becomes more apparent throughout childhood and into adulthood.

I stayed working FT and almost all the women - except 1.other full timer- thought i was crazy. I still get asked 'why i want to work so much' by ppl when they find out im FT. Maybe if women werent expected yo go part time by other women as as men the pay gap would be less. Interestingly, my DH still esrns alot more than me with an apprenticeship background and i have a master's....

@DynamoKev

Refusing to attend a meeting at 1:30 because you had scheduled your lunch break between 1 and 2 is unprofessional. Christ on a bike, have we time travelled back to 1950s levels of pomposity?

Quite.

If I have nothing planned I don't really care when I have lunch, but my lunch break is in my calendar - my calendar is on share - if you choose to schedule a meeting over it, don't be surprised if I can't go because I've booked an eye test or a vet appointment or whatever in that slot.

I thought in graduate jobs women are now put earning men before they have children.

I'd guess it's a combination of two things-
In graduate jobs, if you have a couple of children that's a year when you are visibly pregnant and not considered for any promotion and 2 years where you're on mat leave and not considered for promotion and in that time the man gets promoted and then out earns the woman

Very low paid caring type jobs eg care assistants, health care assistants, nursery nurses etc all attract women and there is little chance of progression compared to other low paid manual jobs for men where they can progress

Also a lot of women have children with men who promise them they will be equal partners in parenting but then when it comes down to it they claim their work has refused flexible working so they can do pick ups, refuse to take time off work for a sick child etc and expect the woman to work but within school hours which is basically a low paid job

See i often think i wonder where it all goes wrong for men. So many are hardly seeing their family and missing out.

In my situation DH and I were neck and neck career-wise. Until he got a promotion while I was on my first maternity leave. It meant that all of a sudden he was earning quite a lot more than me and had to work longer hours, so of course when I went back to work I went back four days a week and did the lion’s share of everything at home.

After that I could never catch DH up in the earning stakes but he kept on getting pay rises and promotions. It was downhill for my career from there.

I’ve since retrained in a new field and do something completely different now.

I think it starts during careers advice in secondary school. Yes, there was a lot of "women can do STEM too" stuff, but one (1990s) the girls were told to "be anything you want to be" and "follow your passions" and "if you do a job you love you never work a day in your life", "consider your future work-life balance" whereas the boys were just told/absorbed "get the highest pay you can".
So the highest achieving girls all got very competitive positions in very poorly paid creative industries but both the mediocre and high achieving boys earned higher money in more "boring" jobs.

Many reasons really but, for me, it was:

Putting my (ex) DH's career before my own training and jobs.
Having a child.

Read so many times in threads that it makes more sense for woman to give up work/ cut hours as dh/dp earns so much more. This suggests that men are already earning more pre-children? So where does it go wrong?

Women on average have their first child with a man who is three years older than them. Even if there were complete equality of pay, and women were not in the slightest bit consciously interested in pairing with a higher earner, the age difference would mean women on average were earning less than their partner, because pay increases with age and experience. So, on average, the women's job is more expendable.

Also, some women are happy to have someone else bring in the money while they look after their children. Very few men feel the same way.

And not figuring out what I wanted to do career-wise before I went to university.