To think this is a case of sour grapes?

[Diaria]

Woman believes that childless women pick up the slack for working Mums….

Reading this, she sounds bitter, sour and traumatised by her prior fertility battle and failed relationship.

She worked in retail; it is of course mental and draining around Christmas time.

Essentially, the argument is that childless women are forgotten and mothers get all these perks along the way like total exhaustion but I digress…

She even goes so far as to complain about mothers having a paid maternity leave (often a pittance) and complains about her having to save £500 a month and not being given a free holiday…… maternity isn’t hopping around Thailand and most mothers couldn’t afford to save £500 a month!!

Anyway, I have no patience for this… but discuss.

I quit because I can't bear picking up the slack for working mums

https://mol.im/a/12860533

Then the employer is shit.

and who are they? Because I don’t know any to, who I have worked for or who friends and colleagues have ever worked for. Mn often has threads talking about how people might lose their job for child related absences.

I haven’t rtft so someone may have already made this point… but where the hell are the dads in all this? I manage a large team of mostly women. It is always them who receive the calls from school to collect sick children, taking carers leave, going part time etc.

I support them as it’s the right thing to do (I’m childfree btw and I help cover their work when they are off ) but always find myself secretly thinking why can’t the kids dad step up?

Instead of women arguing with each other we need to support each other - which means not having a pop at working mothers OR accusing women who went through traumatic fertility issues as having sour grapes OR assuming the childfree are unfairly privileged (I chose not to have them due to health issues)

And I agree. It’s absolutely not ok. At all.

Bit divide and conquer doesn’t work

Exactly. Women take on the burden and then take on blame. Not saying you blame them, but many people do.

As I said above, it’s like the ‘kids don’t do well when brought up by single mums’ the problem is the men having kids and disappearing. Not the women who has stayed and (usually) trying their best in difficult circumstances. Women taking the responsibility and then the blame.

@chucklevisions exactly.
The biggest issue is society's expectations that women should take on the bulk of childcare and caring responsibilities.
We should be dealing with that rather than blaming women (again)

*Re. Childless having extra income; each of our DC costs about 10k a year and that is before you get to increased utilities, food, housing, transport and holiday costs. We don’t pay school fees thankfully.

If you are single and childless you won’t need a big house or have any of those costs. All of my friends without kids have more money to spend on themselves and it definitely adds to their lives. As I say, there are advantages.*

This comes up so often and it boggles me how so many parents fail to understand that just because they would have more money without children, it doesn’t mean that childless people all have loads of disposable income. We’re not all on the same salary so you have absolutely no way of knowing how much disposable income a childless person has.

And yet every time it’s “well I would be rich without kids!”

And who's selecting those shit men to be their children's fathers?

We as women have 100 percent control over who sires children and who doesn't.

It's a pity that such control isn't exercised more rigorously.

Well I did.

I picked a man and harries him. I was happily married for 15 years. Then he unexpectedly had a mental health breakdown and became dangerous. He started following me and linked my phone to his laptop so he could see where I was. He doesn’t see the kids anymore. One is now an adult so it’s now through choice.

I had to leave the house with the kids and dog at 1am one Morning.

But yeah, I totally could have predicted that the decent man I married and had children with would turn into someone recognisable 15 years after I chose to marry him.

Besides which, even if the man is shit at the beginning. Yea it’s a poor choice. But the man is choosing to be shit and if he is a shit dad that’s still a choice he is actively making everyday. Those men could just recognise it’s not ok and not be shit. The blame is still at their door.

This is far too simplistic.

Yes, in an ideal world women would only have children with men who pull their weight.

But in reality we have :
-accidental pregnancy
-men who don't show their true views towards childcare until they have them

• abuse that doesn't appear until pregnancy
• society's views towards the roles men and women play towards childcare and work
• gender pay gap

Forgot to put on that he became violent, in the middle.

i was lucky that career was far enough along I could afford to leave when I needed to.

I’m not an economist but I reckon that working mums contribute massively financially. They usually pay for childcare thus creating jobs, pay tax and NI. They are a good role model for their children. I’m sure there’s loads of other stuff too and let’s not forget that they are often doing most (or all) of night feeds, life admin and cooking/housework often whilst sleep deprived.
Its hardly an easy ride.

Haven’t read the article but this thread is full of the usual stereotypes about childless/free women, and the usual dismissal of our experiences as being unlikely.

I work somewhere where me refusing to cover Christmas for the first time in 8 years has seen two mums report me to HR for “discriminating against mums”. I work on a team of women who frequently say things like:
• childless people should have their annual leave halved so parents’ can be increased
• childless people should be the only ones rotaed to undesirable shifts

• childless people have no stake in the future and what is the point in them having a vote?
• childless people aren’t as good workers as mums, who have time management skills, empathy and loyalty
• parents who work should get paid more than their childless colleagues, to reflect that childless people don’t need help to cover their outgoings but parents do
• childless people have less experience of the world and are therefore less interesting to work with

I have no doubt that these people aren’t the majority, but none of the above is a solely a “management issue”. Parental entitlement exists, and the workplace is where those who have it like to deploy it.

We also both all of the criminals all of the people who are unemployed all of the people who contribute nothing. Meanwhile, childfree and childless people don’t contribute any of that to the world so that’s not a good argument to throw in their faces. Maybe everyone who has children should be grateful for their children anyone who doesn’t want children should be grateful that they don’t have children and anyone who’s childless should be given support from both groups. And then maybe all groups could give each other some empathy and as over 50% of the population we could bring in changes from employers which is where it needs to come from.

I’m curious as to how mums get penalised for child-related absences? What are those companies’ policies around it? I’ve honestly never experienced that, the HR depts in the companies I’ve worked for don’t count any child-related absence towards absence trigger levels, which is why it caused so much division within the teams. I’m not saying mums should be penalised for those absences btw, I’m just wondering how it works elsewhere and how best it could be managed going forward.

Where I work everyone is entitled to 10 days of paid dependents leave. Not just mothers.

After that it's annual leave or unpaid leave.

I notice you haven't addressed my question about your comments on maternity pay.......

Shocking, isn’t it? I’ve had tons of messages from people telling me they’d had very similar experiences to this. Even Ben Sheppard when discussing my article on GMB yesterday morning said “parents are more organised than those without children.” The unconscious bias is real and it’s constant and it permeates every aspect of our lives as we live in such a pronatalist society.

There’s dependency leave.

which anyone with caring responsibilities get. You father didn’t have to live with you to get it ans you state on the article. Your employer made have said that, but it’s not true.

Then after that it depends on policy. You may be offered unpaid leave or using AL. Again, not just for parents. Anyone can be a dependent. A neighbour, an aunt and so on.

However, an employer only has to allow reasonable time off and can manage an employee on excessive absence if the business can’t support it. Even for childcare issues.

If someone is getting unlimited time off, it’s because they are not being managed properly.

I am afraid you can’t moan about unconscious bias.

Maybe in his experience the people he worked with, without kids are less organised.

If you can publish a whole article claiming you had to leave your job because of mothers and ignore all contributing factors as an editorial choice. Surely other people can have their opinion, based on their own experience as well?

This is why your article does nothing to fix the problem. It’s has invited more them vs us.

You can’t join in, in the mud slinging and encourage it, then moan mud came the other way.

Ok, that’s good to know, thanks. I’ll make a note of that as that would certainly make for a more harmonious workplace if that was more widespread I think. See, this is exactly the kind of information I’m trying to gather, in order to make positive changes and suggestions to companies.

Sorry, missed the mat leave point! I don’t begrudge mat leave, of course not, I think that part was just included in the article to highlight that non-mums usually work throughout their whole lives without any breaks in their career, so if we want to take any time out (as I’m doing now) we usually save up to ‘buy’ ourselves out of our contracts for a while. That was all we were saying, not detracting from mat leave in any way. So as well as being full-time, we work for decades with no breaks unless we find a way to buy ourselves a chunk of time out, if that makes sense?

Bookmarking this for the next thread where teachers complain they have it so tough....

It is a management issue.

Anyone saying anything of the sort at my employer and my last 2 would taken in for bullying and for making the work place uncomfortable and unworkable for people without children.

That culture wouldn’t be allowed.

A complaint to HR about someone having a Christmas off when it’s their turn to have it, would be told by HR that there was no complaint upheld. And if they don’t come in they would be managed in the usual way.

We wouldn’t sack anyone for calling in Boxing Day once, kids or not. But once a pattern emerged (again kids or not) we would manage them. Just like we do when some people who don’t have kids phone in sick have day after bank holidays because they have been out the night before and are hung over.

Where I work you can have five days a year dependents leave (at manager's discretion) and then need to use annual leave, and if that's all gone then unpaid. We generally have really generous T&C and I'd say that was in line with that. I've never encountered a policy that allows blanket, unlimited time off for child-related absence.

In the 4.5 years I've been with my current employer I've had 3 days dependents' leave, used AL to cover child sickness a couple of times and had 2 sick days for myself (when I had covid). I did also have a mat leave, so obviously I'm very sorry for that. I manage a team of 13, only one other of whom has children (and I'm the only one with very young children) and mine is well below the average amount of time off in the team. I cover for the absence of others a lot, lot more often than anyone covers for me, even though I work a compressed week and so am not in work at all one day a week. One of the women without children I manage just had a whole week off with a bad cold and I had to pick up a lot of her work to meet deadlines. That's part of being a manager, isn't it - if it really needs doing then it might have to be you that does it.

Point taken. That’s the thing in life, everything is subjective. Our opinions and values are shaped by our experiences. I honestly am trying to gather information here and find ways to change things for the better for all women, mums or not. Otherwise what would be the point of the article in the first place? Nobody wants to be hated and vilified, me included. I genuinely do want to make a difference. I’ve already got plans to write more articles once I work out what that change looks like. Then I can discuss all this in more detail and use what I’ve learnt from the feedback from this one to tell mums’ side too. Sam Brick is appealing for mums to tell the other side too, I shared her post on my FB requesting this. I’m all for both sides being told.

But as a manager you should have known exactly what leave and rights your team had.

It sounds like you don’t make the effort to find out these things independently and the company didn’t have a training plan in place that taught you.

Again, that’s not the fault of people who have dependents.

You then state in the article that you could class your dad as a dependent because he didn’t live with you. It’s factually incorrect. But you assumed, that parents were getting something you couldn’t have despite both having caring responsibilities. It’s more parents faults you don’t know that.

Sorry, missed the mat leave point! I don’t begrudge mat leave, of course not, I think that part was just included in the article to highlight that non-mums usually work throughout their whole lives without any breaks in their career, so if we want to take any time out (as I’m doing now) we usually save up to ‘buy’ ourselves out of our contracts for a while. That was all we were saying, not detracting from mat leave in any way. So as well as being full-time, we work for decades with no breaks unless we find a way to buy ourselves a chunk of time out, if that makes sense?

You might not begrudge maternity leave/pay but you clearly don't understand it.
It's not a holiday. It's not a break. For a lot of women it's a time of financial struggle but to mention the stress and worry about the impact maternity leave might have on your career.