When I was pregnant with my first child, I worked in an all-woman team. My boss was a successful and well-respected mother of three, who ran her department all day (and often all night) with scrupulous efficiency and would insist on driving me to the train station in her shiny smart car. The nursery rhyme tapes and banana skins she had to sweep off the passenger seat before I got in were only apparent once the door was opened.
Alongside generic Harassed Working Mum™, we seem to have two opposing caricatures for women in the workplace after they have had a baby. The first suggests we instantly lose all the skills and hunger we previously had and turn into flaky liabilities, focused exclusively on the needs of our offspring at the expense of our employer. The second is that of heartless career overdrive, abandoning our children in pursuit of world domination and putting the bitch into ambition.
Neither reflects any of the women I've known in a professional or personal capacity; or reflects the reality that for most of us (men and women) work is primarily about paying the bills. Still, the stereotypes persist, and lazy assumptions are damaging for employers and staff alike as talent is wasted and opportunities missed.
However, all research shows that for women as a group, things do change dramatically when we become mothers: we tend to work fewer hours, we work in lower status jobs and we are paid less, not just compared to our male peers, but compared to the earlier versions of ourselves. Are these changes the inevitable result of a natural shift in our priorities and commitments, or proof that the system is broken?
I was chatting last week with a friend who has, in my mind, attained the Holy Grail of working motherhood. She works part-time and from home in a career she loves, and still has the flexibility to shift an assignment on occasion in order to make it to her daughters’ school plays. If I was ever to define "having it all", hers is the picture I would draw.
Despite this, she told me that salaries in her firm had started to lag behind the average in the sector. A colleague wanted to ask management for a raise and had already started scoping out jobs elsewhere. My friend, who knows that her skills and experience are hugely in demand by competitors, intends to live with the gap. For her, the flexibility she has developed outweighs the prospect of an immediate pay-rise or promotion.
Is my friend living proof, then, that women do sideline themselves into the so-called "mommy track"? Does her situation show that we hand over our ambition in return for our first comfy pair of maternity office trousers? Or is it evidence of a more complex – yet hopefully more positive – reality?
Clearly, it's not as simple as women losing their ambition once they become mothers. Having children is a huge event in a woman's life, but I don't think it fundamentally changes who she is – especially if she has invested a huge amount of time and effort into reaching a certain point in her career. What I do think sometimes changes, however, is the subject of her ambition.
I'm not talking about an immediate sublimation or transfer of all her hopes and dreams onto her children – I read articles about Alpha Mummies who pour all their efforts into ensuring that their children leapfrog over every possible target, but I have yet to meet one in real life. Career success itself does not become less important. Instead, ambition has to jostle alongside other demands and desires, which our society still deems to be the particular preserve of women.
I struggled with this when I decided to leave work. I was plagued with fear that by walking away, I was betraying women who never had my chances, and worse, tainting those who came after me with guilt by association. I was making a reasoned choice based on my family's circumstances - but was I unwittingly 'giving in' to societal norms? Despite knowing it was nonsense, I was casting working women as a homogeneous group, a 'side' that I was letting down.
We need to remember that the decisions individual women make should not be taken as representative of mothers in general. The mother with a new-ish baby may want to reduce her hours in order to spend more time with him, the mother with school-age children may judiciously trade a measure of "fulfilment" (whatever that means) for flexibility in order to make family life run more smoothly. It would have made my decision much less painful to acknowledge - and to hear acknowledged from others - that a particular course of action reflects a specific set of circumstances, and not a more general attitude.
Sometimes, perhaps, the wish to do the best job possible at the time wins out over the wish to have the best job possible – and perhaps we need to think more clearly about who wins or loses as a result. In a difficult economic climate, as employers push for greater productivity and commitment, it is more important than ever to keep demonstrating that a valuable contribution doesn't necessarily depend on being the first one in and the last one to leave, or contributing to the largest number of group emails. You can still do a fantastic job even when your car is a mess. Just ask my old boss.
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