Women exercise conscious choice when not aiming for the top jobs and are happier for it

[BonsoirAnna]

Here

Gagghhh PinkaWanka I meant...

OK beth. maccawanka was there first.

Oh FFS! Substantial numbers of men don't want to be company directors, either. They'd rather do the minimum to pay the bills and then sod off to the pub/surfing/writing poetry or, indeed, spend time with their DC. The reason this article is a crock of shit is because it's starting from a sexist viewpoint and not actually looking at people at all. Most PEOPLE are not interested in Getting To The Top, that level of ambition applies to about 10% of the population and they are mostly psychopaths who have found a benign way of channelling their personality disorders.

I see bf baby ahs removed my number lock key again.

Dammit!

This is really interesting. Having seen a number of talented women in my organisation fail at doing the part-time thing, I swore I would be able do things differently. My DH and I have careers with equivalent status, but as he does more travelling and has a marginally less predictable schedule I've had to take on the bulk of the childcare logistics. Therefore, my personal life intrudes into worklife much more than usual and because of this almost every work-day has felt like a partial failure, compared to pre-motherhood. In my industry there don't seem to be good support mechanisms to help people (women) adjust to new ways of working - you fight for flexibility, but aren't really given the tools to make it work in practice. Really sad for me, as someone who's always been driven and a high-achiever for the companies I've worked for.

I think in certain BlackBerry enabled 'always-on' type roles, which most senior roles tend to be, it's become even harder and more women see getting off-the-train for a while to be the only reasonable course of action, before they somehow sabotage their careers by making unwelcome sacrifices in terms of responsibility or going into a stressed-out meltdown. I don't think it's just me, either.

Countess Dracula, I think I want to be like you!

quite sgb
just what i said

well i may be a bit rose-tinted having just had 8 months off ;)

I have just gone back full-time and it was the best move I ever made. I am able to do my paid work thoroughly now instead of always shortchanging everyone. And I feel better being able to concentrate fully on that whilst I am here. DH is a teacher so doesn't work full-time which helps. I am not a high-flier but I am committed to my job which is highly skilled. And I am expected to be available out of hours. Part-time IME was crap. Worst of all worlds.

Before kids I was in a fairly high flying sales role. After DS I didn't see how I could make it work as I wasn't as committed as I once was. Doing con calls to Australia in the middle of the night was no longer an option. I tried the part time thing and it didn't work for me. I had one of those "always on" roles - working in IT that was kind of inevitable. Flexibility always seemed to work in my empployers favour and in the end I thought "sod this" and went freelance.

With all I save on childcare and commuting (yep - always on but still always expected in the office) I clear more in a few hours a week than I did when I was working 3 full days a week.

It isn't perfect - I have weeks when I feel like I am combining being a full time SAHM and all the crappy chores that it entails with work on top of that. In other weeks I have a couple of mornings a week to faff about and MN .

I acknowledge that I am extremely fortunate. Behind this freelancer is a dependable income from my DH.

BethNoire - we are not that lucky my parents have never visisted in 25 year and live 200 miles away and PILs have traditionally grudgingly agreed to look after DSs for 2 hours at a time when they visit twice a year.

Still, must not grumble we have a nice life, we are together 24/7 and DSs never wake up without both of us being there.

ABetaDad- funnily enough we are not that lucky either (and she's my Mum too!)- although we don't live as close and the choice to be apart from DH's Mother was conscious (though necessary).

The limits we would have had to place upon ourselves geographically, career wise and (in terms of our children) educationally would ahve been too huge to stay close enough for everything to work.

Some top jobs are hard for a lot of fathers as well. I was thinking of this yesterday evening sitting in the airport lounge and looking at the familar faces of the business fliers. Mostly all male. 'Here we are sitting here enjoying our evening champers and chatting. Practically all of them have stay at home partners. I work in an office full of men who only see their kids at weekends.

I only have one child and they are 16 now and pretty self sufficient. I had a full time live in nanny and a boyfriend who was a SAHD...

The chat of a lot of the men is shocking. Some say outright that 'the wife wanted the kids' and they find the noise at home unbearable sometimes and if they had to do it again - NO! It does make you think....

The other women in my office are mostly admin staff or low level. They sit and squack about their kids and then leave at 5:30 as well as work from home a couple days a week. I have nothing in common with them and find them unbearable. They gossip about their personal lives so much and don't seem as driven. I've only seen two other women here - high fliers who do seem sharp and neither of them have kids.

I work every night until 7 or 8 at least and then have a 1 1/2 commute. At least 3 nights a week I am out with clients and another 2 nights out with friends. I have a live in nanny and my kid is pretty much grown up. I absolutely love my life and my job. I have to pinch myself some days to see if it is real! I was in Venice and due to fly out that evening when I spotted a friend and she suggested I stay the evening and go to dinner and the opera and then shopping with her the next day. Since I had no appointments in my diary I said yes immediately and changed my flight. I had an absolutely brilliant time.

I have a friend with 2 kids who makes comments 'alright for some' 'your lucky' 'I could do your job' and is asking me to get her a job when her kids go back to school but I know she won't cut it. Nevermind her demeanor and not having a polished professional look or authoritative tone of voice.

It is a very complex issue. I am proving that women can succeed at a top job and yet I can't help my fellow 'sisters' because the ones I've met just don't seem to get it. It is a big lifestyle choice and you can't always have everything.

ABetaMan - just read your post that is sad. But I hope you are happy with your choice. At least you are not like the men I work with who seem to have it all while their women make the sacrifices.

Having kids is a lifestyle choice. In our overpopopulated planet there is no need. The media and the baby industry encourage us. We are only too happy to conform to what is essentially primitive programming and conditioning.

Having a career is also doing what you love and following your hearts desire. It is also about making something of yourself and achieving your potential.

I've always wanted to make something of myself and be the best. I work very hard. I am achievement driven and want to make a difference. It is not because I like work or the money.

Having a child and being able to introduce them to a lifestyle of unlimited possibilities is very powerful.

I hope you two find something you love and start again. It can work. I know people criticise me because I don't conform and have the typical house routine. My parents were high-fliers too. I grew up to be independent, capable, ambitious and fun loving.

Life is great. Live the dream. Good luck

I have a problem with this comparison the writer has drawn with the competitors on The Apprentice. The contestants on this show are all morons. Can they be accurately used as a representative/ non-representative sample of society?

I'd pretty much agree with most of what's in this article. Prior to having a child I thought I could successfully combine f/t money-earning with raising a family. Then I had a child and realised that I actually didn't want to. So my DH and I have collaborated to create career profiles that will enable us both to do fulfilling work and enable me to give more time to our children. For me that is the best possible choice and I am extremely happy with it (will be even happier once my chosen career path starts earning me some cash!).

I know some women who are as driven, career-wise, as men are typically said to be (the 20% of women mentioned in the article), and equally some men who are more like me. In each of those families they have constructed career lifestyles that enable each partner to stay true to their own values.

What's the big deal about that?

Oh FFS! (Again). This is an incredibly narrow, wanky, middle-class view of what 'success' is. Think of the legions of men with no interest in 'getting on' along the corporate track, who lay bricks or drive cabs or grow spuds: they are not held up as examples of how men are too thick and unacademic to 'succeed'. And if everyone is a company director, who's doing the fucking work anyway? Regardless of gender, regardless of whether or not you have DC, there are all sorts of jobs that have to be done, and all sorts of ways of making your life feel interesting and worthwhile. People who are very competitive will be so in or out of the whitecollar world, whether that's to do with being the weekly winner of the pub karaoke night, or the yummiest mummy at the school gates.

I don't believe you can have it all. It is a matter of priorities. I have a career. Pre dd I was the main wage earner. DH has recently overtaken me, but a large part of that is that he gets an expat tax break that I am not entitled to.

I work in a male dominated industry, but feel that the opportunity is there if I want it. I don't want it at the moment. My dd is still small. I do what i NEED to do, and then a bit extra. But I really don't want to be working at home every night and travelling a lot. I have no need to rule the world to feel that i am making a useful contribution.

Maybe when dd is bigger and more self sufficient things will change. As far as i am concerned, I COULD concentrate on my career if I wanted. I actually have an active choice in the matter. Maybe I would need an Au Pair or more household help. Well actually I would need those things. DH is used to the status quo. He travels a lot, I am home. If I was offered Mega Job tomorrow he would be supportive. It would be dd that missed out though.

SerenityX - I agree withyour observations in the airport lounge. I heard many similar things from middle ages men when I was a younger childless man. Perhaps one of the reasons that I decided to take a different path. Despite not working out as planned, I am happy.

You sound like you have a wonderful job, my DW would love that kind of thing. She was involved in the lxury goods industry and loved that whole world.

As you rightly observe, the issue is a bit more complex than many posters (or the book author) describe.

Such interesting reading. I read the article and of course as most journalism does, it gives a journalist's impresssion of the book. It would be interesting (academically only) to read the book and see if the article truly represents the book.

On the topic of work, career,moms and dads, both of us work. We made different life choices- we live close to our work, so little commuting -hence more time with our kids.

I don't find being a woman career limiting (unlike abetadad's post which saddened me to read). But I am sure that with my skills, I would have achieved more younger if I had been a bloke (meaning that I see other men my age being promoted faster than me but I got there in the end!). So I do believe that discrimination is still out there. Interestingly, when I came back off mat leave 1, I asked for a challanging assignment which I got (it was the top project in my company and hit national and international news). My boss told me that he argued to have me assigned to it and that the others senior execs (all male by the way and over 40)were worried about giving it to me because I was just back off mat leave. But he won his case yippee and I did a fab job on it and enjoyed the assignment. My point being that for those of us who do aspire to be successful, there are still gender barriers.

I'm not even sure what 'get to the top' means. I read it as reaching the top of the corporate tree - being in charge of a company, making decisions that affect others. There are many well-paid interesting jobs in which that sort of ambition is irrelevant.

The biggest problem with "getting to the top" of your career is that the rest of your life is probably going to have to lurk somewhere "near the bottom" as you won't have enough time and energy to devote to it to do a good job.

Yes, don't forget that people who 'get to the top' in this very narrow definition of success generally don't have hobbies, interests, holidays, or friends. They might have a SAHP to do the childcare and service the successful executive, or if they have enough in the way of ethics left to remember that it's nice to pay people who service you, domestic staff instead of a partner.

The thing that these articles never say is that being at the top can sometimes be easier than being half way up, or at the bottom.

I have a senior, full-time role in my company and DP works full-time and intensely as well, but it is definitely easier for me to be more flexible with my hours now than it ever would have been if I'd had children when I was more junior, doing much more donkey-work, and expected to really burn the midnight oil.

I know that it doesn't always work this way, but it's worth considering....

Oh good, it's Sexist Article Friday time. Didn't it use to be Bumsex Friday?

This sort of thing always presumes that the world is full of terribly pushy, nasty, single-minded men who have elbowed their way to the top through ruthless ambition because this is What Men Are Like.

I agree with SolidGoldBrass - a small minority of people are like this. Their gender doesn't really come into it.

If a lot of men appear to be pushing their way to the top, it's often because domestic circumstances are "pushing" them - they have agreed a set-up whereby they are the earner and the wife stays at home to look after the family. Fine, as that often suits all parties. But all the earning pressure is on them, ergo feeling like a walking wallet, and continued pressure to do well at work, put in extra hours, not get sacked, etc. They'd like nothing better than the kind of job where they go in, do 8 hours (and have a nice long lunch break in the middle) and sod off home again in time to help bath the kids. That's the kind of job my dad had in the 1970s, and a lot of other people's dads too, I'll bet. They just don't exist any more unless you work part-time.

And programmes like The Apprentice - seeing as the article is so keen on mentioning it - don't do either gender any favours when it comes to shaking of stereotypes.

Let's not have any more of this horseshit about how women always, always make more "sacrifices". Life is a series of endless compromises between what you want and what you get. I don't know anybody who is completely "happy" all the time, but most couples I know have managed to come up with a work-life balance arrangement that enables both parties to be reasonably happy a reasonable amount of the time. (Those who haven't are, sadly, nor together any more.)