Why is it always the woman who goes part time?

[maggiethemagpie]

I never really saw blatant sexism until after I had a baby.....I'm sure it's always been there but I never really thought about it until I had kids and realised that I am very very unusual in that my partner was happy to stay home and do the childcare (luckily he has an income from property) and I chose to return to work, and do a demanding full time job. Sometimes I think we must be living the feminist dream - if indeed the early feminists dreamed of having households with working mothers and househusbands. I'm sure some of them must have. Anyway it's a great example to set my kids.

However amongst all my friends who have had kids, pretty much without exception it is the woman who's had to make the career sacrifice and go part time or stopped work. I don't think many of these women have sat down with their partner and worked out which one would prefer to go part time, and it just so happens to be the woman. I think it's a foregone conclusion that it's the woman's job. Even when both partners work full time, nine times out of ten it's the woman who is doing the nursery drop offs and pick ups. EG my boss returned from maternity recently and it's a big deal when she has to work late and get him to pick the kid up - they never just take it in turns every day or anything. Or, a colleague was forced to go part time to full time. She was really worried about picking up the kids from school on some days as she couldn't get them into after school club. No mention of her partner doing this, or if HE should ask to go part time.

I think until more men begin to consider being the ones to stay at home, things won't progress socially in this area. I know the woman has to be the one to give birth, and until shared parental leave came in recently, only the woman could take an extended period of time off work. But that's just the maternity period, which now can be transferred to the man or shared - what about all the years after that.

Does anyone think this will ever change or are we doomed, as women being the ones to give birth will always be seen as the obvious choice to be the part timer/ stay at home parent?

DH and I are both part time. Our full time wages would be above national average, though not hugely, our part time wages both below. However we live in a cheap area so can afford to do it easily. I mean, we don't have much in the way of assets and we'd be better off financially both working part time. But we never need to worry. Tbh I think it's also worth mentioning that one often sees SAHDs in poor communities as people are less likely to have a choice about who works. That's been touched on already.

OP I think it makes SAHing a very different proposition when you have independent income, regardless of sex.

We used to be the typical "man work, woman stay home family" when the DC were v young. Then I went back to work FT. Then Dh's career went a bit bonkers and I had to stop (I wasn't upset, I wanted to retrain), he was away most of the week. I volunteered, got myself on a course then DH was suddenly v I'll. Now I have the career I always wanted and DH works pt. He does all drop offs/pick ups and I work like a maniac ft for a third of his pt pay. Which won't last forever. He always says that I have equally earned his high salary because he could go off and earn well in a job he loved (before his stroke) without worrying about his home life. He will leave his role soon and I will be the sole earner. Pity my job I love pays piss poor!

In my situation I was the higher earner, but really wanted to spend more time with DCs, DH didn't. I now work 3 days, and still earn more than DH. I got a promotion in that time, and am currently in a position where I might possibly get another one. I can't imagine wanting to increase my hours, even when DCs are all at school, I like the balance I have now (and the prospect of more free time on non working days!) On the whole it sounds like I am pretty lucky.

DH and I both work full time though he is self employed. I am the main earner. 2 year old and a 3 day old (currently on Mat leave). If DH was not self employed we would choose the shared leave from about 6 months due to breastfeeding. Our ideal scenario would be 4 days a week each. DH does most of the pick ups and drop offs at nursery or we do them together because it is so close by.
What gets me is when people learn you're a mum and say 'how do you manage?' I even got asked in a job interview how I managed work around childcare responsibilities. Has a man ever been asked this? I was networking one evening and a lady when she learned I had a child said 'so you work part time?' Why assume? In my career field nobody works part time no matter what gender yet that question was still asked.
Or 'so when you have another you will give up work for good then?'
No! I've worked hard all my life for a fulfilling and rewarding position why would I do that?
Grr.

In my case it was my choice. I wanted to be with Dd . I went pt but would have been happy to not go back to work really too, when she was little.

Financially it made sense for it to be than dh too. He earned dat more than I did and had far more potential to earn more. He is also far more ambitious than I am in terms of career too.

However I do know of a handful of men who are/went PT and even SAH parent.

IME lots of women go part time because they don't want to leave their babies. I know fewer women who wanted to go back full time then men who wanted to go part time ( I live in an area where housing is cheap so it is quite rare for both halves of a couple to have to work full time).

I work for a charity and shared care is the norm in my office. All the parents (male and female) except one work part time, or flexi time or compressed hours to share childcare.

That'stoast, men doing full time childcare and enabling their partners to bring home the bacon are pretty much never seen as cocklodgers on MN. Should anyone suggest that they'd be shouted down.

I earned slightly more than DH but I chose to go part time. I didn't want to go back to work full time, I wanted to spend time with my children - we have twins and I knew we wouldn't be having any more. I was lucky that my employer came up with a role for me that I could do part time as they were keen for me to return to work in some form.
I don't do any of the wife work though, we have a cleaner and DH does his own ironing, and we share nursery drop offs and pick ups.

We both work 4 days. Its great. Gives us each one day a week to do whatever hours we fancy. Also helps that DH is in an 'early' office, and I'm in a late one, so offset hours work well naturally.

If my partner didn't have the extra income, not only would he not want to be the SAHD, I don't think I would want him to either! As we would struggle to survive on one income. In that situation we'd have to either both work full time or one of us go part time. It's not wanting or not wanting to work part time that's the problem, it's finding part time work, which is very difficult for lots of people but particularly in my field of work.

We did actually have a few months after I had my daughter when he was working full time, and I managed to find a (rare)part time job doing a maternity cover. It was supposed to be for a year, and I thought it would be a gentle introduction back to work after a year off (I couldn't return to old job as made redundant). I quite liked that set up, but with the nursery fees for two I wasn't making much money. After a few months the job went full time and he was not enjoying working so I took the full time job, and he quit his job. This was always the long term plan - until the littlest is in school anyway.

I earn a lot more than DH, we both do compressed hours and each have a day at home with DD. Because it works for us. However I think there are a lot of women who do not push themselves early in their careers because they assume they will stop work when they have children, which leads to the 'it makes more financial sense' situation. That is also fine if that is what they want, many women do not want to work when they have children, as long as it works for their family, great.

Toast I do think it's realistic for every woman in the UK to think and start acting like that.
I do also think that I have a big advantage of not been british and to have a very different outlook.
It was very interesting for me to have children here because I completely bought into the british ways of the mum should be at home etc etc. That is until it became such an issue within my relationhsip that I had to start questioning all that.
So yes standing up to that and saying no has probably been easier because I have other models to go back to.
In particular, I have friends who have no issues telling me they wouldn't get divorced because of an affair but would and have because their DH isn't participating enough in HW etc...

I still found the shift from being the nice nurturing woman to standing up my ground and giving my work, my self fullfilment, my financial independance the same value as DH did to his.
The fcat things have changed so much in other countries does tell me change is commpletely possible here. Or rather we should expect the change to happen and we shoould be part of that change.

I think that just looking at the fees with two dcs for the first five years of their life is a very short term view.
We will be working until we are 65~70yo. 5 years is a very short time to jeopardise earning potential.
Yes you might not be making a lot of money but it's an investment to the future, the long furture you have in front of you with children at school and then grown up children, completely independant from you.

I agree that expectations that, as a woman, yu will stop working anyway and end up with a small part time job actually stiffle women and stops them from trying to reach their own potential.

I always say this on these threads but so many of the women I knew who went part time when they had babies really regretted it when they hit their 50s because death, divorce, illness had hit them and they were suddenly without the means to support the family. I am another dedicated full time worker (but also single parent so no choice in the matter).

So many women underestimate the importance of financial independence.

As for men working part time, well I wish they would do it more. I think it's good for everyone. The fact that there are no other dads at toddler group is the equivalent of my working life where I am almost always the only woman in any meeting - to the dads at toddler group I say "Welcome to the fight for equality" .

Where are you from woodheaven?

Everyone on this thread seems much more optimistic than me. That's nice. I think it'll be a long time before men and women are equal in terms of work/life balance (and other things) but I would love to be proven wrong.

I think men working part time / flexibly is becoming more and more common, there are a lot of men doing school / nursery pickups in my town too. However it seems more women than men do still want to work part time, perhaps because of the nurturing thing with the babies, perhaps also in part because there is a whole world of things to do with your young children during the week which are almost solely inhabited by women, which makes that lifestyle attractive to other women, easy to just carry on with after maternity leave etc. Also, it might not be paid employment, but SAH/PT mums put a lot back into society by running toddler groups, NCT Sales, support groups, stuff that really supports other families, so they are working but in a different way.

I think men's culture (your career = your value) and male dominated management are the problem. When they discuss flexible working at work, I have to point out it's for dads as well as mums. These days young fathers are very likely to have a partner with a significant career commitment or earning potential. Few families trying to manage a mortgage can throw away a whole salary.

However the older generation of male managers in their 50s and 60s, never saw a dad do weekday childcare or reduce hours, never saw a mother work fulltime, their own wives did all their childcare while they zipped around the world getting promoted to the Group Board, they didn't need 2 incomes to buy a house, they are holding out those norms to their male staff. They don't enable or encourage flexible working. But actually it pays it forward, some other company being flexible to a dad would mean one of their own female employees can stay on the payroll.

Even to go 50-50 childcare both parents need to flex a day or so. At our place a lot of men do informal flexible working, late starts, 5 days in 4 etc, but it's mainly women who have formally dropped their hours and gone through the more visible FW process.

If either DH or I had 28k from property, I'm fairly sure there'd be many fewer hours worked between us. That's a pretty massive amount.

Also I feel I must challenge the part time= screwed career, no financial independence thing. My career is in much better shape than it was before I went part time.

I think men working part time / flexibly is becoming more and more common

Agreed - I am seeing more of this too (public sector IT). Certainly quite a few of the guys did as I did, and left private sector consultancy for the public sector when we had families, because of the better work-life balance. That change doesn't necessarily translate into numbers on paper as most of them still work f-t and have SAHP wives, but there is a shift in attitudes - coming in late due to the school run, for example. I had several p-t men working for me over the years, all of them having gone part time to accommodate caring responsibilities, usually a child but sometimes elderly parents. However, all of them did it at the point where they felt their career had stagnated anyway - attitudes to the career suicide of part-time working is one of the major things to tackle if we want to see real change in this area.

Another problem is the gender pay gap prior to childbirth which leads inexorably into the argument that the higher earner should be the one who stays in full-time work. But that comes from the same place - actually 3 days a week of two salaries is better than 5 of one and none of the other (for a host of reasons, not necessarily just because the number adds up to a bigger total) but the impact on career progression is potentially twice as bad, it isn't the same impact but shared across two partners.

raisingsteam I always say that about my workplace too. The women pay for their flexibility via part time contracts with part time salaries. The men just turn up when they like and "work from home" and book mysterious appointments marked private in their diaries to take the cat to the vet in the middle of the working day on their full time salaries.

I work pt, I have one child at school and a 2 year old. I intend to do more hours when my youngest starts school. When discussing this with my partner recently (he is father to both children ) he said he looked forward to not having to work so hard while I worked more. I said, well yes, you'll need to be around more to do the school drop offs and pick ups. He nearly fell off his chair! Obviously I'm expected to up my hours and continue my role as full time mum.

Surely a lot of it is about wanting a subsequent child/subsequent children though? I went p/t after having our first child as we knew we'd like to try for another in the near-ish future. As I want to breastfeed it makes sense for me to take maternity leave when the next baby is born and we couldn't afford to live on my DH'so salary if he was p/t with my measly maternity pay. Once we've had our final child then we can reassess the situation. Trouble is, by then he'll have had however many more years in f/t work than me and probably be earning a fair bit more! So frustrating!

woodheaven I get your point about looking at the fees over 5 years as a short term evil over the course of your working life as we will all be working till we're 65-75.

Then I say well if I have to work for another 30-35 years then I'm going to enjoy those 5 years with my kids/family as it's not that long in the grand scheme of things and they're only little for a while then work full time as opposed to PT. Financially, for many women it's not possible for their DPs to go PT. That needs to be combated by society.

I think the opposite WRT to having subsequent children, I went back f/t knowing we were planning to have another child ASAP and I wanted to make sure my second maternity leave was paid on a full time basis. DH worked 4 days a week in that spell and went back f/t when I went on maternity leave, I then went p/t after my second (and final) mat. leave.

And I'm another one whose career has benefitted by going part time, the job I have now earns approx 1.5x the hourly rate of my last full time job and wouldn't have been available on a full time basis, which has enabled me to take on another similar job alongside it and still be p/t overall.

I think - little people are rather lovely. If you've spent 6 months/a year at home on maternity leave with little people it's quite natural to not want to go straight into only seeing them at bedtime if you're lucky 5 days a week. You've probably found some friends who're around in the daytime, some groups your baby or older children like going to.

Also from the work side of the equation, returning from mat leave is a natural point to talk about whether/how much you want to come back to work for. Going to your boss out of the blue and saying you want to work 3 days a week is harder to pull off.

I also find my littler one is very tight bonded to me in particular. She has time home with dad, but when I'm home will often just want to sit snuggling on the sofa with me to recharge. Dad doesn't seem to work for her. Maybe it's to do with bf and mat leave and bonding, I don't know. I'd feel I was letting her down if I was only there at weekends.

We were lucky that both of us could go part time - and later juggle hours so we could manage the school drop offs/pick ups between us. All gone to pot now though as DH was made redundant and part time jobs in his area are hard to find. So it may well be back to him FT and me PT, or if we can't get that to work one FT and one at home.