Do you think this is a feminist issue?

[Sleeperandthespindle]

Long term lurker - I don't post in here much.
Just been thinking after a discussion with DH. I'm a teacher, have been for a long time, and although I'm very experienced and efficient now, I still do many hours of work outside classroom hours. Nowhere near as many as I used to (could be a 60-70 hour week when I was young!). This out of class work is necessary and an essential part of the job. You can't do the job at all if you don't do it.

My contract (full time) says 32 hours. It is accepted by all that it doesn't mean this. There are certain 'directed hours' which require you to be in school if the headteacher wants you there. The children are in school for 31.5 hours.

Anyway, the point (as I'm lying in bed on holiday while DH goes to work), he often says 'Well if my contract said 32 hours, that's all I'd do unless they paid me overtime'. This is not true - he's a doctor and often works unpaid overtime but also lots of well paid overtime. Then I started thinking about the fact that the vast majority of the teaching workforce are women and perhaps this expectation of unpaid drudgery is because of that? I know there are exceptions, of course.

In my experience, when female teachers complain about workload impinging on family life (or, possibly, other leisure time too), other people (such as senior managers) make sympathetic noises but the general response is that juggling work/life balance is just one of those things that has to be endured. However, when male teachers complain about workload impinging on leisure time (or, possibly, family life too), other people (such as senior managers) try to take action by, for example, extending deadlines, eliminating minor tasks or trying to arrange some sort of assistance.

Women's time is expected to be compromised, men's not so much. Teaching is female dominated, even in secondary, but this may also be happening, disproportionately, to women in other professions too.

I don't think the overtime is a feminist one per se but I do think the teaching profession in general has many issues which are concerning from a feminist point of view.

Teachnot I am no expert, but I often read on here that teachers do not get paid holiday and the wage just covers the working hours, but spread over 12 monthly payments.
As other jobs get paid holiday, I used a 52 week flex.
If teachers are paid for holidays, then your comparison is correct.

Those are the terms of my contract Caroldecker - so it's certainly the case for all teachers in Scotland (centrally negotiated contacts).

All I can find after a brief search for England and Wales is "teachers annual leave co-incides with school closure time" and "is in accordance with the working time directive" - so 28 days including public holidays the remainder being school closure, I think. So neither of us quite right!

I think the issue of unpaid overtime being expected, is largely down to a mostly female, committed workforce doing what they felt needed to be done and a host of managers deciding that that meant everyone had to it (while busily screeching that learning had to be individualised to each chold and "one size fits all is ridiculous. People work best in different ways, make sure your outcomes are adapted to your learners").

I also agree that when men say they need more time, they get it but when women say the need more time they're accused of being ditzy, disorganised or wasting time.

Beardsareweird please tell us how you manage that. Are you primary or secondary? How long do you take to make resources / displays etc? How do you cope with changing expectations from senior leadership in terms of planning and assessment? As a pp says, you should run inset days on how to work those hours and no more - there are many of us who NEED to know.

Men often end up being women's bosses in both primary and secondary as they are subconsciously seen as worthy of promotion to management positions or 'breadwinner' type jobs in leadership, even when the people doing the promoting are female. Then the men in management positions further reinforce the idea that women just have to juggle their time.

teachnottech, where do you get the 12 public holidays from?! I have counted 7 (in England).

We get 20 days annual leave, which is (I believe) the legal minimum. Many companies will give the minimum.

This means a total of 27 days, or 5 weeks and 2 days. So we work very nearly 47 weeks. We also have to work evenings and weekends as standard.

So it is actually very different from the teachers' 39 weeks of term time.

I am not going to say that teachers don't work hard overall, but it is nonsense to pretend that they don't have longer holidays.

I do think that it is a gendered issue that so much of teachers' work is not recognised contractually. Without getting into who works harder than whom, for me, the interesting point is the invisibilisation of necessary work, which is a classic women's issue.