Motherhood and equality, what does Eutopia look like?

[Bumpitybumper]

I accept that I'm incredibly slow to the party, but a few threads and specific posts that I've read have really highlighted to me that motherhood lies at the heart of feminism. Whilst I wouldn't say the battle has been completely won for women prechildren, statistics around earnings and education do look promising, however it seems all of this drops off a cliff once kids arrive. I think this is related to lots of factors, some of which are within women's control (eg choosing to be a SAHM) and some not (eg not being able to afford the childcare required to work).

In this context I have been pondering what equality looks like in a post children world. Personally I think it would involve society viewing an individual's career as a lifespan with expected peaks and troughs. It is madness that the peak decades for building your career are also the decades when women are fertile. I think there should be a greater acceptance that when someone has kids it is natural and normal to want to spend time with them and this probably will not be compatible with working long hours and doing lots of travel for work. This should all be a standard expectation of men and women with young families so things like flexible working should be encouraged and time spent at home should be viewed as a pause on a career, not a termination of a career. The big pay off for such an approach would be that as kids grow and parents are able to refocus on their careers, nobody would be too heavily penalised for gaps in CVs or a few years on the career slow track. This would make it much easier for women and men to close any gaps that may have opened up. It also doesn't ignore the reality that parents with young kids simply do not have the flexibility and time that childfree employees have to devote to their career without effectively never seeing their children which is unacceptable to many.

Is my view of equality post children Eutopia in line with what others think? I can see a shed load of challenges to making mine work, but it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility.

On a very practical note: when Dh and I first had a child we earned the same. For us to go 50/50 we would have needed both companies to decide within the same timeframe if they would allow it, which as far as I know isn't a thing? Or is it? Do both parents have the right to apply for PT after becoming a parent and is there a set time for decisions?

It would also need both companies to be open to it, of course which us probably the bigger hurdle. I think they can just say 'no' with no comeback? Maybe that's the change that is needed in law - that the company should have to justify the decision to not allow pt during a child's preschool years.....

I also think that if all the SAHP just stopped all the voluntary work they do then our society, schools etc would be even more stuffed than they are. Parent volunteers are filling the holes in teacher / TA provision at my local school & I bet that's a pattern up and down the country.

It is here. The preschool in our village just closed down because it had to be run by a committee made up of parents of attending children, and no one was willing or able to take that on any more. The primary school's PTA looks like it will be going the same way - they organise absolutely loads of events, including the village's annual firework display. It's a job in itself and people - let's face it, mums, mostly - just can't take that sort of commitment on these days. I certainly couldn't. I'm happy to help out but I cannot take on that level of responsibility, and raise my son, maintain my marriage and bring in income as a freelancer - I just can't.

I should have said the point about me and DH earning the same when we had DC1 is that at that point 50/50 childcare / work would have been possible. Now his salary has gone up loads and mine down we can't afford the financial hit. So, we're stuck in our roles when if we had a free choice I bet DH would jump at the chance of 50/50

It’s funny isn’t it how personal anecdotes reflect what the statistics bear out. Like you Ineedacupoftea’ I earned more than my DH before having our first baby.

In the few years since then his career and salary have soared. I’m really happy with career too as I set up on my own, but on paper my salary looks a lot less than his. (I try to work as little as possible so I can remain the main minder for my two pre school kids but my rate of pay is better than when I was an employee)

The statistic I find most interesting/ depressing is that while salaries for both the sexes before 30 have some kind of parity, after 30 for both women with and without kids the gender pay gap quickly gains pace in a woman’s 30s.

I had always assumed it was a function of having kids / working less & bring discriminated against because of kids but no it’s literally just by being a woman that you will suffer a pay gap

Bumpity

Why is it embarrassing? I think it’s great.

" after 30 for both women with and without kids the gender pay gap quickly gains pace in a woman’s 30s. "

Yep because you MIGHT have kids. I think?.

I was painted as aggressive ("pushy") for asking for a big pay increase last year but as my ceo had already interrogated me twice (since getting engaged / married & turning 30) about my baby plans I knew that I had to get the extra pay ahead of time as clearly I am at risk of suffering a hit afterwards.

Btw I got close to what I asked for. This brought me to (I think) approx the same level as a man doing the same role as me who i had already been outperforming for two years. But it was "pushy"

I had a wry laugh about ‘the big society’ thing of cameron’s actually re all of this stuff about contributing other than waged work...

Do they just not understand reality (or are they in fact well aware of reality) and why people have been paid for some of these things that have been jobs up until then (because they are jobs)? That people have been doing ‘big society’ all by themselves invisibly for an age? Who is going to do ‘big society’ now women are being pushed into wage slavery? Is it going to just be people who used to be paid to do them now doing them for free? No, because those people have now become stigmatised benefits scroungers who have to be taught how to work by working for Tesco for free and starved and made homeless if they don’t get a letter advising them of an appointment. It’s really only pensioners that can do it now and many of the things were actually younger people helping pensioners.

The combination of the obsession with waged work, the state of the economy, the structure of the economy and the cuts means actually people are less able to do ‘big society’ stuff and communities are being destroyed.

Women who are child rearing are a major part of doing ‘big society’ stuff because we have brains that need stimulation and we need connection with the world in the isolation of modern ways of raising children. Lots of volunteer stuff I did had provision of childcare which has now gone with cuts.

Institutions that have had volunteer/community engagement stuff for a long time have had to stop doing it completely because they no longer have resources to administrate it. The ‘big society’ is in actual reality just a euphemism for ‘doing jobs that used to be waged but now we want you to do them for nothing’

I’d love to see everyone being paid for work they do and at the very least ‘volunteering’ becoming non-existent. There are serious problems with relying on volunteers (or often students) in roles that used to be or should be jobs.

Is the ‘big society’ something women are meant to ‘make sure they still keep up with’ just like kids/house/food/etc when they get a job? Is it something like national service but for pensioners? What even is it?

Mums did volunteer peer support for breastfeeding, grans did Home start for struggling mums, a mixture of mums/grans befriending for the elderly, mainly male pensioners did reference/engagement groups, mums did roles in schools/maternity/parenting, a mix of male/female pensioners and students did CAB in my local authority while I was in the volunteer community and there was good support from paid staff that began being sharply cut.. All this stuff is being lost or ruined by cuts and policy at the same time the paid roles are being lost or ruined by cuts and policy and lots of these things were important community functions re scrutinising services and connecting services to service users so they work better.

The loss of these things really does badly affect the functioning and accountability of the services and makes communities more disconnected, vulnerable and less resilient at the worst possible time.

And by that I mean a time of rising demand and complexity of problems (caused by cuts and policy).

Basically all of our public services are collapsing, police, NHS, SC, schools, the CPS, the courts, HMRC, govt departments, LAs... they are just not functioning... Early intervention has been completely gone for a long time it is now just firefighting and scapegoating onto other services.

A lot of people don’t realise how bad it is because they only see the scandals as sound bites in newspapers and no-one mentions cuts...

I really dislike Alison Saunders but clearly and obviously the police are doing a shittier job of investigation with all the cuts and CPS and doing a shittier job of charging decisions and prosecutions with all the cuts.

Individuals are being sacrificed and scapegoated when the reality is this is happening because of cuts to services making it impossible to do even an adequate job like the doctor who was struck off essentially for a child dying as a result of her not being able to resist the pressure to agree to take on work that she should never have been asked to do in the first place (I think she should have been struck off but the cuts were ignored as one of the issues re why she was even there at the time).

It’s all a mess. I am quite frightened because women are more likely to be impacted by all of this because of motherhood in a variety of ways. But as ever women are not listened to when they speak about it because men in their ‘career’ enclaves by and large don’t even see it happening.

offred yes agree. If I had the decision to make again about whether to move back to the UK I wouldn't. We lived in the UK, then abroad for 4 years then back. Everything so much worse when we came back. And whether Brexit is the right thing or not long term (i think not but appreciate others think differently) I just don't think we can afford it short term - either in terms of finances nor in terms of the skilled immigrants we'll lose. And women and children of normal and lower incomes will lose out the most.