Work and career breaks.

[FloralBunting]

I had an evening out this evening with a friend, and we had a bloody good chinwag about where we are in our lives right now. Ten years ago I was timid, terrified of everything, and would hardly leave the house. Today I'm seriously considering moving into management, and thinking about the lessons I've learned on the frontlines that I can take with me.

And I don't just mean what it's like to work in a shop and deal with 100 different things at once, but the ability to assess processes for flaws and be able to see better ways, and to motivate people with wildly different personalities towards a common goal.

I realized as we talked that I simply could not have done this twenty years ago. I did not have the skills or the confidence. And it dawned on me that the only real reason I do possess the skills is because I've spent most of that time raising a family and running a home.

Now, I am in no way saying these things are necessary for every woman. But I look at some of the shambolic management I've seen over the years, even in government, and I look at so many of the women I know who have raised families with precious little recognition, and think to myself, what on earth could we achieve as a society if we stopped scorning the 'little' things that women do.

If instead of manufactured mummy wars over SAHMs and mothers who are in paid employment, we had a system that supported and encouraged women and actually saw their career breaks to raise children as invaluable skill building that would prove so incredibly beneficial to business, government, anything they turned their hand to thereafter?

I've had a little wine, so I'm not sure if I've made sense here, or if this is incoherent rambling, but it just hit me that society is just shaped entirely cock-eyed, so to speak. We really can do so much better if we have the vision for it.

Yes! When management is made up of a class that scorns a type of work because of who performs it, they don't know what they don't know.

The gender hierarchy holds society back, because it holds back 50% of the population. This is not how a meritocracy works.

I'm pleased to have woken up this morning with no headache and to read that what I don't remember writing actually makes sense...

BUt i have been told ( can't remember the context, but it was a man) that business management is nothing like household management.

But running a home is nothing like managing a business (unless small). Sure, some skills are transferable but several more are needed. The skills you mention (streamlining processes, multi-tasking, motivating teams etc) are all valuable, but often need to be achieved in a context of a global business and cross-cultural working environments. Add to that different personalities and achieving these things whilst hitting your PnL or other financial targets and keeping on top of current industry trends and things become much harder.

SO within a family we don't have different personalities, cross cultural experiences, financial targets, a rapidly evolving world...hum...

BlueJava, obviously I'm not suggesting that it's sensible or possible to walk straight from running a home and young family into running the whole of a multi-national corporation. I'm well aware that there would be a considerable number of leaps between the two places.

I'm talking about the disdain with which the former is perceived when actually it is the skills I learned doing that, that formed the backbone of a lot of the work I do now. Which is not running a multi national corporation, but there are plenty of other positions in various forms of management, business or politics, education, whatever.