High earning mothers

[ClarissaG]

I'm interested to start a discussion group for Mums and Mums to be who are juggling (or planning to juggle) a high flying career and motherhood. I loath to use the term 'Power Mums', but those who earn enough (£100k plus) to afford a team of help, but have the kind of pressures and working hour expectations that that level of salary brings.

I read the Mumsnet Guest blog with interest (www.mumsnet.com/Talk/guest_blogs/1977242-Why-is-society-so-unsupportive-of-high-achieving-power-mums) but the comments less so.

Is there scope for a supportive group for such Mums with practical ideas, experiences and thoughts rather than judgement about whether we can 'have it all'?

I am mid thirties, a VC, 12 weeks pregnant and have not yet told my fellow partners. I want it all but have no idea if that is realistic or how my future is going to pan out!

Hi Ice thanks for that link you sent me! This is a brilliant thread. No apology for enjoying work.

I'm going to a school next month to give a talk to girls about careers in IT. There is a huge problem with the pipeline at the moment; seems like a lot of girls think that a footballer's WAG or Page 3 career are the best choice. I am hoping I can make them see that there is huge satisfaction in buying the WAG bag yourself with your own money if that is what you want to do, and that I had 15 great years of working hard and playing hard before I met my husband, and our relationship was on very equal footing from the beginning because I also make good money. I am also hoping that they can see that you can be girly, like makeup and clothes and be really good at maths/science/tech.

novice, thanks for the tips on a personal PA. I don't think I will be able to afford one but I can see how she will be a godsend!

kalidasa, I think there are actually far more issues for women who aren't high-earning but are in roles that demand total dedication (academia being an obvious one). If you earn six figures, you can solve most problems by hurling money at them. If you don't, things are much harder. I'm not in the six-figure bracket, as I've mentioned up-thread, and one of the many, many reasons why I'm sticking at one child is that on my good but not stellar salary, we'd be struggling with the costs of childcare for two and a London mortgage, which would mean that I'd somehow have to find enough time in my very busy week to do a lot of domestic crap that we currently outsource (as would DH - this isn't a gender issue, just an X amount of work into Y number of hours doesn't go issue).

LauraBridges, fathers taking extended paternity leave is becoming increasingly common in the Civil Service, but then they're fairly enlightened employers. It's interesting that you mention it happening elsewhere as well.

Ice, we did not find a second tipped the balance into making it much harder although a new baby is certainly always hard work. Also there is no reason if you both work full time why if a 2nd is harder that is not also just as hard on the father surely? So why don't these couples where the second comes and they find it hard have the man giving up work? Surely he finds it as "hard" as his wife unless he's a lazy slob who does nothing at home I suppose but most of us don't tolerate men like that. With two there are more to keep financially so it's usually more( not less) important to earn money so more incentive to earn money not less.

I think it may be harder with two if your childcare costs double or you don't have a partner doing as much as you at home, but not too much harder otherwise. Having the first baby is the biggest change to your life. Once you have had one number 2 just has to fit in and the routines of bathtime, bed time etc are already set. Three means you are outnumbered by children which is fine too (and five - my number is lots of fun although I accept that is not for most people). By the time they are teenagers - the age of my youngest two it's very easy. You are into the territory of having to wake them if they are still not up by lunch time and when they are up they tends to get their own food a lot of the time too. I certainly appreciate the contrast now that they are older although I will always remember those early baby years of cuddling tiny babies, breastfeeding the twins etc. Gorgeous (as long as it is in relatively small doses).

Thank you Laura, encouraging words.

My DH is great - we absolutely take a 50/50 role in child are and home management. MAnd early on we talked about how all

Sorry, fat fingers today.

Early on, DH and I agreed that child care costs effectively come from both our salaries - split evenly. Money is all in one pot so this has no actual effect, but is an important theory for viewing the both earners' contribution I believe.

And he is proud of me and encourages me to do well. We're also lucky, outside London, that high quality child care is not as expensive (c£10k per year per child at DS's nursery for a FT place). Which will double with two - but still mean working is profitable. Regardless, financially I agree that these early years are an investment in our future so I'm taking a long term view.

I think it is more that I have not quite got my head around taking another break from the workplace so soon. I certainly won't take as long a mat leave this time. And will be cleverer at keeping in touch and dialling into conf calls etc.

Threads like these have really helped me order my thoughts on my career, especially over the next few years which i feel will be very important. Please ladies - keep posting (here or on other similar threads) as people like me find them inspiring. I'm that woman a rung or two down from you who is watching to see the best way to go.

Agree with Ice! This thread is really encouraging me at a time when I was almost ready to throw the towel in.

Have not read all if this thread yet but the advice just in the first few pages is great. I'm not such a high earner as some of you (live outside London) but am returning to work in 5 weeks to a new role & really need to impress straight away. Will keep reading with interest.

I can certainly keep posting. I just had a chat with one of my 20 something daughters including about what might come up on the R4 panel next week. I think they certainly want my view that taking too long off to have a baby might not always be wise in career terms (and in my view which I accept is not universally held nor always in the interests of the baby).

Even now in year 29 of being a mother doing the radio thing means the children need to find someone else to drive them to school. In 3 years that will cease to be an issue. TV and radio find fewer women than men prepared to go on and I can see why . I did something on the Today programme at the end of last year and they sent a car for me at something like 5.30am. It is huge effort for no fees at all and minor publicity although I did get a bit of legal work out of that last appearance.

Women do need to do personal promotion, not just assume if I work very hard I will be noticed. Men are often better at telling their bosses and colleagues how brilliant they are. Don't assume people will realise. If something has gone well - you've won a case or whatever don't just go off to celebrate = add the triumph to your CV, your linked in profile, tweet it shout it from the roof tops. I wrote an article today for pay first thing. I added in it details of my book on the subject which gives most of us a slight ugh feeling of shameless self promotion but if the publishers want to remove it they can, if they don't then it needs to be said as people cannot read my mind and know I wrote it and can advise them on that area.

Yes I totally agree re the self promotion thing. But also to find within the organization some champions for you. So someone who could say at a senior meeting that it was 'nk's bright idea that saved us £xx' or something like this.

Gotta run. Ds birthday party in a couple of hours!!

Hi. I've been enjoying this thread very much and posted earlier on about my own situation (as Aquatic Nocturne, another Sylvia Plath poem!).

Like a couple of others here, I feel a bit of an interloper. I only work part time, I work for myself and my job happens to command a good rate of pay (I charge out at 500-900 per day, depending on whether I am working for private clients or public sector / court work). I have extensive and specialist experience in what I do, gained useful public sector experience and I am therefore in demand, at least for the time being. My work is very flexible and the hours are not demanding, although the work is intellectually challenging and I have the added complications of running my own small business. I am also doing some further study and do quite a bit of pro bono work, which does add to my hours, but I enjoy the one to one work with families (I'm a psychologist by training). I gave up working in the public sector because I was two promotions away from Director of Children's Services and just didn't fancy it (front page of the Daily Express? Cabinet Ministers bending your ear?- not likely!).

In the future I will try to build up my business, possibly as a social enterprise. There are lots of opportunities out there, but I feel that with a young family I can't make the most of them just yet.

Could I just add to what LauraBridges was saying about media work?Many of us on this thread will have years of experience and expertise in our field of work. It can be an issue that women just 'get on with it' and so even when there are women in senior roles we don't hear from them. The BBC and other media organisations are desperate to get more women on the air, especially those with STEM expertise. A friend who is a quantum physicist (be afraid...) is contacted often to talk about academia and equality issues as well as her own subject. I have done a few interviews (mostly about my doctoral research) and it has always been an invigorating experience. If you love the job you do and you have expertise to share, get in touch with the BBC and get on their 'experts' list- you might just inspire a younger woman to give it a go herself!

Imogen that's an interesting point actually re: these issues being toughest on what I suppose the FT has now got us all calling the 'cling-ons' (I see they are the pursuing the theme re: house prices this weekend as well - interesting as you don't usually see academics used as examples in broadsheets). Of course you're right that money makes a big difference - not just money in the present, but also having a reasonable expectation of high earnings in the future, which makes it easier to make that decision to commit to a 'loss leading' investment in childcare in the short term. It is much harder to make that sort of commitment in a career (like academia) where pay does not rise very much for most people, and also where a lot of women are still on temporary contracts/postdocs at the point of having children. (We started a family when we did - ahead of most of our contemporaries in academia - because we were fortunate both to have permanent jobs at the same place, and also because we had been able to buy a flat.)

This is such a good thread. It strikes me that it is in effect a kind of virtual version of the lean-in "circles" which sound cringeworthy but I actually thought were quite a good idea in a way. I keep trying to work up the nerve to suggest that I and a few other women academics I know at the same sort of point - juggling these issues of when and how to have children and still progress - should create a sort of informal version. But this thread is so encouraging and useful in a similar way. It's just a shame that the mumsnet format makes it hard to tag and archive and so on in a useful way - it would be good to be able to tag some of these comments for future reference under various headings.

Forgot to say that I have found laura's points about maternity leaves v. thought provoking and have been discussing them with DH who mostly agrees (he is French and maternity leaves are in any case still shorter in France, and full-time nursery provision for small babies much more widely available and more generally acceptable than it is here).

Hi kalidasa
I'm an academic. Full time contract etc, recently promoted but nowhere near 100k pay! I came on this thread because I feel a lot of the ideas about women and work I resonate with. I went back to work at 6 months both times.

My work have recently (in the last few years) changed their promotion criteria to be more inclusive. It's not hit 50/50 promotions yet but it's getting there slowly. So resonates with what recent articles have been about.

I'll write more soon. I've got hyped up kids who've just celebrated a 6th birthday! My ds'!

That's interesting NK5 - can you say a bit more about the changes to promotion criteria? I went to a presentation about GEM (like Athena Swan but for arts/humanities/social sciences) a few months ago and I thought that was one of the things they ought to be thinking about. A year or so ago there was a thread for academics at our sort of stage in 'off the beaten track'. It was very interesting but actually I find the positive tone and practicality of this one more useful even though it is not career-specific.

I'm involved in the aurora leadership initiative too - hosted by the leadership foundation.

The promotion criteria. Well basically they've said/and written explicitly that they will consider all forms of excellent outputs so no longer are they just looking at REF primarily but also other activities, be it teaching, external outreach, grants, student support, programme development etc.

Of course they have to be of excellent quality so not just 'bog standard' teaching etc (so it's the same as we can't just get promoted if you get the 'bog standard' papers).. And 'over and above' quality of the level you are at...

I guess the point of the inclusive criteria is because research has told us so far that to go far in just research, one not only needs to write, but also needs to collaborate, network, go to conferences... And the one thing research has told us is that conference attendance drops once women have the children (at least in the first couple of years due to lack of
childcare but also due to the maternity leave that women take - so if you've gone off for some time, you need to start up the paper trail again).

So in light of this, we've implemented things like study leave immediately after coming back from maternity leave (or reduced teaching) so that women can get back into the swing of research.

There are many places that have implemented 'teaching only' track and so have we. But I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing because I'm not entirely convinced that every academic out there wants to do research solely. But the issue with 'teaching only' is that a lot of women can end up in there (due to the above reasons) and so can look a bit like the mommy track.

So the role of these promotion criteria is then to make sure that they aren't.

Interesting that both kalidasa and I both had families before our contemporaries. I do think it is often just best to get on with it. Circumstances are never ideal. You are never in the perfect job or situation or house to have a baby and if you just get started but keep your career going full time too the "pain" of it (financial - childcare costs and lack of sleep) is over sooner as it were.

On whether enhanced maternity rights damage women most women on £13k -£20k a year would probably disagree as they would probably never have been the primary wage earner so being, in a sense, pressed by the state to stay home and subjected to peer pressure that you take a year or you damage the child for life and all women take a year is not going to harm them very much. However even there your woman on £20k a year will never know that she might have risen to £50k to lead that small company if she had not stopped work for 5 years to have children. Also if more generous leave is there even if it's many months on full pay women don't have to take it.

On conference attendance, I attend if I am paid to speak (about 50 times a year) but I have never liked the pointless networking. I have just thought laterally and manage to do pretty well without going to lots of extra things like that. I suspect it's also my personality. I like to be alone quite a bit. I like silence and my thoughts and therefore I market myself through those talks, my books and writings rather than Golf Days and all the other things most people in my profession do day in day out (more fool them unless they happen to like them I suppose in which case let them do it). I am not even sure I am like other women on this. I went to one work evening at a spa thing, with massages and drinks and that was supposedly female but even that was having to stir yourself from your warm home and talk to people you don't even like so no better than more "male" events for me.

Not sure if I qualify on here but love the thread, don't earn a fortune but that has been a positive choice as I work in the regions and in the third sector (double whammy) but I do have a career and not just a job IYSWIM, also have a high earning dh with very time pressured career.

Like Laura I was one of the first to have children in our circle and went on for a bit , 3 dc eldest is 20 youngest just turned 12 .I have pretty much always worked went back fulltime after 6 months with eldest , even then working for one of the big accountancy firms I was promoted whilst away. I had about a year with the second ,changed firms and then had career break of two years with youngest,to be honest the shine had worn off my role at the time, it was the period of constant mergers and I used that time to think and plan for what next ,we also relocated in that period,so now work in a senior role in a dynamic organisation roughly three days a week (usually more) and am filling up the remainder with other options (in all honesty could work full time but want to retain the flexibility that I have with part time)

The key to the childcare in my opinion is to have the best childcare that you can afford for as many hours as possible,always add on at least a couple of hours a day more than you ideally think you will need; you can always let the Nanny go home early but conversely always have cover if you need it.

It sounds trite and obvious but careers need to be managed I despair of how many of my contemporaries are moaning now because they gave up their careers and can't get back in.I was left incandescent the other day hearing a fifty year old woman who used to be pretty high up in industry but gave it up because it was "too difficult with the children" telling a 21 year old that her profession (same as mine) wasn't good for women because after 10 years off it was impossible to get back in at a senior level.FGS what career is around where it is easy to get back in after 10 years , you have manage, plan, make choices etc .As I say to my dc "success comes in cans "!

Sometimes I have felt overwhelmed but I have also had huge satisfaction from my career,I also think it helped that my mother also had a career and worked full time when I was a child , it was normal to me.I hope that as I have boys it will be normal to them to be in relationships where both partners have the careers they want.

I think the hardest is between ages 9 and 14 actually, so in general I would say work as many hours as you can when they are tiny so that you can enjoy the flexibility when they notice your absence more and when frankly they are at their most rewarding ;old enough to engage in things with you and young enough that you are still the centre of their world.

On a separate note ,I have been on here for more years than I care to remember and I am so pleased that you are still here LauraBridges !

Laura
I take your point about conferences being slightly pointless but your industry is different from academia. For one, unless we are a keynote speaker, we don't get paid to attend! If anything it's the cheapest economy ticket, in the cheapest travel lodge, and £20 for stipend (ok I may be exaggerating but not far from the truth).

So we do it because we want to learn about the latest research from contemporaries publishing in that area... And conversely sharing our findings.

And at those conferences because you meet the like minded or the biggest names in the field, you get to know them and they in turn act as your references for your next promotion or they ask you to be their collaborators on international projects funded by ESRC and the like.

I know an academic couple where the bloke is higher in seniority to her. And he just spent 3-4 weeks in nz working on a research grant with his collaborators. I'm not saying the wife can't do that either, but he's managed to do that with the wife's support (holding down the fort at home, kids etc). He's now been promoted and got a job elsewhere which means they'll have to relocate. She's going to be trailing behind him and hopefully get a position either at the same Uni or nearby.

She says that whilst she was having the kids (about 9/10 years ago) she was working on her phd (as was he). He then got his first permanent position and she followed, all the time still rushing home to cook..).

She's still the domestic at home - yes she probably enables him but this is pretty common behavior I think, regardless of industry.

Yes, sorry conferences are very important in academia and my brother as well as being an NHS consultant is a professor so I know a bit about the sorts of conferences he would speak at etc. In my own profession lots of people attend conferences to gain clients. I am not really suggesting avoiding that. I just prefer to do it other ways or only attend if I'm paid and I tend to be speaking for half a day (or all day like this coming Friday) which is very hard work although I suppose no different from university lecturers and teachers who present all day every day. It is the hardest work of anything that I do for work.

On trailing spouses well NK my children's father followed my career hundreds of miles 30 years ago so it's not always been that women follow male careers particularly when women will earn a lot more than men. I suppose at the end of the day money is the thing that talks.

(Ps.. out, thanks. My 9 - 14s though were much easier than younger ones. Perhaps we just had very demanding under 5s and easier older children or they did more at school, took school coaches to school etc).

Well I think I was a lot older than you laura. I had DS at 32, but got pregnant (at 31) half way through my second year in my first permanent job, and I was lucky to have a permanent job so (relatively) early. I also hadn't yet passed probation (after three years). So overall it ended up being earlier than any other academics I know. But obviously it's not early by any objective measure.

I totally agree about trailing spouses could go either way - my DH is at the moment, caring for the kids at home whilst I'm here at work (have just finished 20% of what I was meant to do and because of time really, rather than MN). He came with me to this city when I got this job, and now that I've been promoted, he's going to be 'doing the kids' whilst I travel to Europe over the next months (3x)...

Money talks, and yes, if it was my dh who was earning the big bucks I imagine we'd be doing the opposite. although I sadly am not 'big bucks'...just 'bigger'...!

I know female profs who have chosen to have 'only' one child. the one I'm specifically thinking about said that it took her 6 years after the birth of her child to get back to where she ought to be, and then some. Now the kid is 9/10? she travels a hell of a lot for work, and her DH is the one that's 'grounded' at home.

I suppose what I meant about 9-14 is that at this age they have much more options about school holiday care etc I got more push back on my working hours , etc from them and because we live in the country they needed more transportation etc ( not their fault we live in the sticks) to facilitate their social lives .

I also felt these were lovely years for doing things together as a family , traveling became easier for example and holidays really become a joint holiday rather than just home somewhere else!I have been pleased that by the time they got to this age I was senior enough to have greater control of my own diary and be able to enjoy those years before the friends take over in the teenage years