a good question
sometimes people say simple things , but which resonate and stick with you. this week has been one of those in which work and home collide. back from bank holiday , school seems to have organised two events which i really should attend to support one of my boys. i feel a bit embarrassed asking top honcho if i can be late/miss something for the second day on the trot. when i ask , he responds ‘ is it important to you?’. now that i think is a good question to ask. cos yes this is important, for lots of reasons . reasons which might be difficult for him to judge, but he trusted me, he asked me to be honest about whether it was important…and of course if it was, he supported it. this is good management.
nothing to do with workingmums
..just to note great delight that sarah palin didn’t get to be vp..and even more delight that obama got the big job 
pressure points … and how they evolve
tonight has been one of those nights when all tributaries of workingmum’s life come together. so monday night is now homework night. which is cool except that tonight there’s marking to be done. and a hair lice check is due. the planned swim (to retain an element of sanity) clearly isn’t going to happen – have to be an early morning run instead (supposed to be doing 30 mins exercise a day to keep healthy i hear).
so whilst mornings (sometimes) seem to be less painful as the kids grow older – son no one is now quite competent to dress and assemble all necessary bits n pieces for school – it’s the evenings which now seem to be the victim of the collision between motherhood and working life. pass the wine will you.
workingmums in top jobs .. or not
today’s media talks about workingmums and their chances of getting to the top . well to be fair the story isn’t that specific- the news is that there is a decline in the number of women (mums or not we assume) in the top jobs.
ok so first of all we might question the definition of top jobs … income is no doubt central to the definition used in the survey, but perhaps when we talk top jobs we should think about a wider range of criteria and then once we’ve got to a sensible definition of top jobs, then we can question whether women , or perhaps in this context, workingmums, have access to those jobs.
i sometimes talk with workingdad about what makes a good (possibly top) job. i’ve pretty much settled on three criteria : for me a top job in essence pays well, contributes something good to the community , and is fun (this is probably something to do with the people you work with). so straight away some of those top jobs the survey refers to, probably get excluded from my version of the list of top jobs…and the good news is that possibly some of the jobs workingmums do hold, perhaps emerge higher in the list by virtue of their contribution to society and (hopefully ) enjoyability.
so how do workingmums get access to such jobs? well the discourse in today’s media covers all the points which have been raised in this blog series including do workingmums want them? (they might want my definition of a top job, but a top job defined only by buckets of salary might be less appealing); is flexibility of working sufficiently available? are structures of working defined by a male orientation to working practices and changes to those structures resisted by those (dominant) males ? personally i can’t think of any job which couldn’t have flexibility of working built into it. every job should be supported by other roles in the organisation, and it’s such a supportive , collaborative structure which allows any single role to be flexibly delivered. yes that even applies to gordon brown and his cabinet (when they’re in supportive mode).
btw talking of politics, it is of course interesting to see a discussion about women’s access to top jobs appear during the same week in which we see sarah palin, seemingly workingmum extraordinaire, in her pitch for the vp position. this workingmum was initially pleased to see her nomination, but the enthusiasm was somewhat dampened after the sight of her perched on her bearskin (completed with head) sofa. the anti abortion; pro gun lobby; anti environmentalism; pro death penalty views don’t help either.
we will see if that workingmum does get access to a top job – and probably the establishment and this workngmum agree that it would indeed be a top job.
sometimes the stress is so high…
it surges through the system, as real as blood . it feels incapacitating.
sometimes arrival back at home is the perfect antedote – the demand to get one child to tennis, t’other to the dentist, takes over and serves to blank out the demands of the previous hours (this is the good side of being a workingmum).
…but sometimes….the stress won’t compromise. it takes over . mind is occupied. smiles are unforthcoming. this is the (very) bad side of being a workingmum. sometimes work takes over, when you know it shouldn’t:(
today is one of those days.
every cloud does of course , have a silver lining :)
two years ago my childminder dumped me..well it wasn’t that personal, she was moving on. as a result the challenge was , pretty much overnight, to find a replacement for one of the most important adults in my life. luckily enough we were successful and found the wonderful claire, who’s created an environment for the kids which is pretty much as idyllic as you could hope for in a house across the road from school. she’s fab.
the only problem (which has been at the back of my mind throughout the year) is that as a trained teacher, the lovely claire has been contemplating going back to work in a school. so i’ve been trying to work out how on earth i would cope with life as workingmum without the childcare on which i so depend.
anyway claire announced last week, that she was sticking with looking after the kids. hooray. and what’s more, apparently i was the key influence. sounds good ? not so sure … she was persuaded that this was the best course of action, by seeing me arrive for the boys stressed up to my eyeballs day after day.
so here’s to stress …and of course to three more years of claire .
good bits v bad bits
this is a list which will grow..just kicking off with a few ideas today
good
life is NEVER boring; you keep in touch with a whole loada people; you don’t have to worry about paying the bill for next term’s guitar lessons; …….
bad
work preoccupies you when you should be thinking about the kids; stress levels are generally high high high (especially between 830-845 and 445-530); you’re ALWAYS rushing around; ……
so one of the painful bits about being a workingmum ..
is lying in bed on saturday morning, with work swirling around your mind, when you should be thinking up fun things to be doing with the kids (in the rain).
workingmums : full time or part time ?
couple of weeks late, but thought it was worth a comment or two about the study referred to in ‘the guardian’ on 27 feb which looked at the changing work patterns of women pre and post the birth of their first child.
in short , before kids as a woman, you’re pretty much as likely as a man to have a full time job , and actually pretty unlikely to have a part time job . birth of first child and that proportion of full-time working women clearly plummets ..80% reduces to 15% (in fact interestingly , co-inciding with the proportion of women with a part-time job). so how long does it take for the proportion of women with full-time jobs (and kids) to return to a higher level than the proportion of women with part-time jobs (and kids) ? just 17 years after the birth of their first child. seventeen years – that’s probably double the time most of those workingmums spent in the work-place as full-timers before the kids arrived.
so what does this mean?
well clearly workingmums either prefer or are restricted to part-time jobs (once you’ve had the taste of part-time work , perhaps you’d rather not give it up )
….btw we don’t of course quite know how they’re defining part-time work .. seems to be under 31 hours a week – so a four day a weeker like this workingmum would be classified as full-time (and to be honest that’s how it feels , so that’s fair enough)
pay gaps between full-time and part-time wages (per hour) have actually more than doubled in the past 30 years. so we can infer that many of these part-time jobs are probably not of a ‘professional’ level .. this probably means that there are plenty of workingmums who have the talents to work in roles beyond those that they end up in .
the study suggests that the best way to retain employment in a ’professional’ job, perhaps at less than five days per week , is to stick with your pre-kids employer. agreed. presumably one of the reasons the workingmums who stick with their pre-kids employer do so (above of course hopefully , liking their job) is precisely because they know how difficult it will to get back into the workplace at a similar level. they made that sacrifice of time with their kids for that. equally validly, mums who gave up work totally to exclusively be with the kids say until school age kicks in, made that choice knowing there would be a sacrifice further down the line. the point is , don’t kid yourself , being a workingmum involves sacrifice for all but the luckiest.
so when they say plan for your first baby ..it’s not about planning to have enough money to buy the mountains of stuff you need to get through the first year ..it’s about planning to be in a job you enjoy, with an employer who’s prepared to be flexible about the proportion of time you work for them in the future.
when we gotta go, we gotta go
ooh , feeling positive tonight . another good thing about being a workingmum. when you gotta go, you gotta go. no hanging around to finish your emails (1500 currently unread if you want to know). the metaphorical bell goes at whatever time (245pm/5pm depending on part or full time) and you’re out of the building (reversing into a bollard if you’re this workingmum last week). music on ; kids in sight ; tea to cook and part two of your life to live.
workingmums have no time to waste
