Juggling work and family has never been an easy task. But Helen Raine urges mothers to get their heads out of the washing basket and back into the workplace at the level they belong when the school bell rings this year.
It’s the first day of school. The bell rings and you disentangle the nervous offspring, which has wrapped itself round your legs, and herd him or her gently into the classroom. The door closes. Freedom!
This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, right? When your child is finally taken off your hands by the state for a reasonable chunk of the day and you can go back to your fulfilling, go-getting job. No more slouching around the house, doing the laundry and the cooking like an erstwhile Cinderella.
Except it doesn’t quite work like that. By the time you’ve dropped your child off at school, there’s a fair chance you’re late for a potential new job. And then there’s the pick up at 3pm; not exactly conducive to a full day at work.
Let’s now throw in the intermittent colds, fevers and stomach upsets that tend to play tag between siblings, so that no sooner is one well, then the other goes down with the lurgy. Not to mention the interminable school holidays.
“Not to worry,” you think. “I’ll go part time.” Which is fine, as long as you don’t mind earning a much lower salary, having a less than dazzling array of career opportunities available and watching male counterparts of similar ability leapfrog over you for promotion. Plus, childcare doesn’t come free to cover the times when you’re at work, but school’s out for the kids. That means that most of the wages from your slightly below par job will be eaten up paying for someone to watch your children; that’s if you can find a child minder. And who will cook, clean and pay the bills now?
Many women actively decide not to push as hard in their career after they have children
It’s enough to convince the average woman to leave their brain in the deep freeze next time they are mindlessly pushing a trolley round the supermarket. It also accounts for the fact that women are woefully under represented in the Maltese workforce, and the ones that do work tend to do more menial jobs for less money than the average man.
But perhaps all this is just fear of the unknown. Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook, thinks women can have a family and still count in the workplace. In her TED talk (www.ted.com) she urges them to seek out challenging jobs. Her rationale is that while it’s hard to leave your kids at the child minders after school, it’s much harder to do so for a dull job. If your career is interesting enough, you can make working and raising a family work for you.
Sandberg recognises the absence of women in top jobs worldwide. Of 190 Heads of State, only nine are women. Only 13 per cent of Members of Parliament in the world are female. Top-level female executives number around 16 per cent.
When she talks about why this is so, she touches on a truth that many of us modern women would rather not articulate: that while there are clearly still challenges for women struggling against discrimination in the workplace, it’s also the case that many women actively decide not to push as hard in their career after they have children. For many, that’s frankly because family becomes more important. If something needs to be sacrificed, we don’t want time with the kids to be the first thingto go.
Sandberg has children herself and experiences the painful moments of leaving them so she can work, go to conferences and do all the things you need to do to stay at the top. She is not contending that her way is the only way. What she is saying is that we need to make it easier for women to choose to stay in the workplace when the children are born or after they go to school. The option to pursue a demanding and interesting career and to be more than ‘just’ a mum has to be there and its down to women to create that space.
That’s important because otherwise, we go back to the days when girls watched their mothers baking, played with dolls and learnt that a girl’s place was in the home while boys went on to be engineers and doctors. Not many of us want to send that message to our children, but when daddy goes out to work and mummy picks up the kids, we reinforce powerful stereotypes.
The trouble is that when a child minder picks up the kids, it feels like it’s women and not men who are making sacrifices. Men, on the whole, still don’t seem to feel that imperative to look after the children.
Sandberg thinks that women need to believe in themselves, negotiate for themselves, sell themselves better and own their success. And if you truly believe you are exactly what an organisation needs, then it’s easier to ask to start work later so that you can drop off the kids, or to finish a little earlier to pick them up when school ends, and to catch up those hours later in the evening.
It’s also about negotiating within your partnership at home. It’s much easier to convince your husband that he should take the day off with the sick child when you’re both earning a similar amount at a similar level. If women take more menial jobs and don’t put their hands up for promotion, then simple home economics dictate that mummy’s job is the one on the line when push comes to shove.
Sandberg tells women to “keep their foot on the gas pedal” even though it’s hard and stressful. Otherwise we get stuck in the slow lane. And the bottom line is that staying at home and feeling unfulfilled can be hard and stressful too.
Of course, the government can help with this. Affordable after-school clubs, a longer school year, flexible working; all these things would help. But mothers also need to see the start of a new school term as an opportunity, a stretch of child-free time, where anything is possible. No one said that excelling at work and a home life would be easy. But Sandberg is saying that it’s doable if we believe in it enough.
When the school bell rings this year, perhaps it’s time to get our heads out of the washing basket and back into the workplace at the level we belong.