NewsLab

To be a working mother or not to be?

The image is a familiar one. “I wake up early in the morning, I prepare the breakfast for my family, I get the children ready to school, pack their lunches, go to work and after a tiring day, I try to devote as much time as I can to my children”. For all those thousands of working women, this picture is very common. Unfortunately, the image of the “super feminine” is very far from the real lives of most women.  Tracey, Manager of a Lloyds Bank Branch and a mother of a two years old boy describes an ordinary day of her life.

“I get up around 6 o’clock in the morning, I get my son ready for nursery, I drop him off and get to work at 8:15. After a hard working day, I leave the office at 17:45 to pick my son up at 18:00, get home and then begin tea; bath and I try to spend some quality time before he goes to bed. Then I have to sort out the house and prepare dinner. My husband is always late”.

Being a working mother can be hard, having to cope with the emotional demands of children and partners as well as household chores, when at the same time you have to be successful in your job. Gemma, a barrister and a mother of two believes that the pressure to perform well at work and be a good parent can be difficult.

“At times I do find it difficult to achieve a balance. If I am spending a lot of time at work, I feel I am not fulfilling my responsibilities as a mother properly. And if children require a lot of attention in any particular time, it is also quite frustrating not being able to do the things I would like to do at work”.

For Tracey: “I find it a constant struggle. In my profession, I often go to meetings, where there are 13-16 managers, from which only 3 are women, all working mothers. I am the youngest. I am feeling that in those meetings they are not taking into consideration that I may need to go home earlier to pick my son from nursery. I do not believe things are made easy from me and my career. I get angry because people say to me, “you should be home with your baby”. If I had the choice I would still go to work, not full time, maybe part time. But I cannot afford to do this because my family needs the income.”

For women like Tracey, working means less time and energy for their son, which creates problems even while the added income help solve others. Nicky is a single mother with 3 children who works in a crèche four hours a week. She lives in a two bedroom flat provided by the social welfare and struggles against all odds to ensure the basics of life.

“It can be difficult financially and emotionally. Sometimes I feel quite lonely because I do not have anyone to talk to. Sometimes again I feel I am far better off on my own because I can concentrate more on my children than being with a partner who is not supportive in all aspects of life. My only reason for working is getting out of the house really. I do not earn much but I want to gain more experience to get a better job in the future and also…self respect.”
 

For all the very real benefits that working can give women, such as self respect, the strain is almost too much. Especially when the men’s mentality does not seem to have radically changed over the years.

“ I am very lucky with my husband”, says Helen, a Customer Services Assistant in Natwest Bank and a mother of two. He is very good with our children. But he goes out to work, he is the main bread winner. Sometimes he says to me: “I have been working all week….. and I wonder what on earth I have being doing?”

Either because they need the financial income or motivated by a desire for personal fulfilment, women nowadays devote a large part of their lives to working. But what kind of problems do they really face in they everyday life to work? Lesley, Manager in the Employment Advice Services of the Equal Opportunities Commission, reveals the reality.

“There are a lot of barriers in the working environment. We get around 5.000 complaints a year from women about discrimination around pregnancy- maternity issues because employers find it difficult to accommodate the fact that most women want at some point in their lives to take maternity leave. We have complaints about access to flexible working for short periods, when children are at a school age and we have thousands of complaints for sexual harassment. All of these things suggest that men find it difficult to accommodate women professionally as colleagues in the work environment’.

“I had been to so many interviews, in hospitals, in caterings..etc..says Nicky. As soon as you mention you got children and they ask you discreetly how old are they, they make you feel very uncomfortable.

I was really upset by one particular job. I was chosen among 100 persons to give an interview for a job in a clinic with children who have learning disabilities. At the end of the interview, they asked me how many children I have and their ages. When I told them the age of my youngest child, I could see the look in their faces. I knew then I would not have any luck.”

It seems that even nowadays many women share the same experience with Nicky. In many areas of work becoming pregnant and having children can have decidedly negative effects on a woman’s career prospects, despite any legislation to the contrary. The fact that many companies were unwilling to talk about their employment policies, despite my numerous phone calls shows that this is still a very sensitive subject.

“ It really makes me angry, says Tracey, when I see that 80% of the people in my bank are women but when I look in the senior manager positions, I see far less women than men. A lot of branches are full of women, except the manager, the only man who is working in the branch. It is really ludicrous”.

However, women are in the work place and they are here to stay. It seems that the ability to juggle roles qualifies some of them to achieve far more than they might have done otherwise.

(This is an extract of one of my radio programs in London).