Trying to get over the maternal wall

Published: Thursday, February 17, 2011

Returning to work after maternity leave can be daunting, particularly if your bosses frown upon flexible working, writes SHEILA WAYMAN
KATHRYN IS just two weeks back into her marketing manager job after returning from maternity leave with her first child and is waiting for the day she is going to have to stand up in a meeting at 5.30pm and tell her mostly male colleagues she is off home.
"I think when it gets to that point, they will make a huge judgment on me," she says. "When I went back to work, I said to myself I will never let a day go when I don't put my own child to bed. Now I know it is going to happen, but as a rule that is not how I am going to work."
Leaving at 5.30pm does not mean she cannot do her job, she says, as she can go on her laptop computer at home after 8.30pm if necessary.
"From my point of view, I will still get the job done. It means I have to work more intensively during the day and occasionally, not too often, I will have to work later at night - but between the hours of 5.30 and 8.30 I am not available."
However, it does mean her colleagues will have to learn not to decide in the late afternoon to call a meeting if they want her there for its entirety.
Kathryn (36) works in a male-dominated department and two men are at her level. "They both have children, but I would see them working late fairly regularly. I don't think the onus is the same on the man."
She never thought twice about staying late before she had her daughter, who is now seven months old. "I like to work and have always enjoyed my job. I have different priorities now and it is an awkward situation with an employer because you are expected not to bring your personal life into your job. That is unreasonable."
So who is being unreasonable here, the employer who expects "business as usual" when a mother comes back from maternity leave or the employee who wants to change the way she works because she has had a child?
It is a question that is central to the "maternal wall" which women encounter in the workplace. The stalling of women's careers is a clear phenomenon and while it can be through personal choice, other factors include cultural attitudes, availability of childcare, "old school" work practices and a presumption that they will never be as interested in their job again.
A UK survey of 1,000 companies last month showed that 38 per cent fear that working mothers may show less flexibility and commitment than other employees. Meanwhile, women know that taking time out can do irreparable damage to their job prospects.
The Central Statistics Office's report, Women and Men in Ireland 2010, which was published this month, found that in 2008, men had an average income of €35,966, while the average for women was €25,077. "The difference between male and female incomes also increased with age," it noted.
Yet when it comes to education, the disadvantage of gender is with men. Women are more likely to have a third-level qualification, with more than half (52 per cent) of women aged 25-34 having a third-level qualification compared with 39 per cent of men in this age group.
"Isn't it a little crazy that we have these smart, well-educated women that we are not making the best use of? Who aren't getting promoted into senior positions?" asks Camille Loftus, policy spokeswoman of the National Women's Council.
The degree to which motherhood is a barrier to women becoming key decision-makers in many different sectors of life needs to be re-evaluated from all angles for everybody's sake.
A "long hours" work culture, for instance, means many women won't seek promotion if it means spending longer in the office and neither will they be considered if they do not appear willing or able to put the extra hours in.
More enlightened workplaces acknowledge that parenthood alters people's needs and they look for mutually beneficial ways to accommodate a phase of life that often brings increased maturity and greater focus with it.
Kathryn does not expect much understanding from her company, as she felt it was not very accommodating when she was pregnant. "There were many nights I was in meetings until eight o'clock."
Denise McNamara agrees that there is a glass ceiling of motherhood, but it is not an issue for her or where she works - with Starwood Hotels' customer contact centre in Cork, where she has a global role.
She works three days at home, when her 14-month-old daughter Maeve goes to the creche, and two days in the office, when Maeve is minded by her husband, Michael, or his mother.
A lot of senior leadership positions in the company are held by women, which she thinks is "helpful", and there is a good respect for work-life balance - "not too many people Blackberrying at the weekend!".
She does not see any bar to her progression in the company. "A lot of it is down to personality - some women think they should be doing the 'woman' thing, it is self-limiting."
Mary, an accountant and mother of two, says she could see she was "written off" when she was expecting her first child five years ago. "In ways I wrote myself off. I was quite happy. All I wanted was a child."
After the birth of her second child, she would have liked to have returned to work part-time but that was not an option, so she resumed her full-time job.
Initially, the company was good to her, at a time when things were quiet, but as business picked up, the pressure was on. "I could not stay all the extra hours they needed."
They were getting annoyed, she says. "It was not paid overtime, but I was expected to stay over."
She ended up taking redundancy. "I just couldn't do what they wanted me to do - and have a life. I was working with people who didn't have children, didn't have the commitments and just didn't understand."
She is glad the money gave her time to stay at home with the children, but it is hard to find another job. "I do have a lot to give, but it isn't 70 hours a week." If a company can get somebody who can be totally flexible, "why would they want to bring in someone with complications?"
In the current economic climate, it is hard to answer that. But another feature of this recession is an increase in households where women are the bigger earner or, indeed, the sole breadwinner. It will be interesting to see what impact this has in the long term on that maternal wall.
Attitudes and choices people make are always made within a framework, says Loftus. "Our framework is that women are supposed to be the ones responsible for raising children, and there is no reason why it is just the woman's responsibility."
It takes changes in public policy to shift attitudes, she argues. Our zero statutory paternity leave says a lot about who should be left holding the baby - although at least couples can share the 14 weeks' unpaid parental leave.
Other European countries encourage a more balanced participation in parenting through legislation. For example, from April in the UK, men who currently get two weeks' statutory paternity leave will be allowed to take the latter (unpaid) part of the mother's maternity leave if she returns to work before using up her full 52 weeks.
Clare, who has two children aged three and 10 months, thinks it would be "brilliant" for a couple to have the option of sharing that block of leave. Unusually, she was promoted while out on her second maternity leave.
After her first child, "my interest in work definitely diminished", she says. She had to push herself to apply for promotion, but an opportunity came up when she was off.
She is delighted because it is a job-share, with more pay and a shift pattern she prefers to her previous three-day week. They are juggling childcare and her husband told his manager he might need some parental leave. "Oh, do men take that?" was the response.
Annette works in the education sector and is well placed for promotion. But with two children, aged five and 18 months, "I have never been at a worse time of my life in terms of looking at if I could cope with that," she says. "That is a reflection of carrying what I consider to be the two jobs."
She resents the fact that her husband, who also works in education, can maintain his flexibility by leaving most of the care and domestic work to her.
"Men don't have to surrender as much when children come along. There is that presumption - 'I have to stay, I have to go', whatever." She wishes he would help out more in the evenings.
Does she discuss the unfairness with him? "No. It just leads to arguments, so generally I try to just suck it up."
Some names have been changed
What maternal wall? Organisation is key
It is much more difficult for a woman than a man to progress in her career after having children, says Tanya Airey (44), managing director of Sunway travel agency.
But, as a mother of three children ranging in age from 11 to 18, she believes it is possible "to have it all". "If you are not an organised type of person, I don't think you can hack it."
Women may whinge that organising the childcare is always down to them, but she wonders if they would want anybody else to do it. "I would want to do it myself."
How you work your childcare is key. She used a creche for her first child and continued with it after the birth of her second, but found it a "nightmare" - between dashing to do the pick-ups and when either of the children were ill - so she decided she needed somebody in the house. "That changed everything."
The logistics got more complicated as the children grew older, but she and her husband, Philip, who is also a director in Sunway, do have a bit of flexibility.
The travel business is dominated by women - 85 per cent of Sunway's workforce is female - and there is no predicting the impact motherhood is going to have on an individual, she says.
"There are people who say they are definitely coming back and then you get a call just beforehand, 'Is it possible to get part-time? Others, who you might have thought would have wanted to stay at home, are really happy to get back into their career and really 'go' at it."
When Cecilia Ronan, a managing director with Citi bank in Ireland, came back from maternity leave in 2006, she was determined "to work smarter".
Having separated from her husband before their daughter, Lauren, now aged five, was born, she felt very focused on work to maintain a livelihood.
"Before my child, my life was very different - both my personal and my professional life - and I had to make changes."
She used to work very long hours so she had to "set up expectations" that this would no longer be the case. "I set up a routine and I stuck to that."
She is usually in the office by 7am but gone by 5.30pm. "The organisation shifted to that."
You have to be ultra-organised, she stresses. "When you have less time in the office, it is more about doing and less about talking."
Ronan has an au pair living with them in Kinsealy, Co Dublin, and has a creche as back-up. She is always back in time to have dinner with Lauren and put her to bed - "even if it means I have to do a conference call on the way home".
She believes that if you have a history of high performance, most workplaces are accommodating. As country human resource officer of Citi in Ireland, with more than 2,200 employees, and also responsible for the HR governance of Citibank Europe Plc (across five countries), she works for two bosses, both male, one in Ireland and one in Italy.
"You could not ask for better bosses in terms of understanding." She says they know that if they give her the flexibility she needs, she will give it back. What she finds most tricky is travel because it requires greater support beyond routine childcare.
With a workforce that is 50 per cent female and an average age of 32, enabling women to juggle work and motherhood is crucial for Citi. "Maternity buddies" help ease mothers back into work after their leave.
She acknowledges that priorities in her life have changed since becoming a mother. "There are times to be honest that I do have guilt about my daughter. I try to balance it, so on a Friday morning, for instance, I bring her to school."
She learned a lesson when she went to a Christmas play at Lauren's Montessori and her friends' parents were saying to her, "And you are . . . ?" It is important to listen to those "wake-up calls", she adds, and re-evaluate your routine.