The opposition of employers to flexible hours frustrates many working women with children, reports Sylvia Thompson
The case last week of the British Airways pilot who successfully challenged her bosses after they refused to let her halve her working hours to look after her one-year old daughter has been heralded as a victory for working mothers. Jessica Starmer, a co-pilot on short-haul flights from Heathrow, won her sexual discrimination case at an employment tribunal.
The British Airline Pilots' Association (Balpa) supported Starmer and said the outcome would help many more employees to fight for flexible hours to look after their children.
"All professions will have to wake up to this question of flexibility," said Balpa general secretary Jim McAuslan.
In the UK there is a right to request flexible working hours but there is no such legislation to date in Ireland.
It's an age-old problem - juggling family responsibilities with work commitments. But for the current generation of Irish thirtysomething mothers, it's one which they believe could be eased if employers trusted their commitment to work while at the same time allowed them to work more flexible working weeks.
Sounds easy, doesn't it? But, ironically at a time when Irish employers most need to hang on to experienced, dedicated staff members, they are losing them in their droves through unwillingness to set precedents with new working arrangements for such women for fear that it will cause disgruntlement among other staff members.
"I've been with my company 12 years. They know my work ethic and ability. I've travelled a lot for my job so I feel there should be some payback now," says Sandra, a sales executive and mother of two who is currently on maternity leave with her second child. I have been working a four-day week since my first child was born and I am doing the same job in four days. Now I'm looking for a three-day week. I'm very conscientious about my work and I could still do a lot of my job in three days.
"Considering my length of service, I feel they should be able to be flexible but they don't want to set precedents. Senior executives are afraid to give allowances to mothers. Many companies are dominated by men in their late 50s who just don't see the problems," Sandra says.
Echoing the experiences of lots of other mothers of young children, she questions such practices as having to take one-and-a-quarter-hour lunch break which means she misses the chance of taking an earlier train home to pick up her children from the crèche before 6pm.
"Why can't I work through lunch when other people are allowed to take five smoking breaks a day?" she asks.
Part of the problem is that Ireland is at a crossroads in terms of our attitudes to childcare. The majority of mothers in their 30s and 40s now grew up with their own mothers fulltime in the home. And the memory of this form of child-rearing often plays on their minds when they send their little ones to crèches and childminders for 40 hours a week.
Then, consider that many of these women are well educated and have spent up to 10 years building up careers before they have their children. And since decisions about childcare still almost always fall to women, they grapple with how they will manage to continue in their fulfilling jobs while giving their babies and children a good start in life.
Advances in EU legislation such as the Parental Leave Act 1998 often don't seem to make much difference. "I know lots of women who have tried to take their parental leave as one day a week over time or even as a block of six weeks in the summer and it has been denied to them. The civil service is the only place to work as far as I can see. There you can do job-shares and work flexitime," adds Sandra.
Anne, a mother of one who is currently looking for a four-day week, says, "There is a generation of women who graduated with degrees in the early 1990s who are not like earlier generations of women who gave up work to have families. Suddenly, they are finding themselves stymied by an inflexible system.
"In my company, if you are working at an administrative level, there is talk about the work-life balance but when you are at management level, they don't practise what they preach. In many companies, it is a culture of presenteeism over productivity," she remarks.
"Everyone says, when you have one child, you'll manage but by the time you have a second child, the cost of childcare doesn't make it worth your while working anyway," she adds. "Anyway, going to a four-day week will probably put the kibosh on me career wise."
So are trade unions supporting such working mothers in their search for more flexible working hours?
"A lot of women are saying to us that they want to work all their working hours but in a different way, for example to do a full week in four days. It's the rigidity of having to be in a company at 8.30am which is often just the time they would be dropping their children to school that is an old-fashioned and outdated hurdle and not the way people's work should be managed now," says Esther Lynch, the legislation officer with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
"We are suggesting that the legislation obliges employers to give a good business reason why they are refusing flexibility. For instance, the law is about to be changed on parental leave so that people are entitled to take it in blocks of two six-week periods and one two-week period rather than solely a block of 14 weeks. At the moment, we are still coming across too many employers who are saying you can only take parental leave as a block of 14 weeks," she adds.
Pity the employers in all of this who are just trying to get a decent day's work out of their employees five days a week. Maria Cronin, director of European and Social Affairs with IBEC, says that a recent survey found that "some form of atypical work is happening in 80 per cent of companies". However, she admits that the frequency and incidence of such atypical work is more common at junior levels.
"Employers are doing an awful lot and there has been an enormous increase in atypical work patterns and the majority of those who avail of these are female part-time workers or those with a staggered start and finish time. However, you have to balance such individual needs with the needs of the business and the needs of other employees for it to work. In my experience, the biggest issues for those workers with caring responsibilities are difficult commuting times and affordable childcare," adds Cronin.
One mother of two, Clare, decided that rather than work for somebody else when her children were young, she would set up her own consultancy business. Now, ironically, she says she is working even harder than she was before.
"I do get to pick and choose what jobs I want to go on. And I get into the office a bit later and leave a bit earlier but I do some long days as well," she says. "It's still stressful but it is a different kind of stress. I suppose, I'm thinking that I can work really hard now to get the business going and then work during school hours once the children are in school."
All the working mothers quoted in this article asked that their real names not be used for fear of repercussions in their working lives.
Keeping one foot on the ladder
Industry in the US can't afford to waste expensively educated, accomplished women, so companies must introduce policies and promotional opportunities that keep them in their jobs or entice them back into the workforce, according to a new study.
"Companies that can develop policies and practices to tap into the female talent pool over the long haul will enjoy a substantial competitive advantage," writes Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president of the New-York based Centre for Work-Life Policy, and Carolyn Buck Luce, global managing partner for Ernst & Young health sciences industry practice, in Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, a report in the Harvard Business Review last month.
They suggest giving the "gift oftime" by creating positions offering promotion possibilities and reduced workloads. Giving part-time employees access to the same benefits and training as full-time employees keeps them in the loop for promotion while also making a return to full-time work more appealing.
"Making flexible arrangements succeed over the long term is hard work. It means crafting an imaginative set of policies but even more important, it means eliminating the stigma that is often attached to such non-standard work arrangements," write Hewlett and Luce.
Thirty-five per cent of women surveyed reported aspects of their organisations' culture that effectively penalise people who take advantage of work-life policies.
"Only a leader's devotion to these issues will give others permission to transform conventional career paths," said one company executive.
The survey also found that 93 per cent of women who are currently "off-ramps" (most frequently due to family commitments) want to return to their careers. So keeping women connected by creating formal alumni networks and tapping them for advice is deemed another key strategy. "There is an urgent need to implement mentoring and networking programmes that help women expand and sustain their professional aspirations . . . To tap this all-important resource, companies must understand the complexities of women's nonlinear careers and be prepared to support rather than punish those who take alternate routes," conclude Hewlett and Luce.
