What happens when differing life choices lead to a fallout?
There was a survey conducted in 2011 by business services firm Regus which found that an increasing number of working mothers were being turned down for jobs as a result of the global recession. Some 38 per cent of employers were afraid that working mothers did not work as hard as their childless counterparts and that they were less flexible with regard to working hours. 31 per cent of those same 1,000 employers also feared that if they hired a working mother then she was likely to get pregnant again, leaving them both short a worker and liable for maternity leave. As a result only 26 per cent intended to hire working mothers that year as opposed to 38 per cent the previous year. 17 per cent believed that women who haven’t worked while bringing up a family were more likely to be out of touch with the changing demands of jobs.
Chilling statistics at a time when more and more families were finding that both parents needed to work due to rising mortgage repayments coupled with plummeting salaries. Or, as happened in a lot of cases where husbands had lost jobs due to the decline of the construction industry, women were left with no choice but to return to the workforce, or at least to full-time hours to compensate for the slashed family income.
But still, good news for childless women right? They must have been hot property, the ideal employees, the ones that had no need to dash out the door at 5pm, the ones that only had to take time off if they themselves were sick, and bar holidays, had no need to take any other time off, no maternity leave, no parental leave… Gosh, sure they were practically as good as men, right?
Well, let’s have a think about this one... Yes, of course they were as good as men, but did that mean they had it easier than their working mother counterparts?
Of course not.
The perception that childless women have nothing better to be doing than give their every waking hour to their employer is just as wrong as the perception that a woman of childbearing age in possession of children and/or a partner is nothing but a liability. The fact that you’ve no children to go home to shouldn’t – and doesn’t – mean that you want to be in the office until 10pm every evening. When it comes to work-life balance, why should the “life” bit only apply to parents? Surely what non-parents do in their spare time is every bit as important to them as what parents do? Well, yes, of course it should be. Yet time and time again when someone flies out the door to collect the kids, a childless counterpart is left picking up the slack. Does this make mothers less employable? Probably. But bar hiring round-the-clock childcare, there really is very little they can do about it. So who should be compromising? The woman who can’t, or the woman who shouldn’t have to?
While this survey was conducted in 2011, I really doubt that if it were done today the findings would be any more positive. This is a sobering thought but then of course, there are many ways that women’s life choices can cause conflict even between mothers themselves. The way we feed our babies, the schools we choose, whether we let them use technology or whether instead we sit and do arts and crafts for hours – and that’s all before we tackle the “staying at home” versus “working outside the home” debate. In fact there are so many ways that we can give each other a hard time, I’ve often felt that it must be quite hard for men to get a look in.
In my new novel, The Fallout, I try to tackle all these kinds of conflicts and more. Mary feels hard done by as the bank doesn’t seem to value her personal life as much as the personal life of Olivia, a working mother of three. Kate has just come back to work after taking time off to have her children and wants to get back on the career ladder again only to find that Leona, her manager, is really not so keen on a working mother joining the team. Throw in a very reluctant stay at home dad and the toxic environment of 2011 corporate Dublin and it’s really hard to see how it could possibly end well for anyone.
In the stressful years that followed the banking crisis, ordinary decent people found themselves under horrific pressure in their places of work. Those that didn’t lose their jobs found themselves working longer and longer hours, often for a lot less money, in order to keep from being the next employee to face the axe. And managers under that kind of pressure don’t always make the right kind of decisions, poor decisions lead to conflict, and the repercussions of workplace conflict often reverberate far beyond the office walls.
Which brings us to the tagline of The Fallout: “It’s time to take sides”. An easy line to pick because invariably that’s what we all do in any kind of argument. Pick a side we can relate to and jump on in. We do this because it takes time to look at all sides in a dispute. It’s much easier to dismiss the fact that in most situations there is no villain, just someone who is trying to do their best, albeit sometimes badly. It takes time to assess everyone’s intentions, time and empathy and an understanding of the fact that there are often several sides to a story.
In the kind of workplace conflict I write about in The Fallout, no solution was ever going to be black or white, but maybe a delicate blend of hues that would probably require a compromise on all sides and above all, the acceptance by the powers that be that everyone’s time is precious and all life choices should be respected and catered for within reason.
So maybe the next time we find ourselves in conflict with another woman, another colleague or another mother, instead of taking sides, it might be an idea to take time to look at the bigger picture, and well, just try to get along…
The Fallout by Margaret Scott is published by Poolbeg Press
