What do mothers do?
Looking at the careers of women who have dependent aged children, we see that it splits fairly neatly into three equal groups: those who are not working, those working part time, and those working full time. Some women go back to work full time after their first child, but opt for part time or lower level jobs after their second or third child comes along. The proportions shift a bit as the children get older, with a drift towards work: by the time the children are 16-18, about a third still work part time, but the proportion full time is greater and the proportion not working is smaller.
Incidentally, the proportion of fathers not working is tiny and just 6% work part time, and most of the reasons cited for men working part time are not to do with children (they are more likely to take a career break or go part time due to ill-health, or because they want a career change). Fathers do, however, often request to take advantage of flexible working practices - so are likely to work eg later days so that they can, for example, drop the kids at childcare, or work from home on Fridays to pick up from school.
There are four common options, with women making choices about the nature of their occupation and industry, and their conditions or mode of working - whether part time, full time or freelance.
Occupation
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same
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different
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Mode
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same
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Same
job, same mode:
going back to work exactly like before
This almost always happens straight away. If ties with an organisation are severed then women rarely return to their old role (only 5% after a career break). Mothers are more likely to do this after the first than after subsequent children.
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Whole new
career:
full time
Often a shift to a more values-driven career, or a more traditionally female occupation. These choices are often made after a career break and women can find it hard to identify and chose options. Sometimes women start part time and build up their hours gradually.
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different
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Same
job, different mode:
going back to work part on different hours; job
sharing; going freelance
Working part time is the no.1 choice of mothers, but it's not always feasible. Self-employment is an option that allows women control over their working conditions but still gives them status and earning potential.
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New
family friendly career:
A new career that can fit with your new family
Many women choose lower grade jobs and opt for jobs in (eg) education where flexible hours are more accepted.
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The proportions of women going back into the same job, same conditions, are particularly small after a career break (ie anything longer than their maternity leave), and this small number reflects both what they want to do and what they actually do (around 5% of professional women). And cutting ties with your pre-maternity organisation makes this particularly difficult. A large proportion of women (61%) are interested in changing industries altogether. (Lovejoy & Stone, 2012).
Career breaks for women incur penalties, (as far as objective career success is concerned). Women very often find that they go back to jobs which are lower level or lower paid and are more likely to work for smaller organisations. They incur a wage penalty which increases with the length of the career break, (at 3 years out of work stands at about 37%) and which never goes away, even 25 years after the career interruption women are earning less than they would have been had they not interrupted their careers (Reitman & Schneer, 2005). Another shift that is often seen is that women after a career break revert to more traditionally female occupations, retraining in education or moving into not for profit roles (Hewett et al., 2005). The reasons cited for this are that their values sometimes shift whilst they are at home, and they want to 'give something back', or that they they are looking for part time work which is more often available in traditionally female spheres. In McGrath et al.'s study of professional and managerial women, 83% took a lower level job after a career break. Women who work in these kinds of roles or industries before children are more likely to stick with their previous occupations than those whose careers started in traditionally masculine jobs. Self-employment is another trend that we see, as women find that this is a good route to a career that fits around their families and makes them feel that their skills and experience are valued (McKie, 2013).
Why do mothers make these choices?
Women who leave their previous jobs usually do so for a combination of reasons, including push factors (reasons to leave their jobs) and pull factors (reasons to be at home). Spending time with their children tends to be at the top of the list, but it is rarely the only factor. The relative importance of push and full factors seems to vary from industry to industry, with those in business citing push factors more often than those in the public or service industries (Hewlett et al., 2005). The women who carve out a successful re-entry to work after maternity leave or a career break tend to be those who have a) a supportive employer (in terms of their boss, organisational policies and organisational culture) b) a supportive home arrangement, with a partner or other family members who contribute to childcare and domestic chores and c) appropriate childcare facilities.
Women who go back do so because they are looking for the intellectual challenge and the company of good colleagues, and for intrinsic interest in their work. They are also keen on the money, whether to contribute to the family finances overall, or because they are keen to have the independence associated with their own income (McGrath et al., 2005)
It interests me that the role of the dads in the families is rarely mentioned in women's narratives about their choices. Fathers are discussed mostly in the context of the need for women to find jobs that allow their husbands to continue unchecked in their work, and will ensure that the women are able to take responsibility for most of the domestic chores (Stone & Lovejoy, 2004). I think a fuller exploration of this would be great, if anyone is looking for a new research project!
How does it work for the women?
The process of giving up work seems to be quite hard for women and many of them hang on to their professional identity even years after they were last in the workplace. Women don't usually anticipate an identity crisis, but they are often giving up a hard won, high status identity that they have inhabited for some years, so this grieving process is perhaps to be expected.
Kanji & Cahusc (2015) looked at women's experiences of identity, and identified 4 stages that women go through during their career breaks.
Stage 1: identity is under threat at work. This can happen during pregnancy, as women find they are marginalised, miss out on important meetings because of medical appointments and feel guilty for not pulling their weight. But it also happens when women return to work after maternity leave as, for example, they can't join colleagues in the pub after work as they have to rush back for school pick up.
Stage 2: Making sense of identity at home. Once they have decided to take the plunge, women then need to start to come to terms with their new identity as a stay at home mum, which often takes time and involves some to-ing and fro-ing as they keep their work identity alive through freelance or temporary bits of work. This stage can be hard as it involves a loss of identity.
Stage 3: Creating a new identity while at home. In this stage women become more involved in their local community and develop, justify and defend a new home and community based identity. They may get more involved at school, and engage in collective sense making with other mothers in the same position.
Stage 4: Springboard for action. Having made their peace with the loss of their previous work identity, they are in a position to consider something new. Alongside this can be a period of uncertainty as women try to work out what kind of options are open to them and to decide what to do next.
The vast majority of women want to and intend to go back to work, but totally underestimate how hard it is going to be (Hewlett et al., 2005). They can feel very positive about the career break itself but as soon as they start to engage with the process of re-entry, they find that they are unprepared for the barriers they will face (McGrath et al., 2005). Women often imagine that their education and experience will be enough to keep them employable, even after a career break, and are surprised with the challenges they face. This can be significantly disappointing and dispiriting for women.
The challenges include:
1. Changes in the work place, as technology and regulations have moved on and mergers have resulted in a new industry landscape. This links to the idea of human capital, which is the sum of the knowledge, skills and experiences that an individual has which they can operationalise to help their career development. There is a perception (held by women themselves and by employers) that human capital will gradually erode during a career break. This may be true to some degree, in that there are technological and regulatory changes which women may need to catch up with, but this probably has more impact on women's confidence (and employers' perceptions) that it warrants.
2. Personal changes, as women's networks have become dormant, their confidence is eroded and they have limited support at home. One of the challenges here is that families get used to a new normal, as the family adjusts to living on one wage (so the second wage isn't given the weight of the first one) and domestic chores become set as the responsibility of the mother.
3. Hiring managers, who have no understanding of the challenges facing working mothers and have no real appreciation of their assets. Women's career capital has been shown to take a knock from the moment they become pregnant, with employers assuming that they are less committed to work (Woolhough & Redshaw, 2016), despite evidence (Ruderman, 2002) that time at home with children makes women more effective workers (with better interpersonal skills, psychological resources, leadership ability, and time management skills). Women can also find themselves in a double bind in that they can't get senior jobs as their experience is not rated, but they also can't get junior jobs as they are so overqualified. Women emerging from longer career breaks too can face the added challenges of age-related discrimination.
Is this good enough?
My mother's generation felt that they had no choice. Social pressures dictated that they should stay at home and any job needed to be part time and secondary both to their husband's career and to their roles as wives and mothers. These days there are at least different options open to women. But despite significant changes in policy and legislation, women still have to compromise. It's a process of trade-offs, and although women do have a choice, every option has its price. The options on offer are often not the options that women want, but they reconcile themselves to their losses and compromises over time (Kanji & Cahusac, 2015). Women, generally, want to work, and want to work part time, in interesting, challenging and well paid roles. But for a combination of reasons (social and individual pressure, discrimination, childcare, economics) they can't, and then they have to make sense of it. Women find the decision to leave work hard (Lovejoy & Stone, 2012) and it takes a long time to make and to reconcile (Kanji & Cahusac, 2015).
The changes in policy and legislation don't seem to have had the impact we hoped: the 'ideal worker' is still basically a man, with the ability to work long hours and travel if needed and total commitment to his role. New policies have been drawn up and legislation supports equality, but culture hasn't moved on: mothers are still assumed to be less committed and capable at work than fathers, and women find that they are stigmatized for taking advantage of family-friendly working policies (Stone & Hernandez, 2013).
Theory and rhetoric
The literature which discusses the 'opt-out revolution' (coined in 2003 by Belkin to describe the decision of professional women to give up work), frames mother's career trajectories as the result of choice. These are privileged women, married to wealthy men, and they are in control of their own professional destinies. Career theories too which have been used to help explain women's choices suggest that they are a reflection of women's choices and an expression of their agency. But the studies that I read have portrayed women more as dealing with compromises and trade-offs, making the best of and making sense of the options that are available to them.
A number of career theories have been proposed to help explain the process. The Boundaryless and Protean career models have both been applied to explain women's non-linear career paths. Although neither of these models was developed with women's career paths in mind, they do reflect women's choices to some degree, although the implication for both models is that this approach is one which people aspire to, choose and enjoy, whereas, as we have identified, women tend to see this as more of a forced compromise rather than their ideal approach.
Catherine Hakim's preference theory (2004) suggests that women have natural preferences either towards the family, towards work or towards a hybrid of both and her theory implies that women can get what they want. Women work part time because they want to and they leave the workplace because that meets their personal needs. But actually, the research quoted above offers an alternative perspective. Stone and Lovejoy (2004) found that 90% of the women on careers breaks they studied were ambivalent about their choice to leave the workplace. The 'choice rhetoric' (Williams, 2000), that women's behaviour is all down to women's preferences lets everyone else off the hook. Yes, women have preferences, but they are not always free to enact them.
Proposed by Mainiero and Sullivan (2005) as an alternative explanation to the opt-out revolution, the Kaleidoscope Career Model explains women's career paths in terms of drivers. The model doesn't quite challenge the choice rhetoric, but it does offer an insight to the complexities of some of the decisions. The authors suggest that women are driven, throughout their working lives by three goals: challenge (career ambition and the impetus to learn, develop and succeed), balance (the desire that work should allow them to balance the various aspects of their lives of the roles they fulfill) and authenticity (the need to find meaning through work). The authors suggest that all three drivers will be present throughout a career path, but that one may take centre stage at any one time. And for women who (the authors argue) are essentially relational, the need for balance dominates during their mid-career stage, when they have dependent children and ambitious husbands to support.
One final comment is that much of the contemporary and feminist literature rages against the system which makes women less likely to achieve career success in objective terms, measured by promotion and pay. There is much less written about the subjective career success of women and perhaps we need to reconsider how we measure success in these debates. I have struggled to find much literature which focuses on the job satisfaction of working mothers, although there is plenty of evidence that women, in general are more satisfied in work than men, and part time women are more satisfied at work than full time women (Zou, 2016). The reasons put forward to explain women's higher job satisfaction despite their lower opportunities for objective success are many and varied, but one suggestion is that women are more likely to feel able to leave unsatisfying jobs than men are. Perhaps, however unsatisfactory women find their options, men find theirs worse, and limiting our discussions to the narrow outcomes of salary and seniority are unhelpful. Ranson (2012) points out that we don't have a need for the expression 'working fathers', because the notion of working is integral to the notion of fatherhood. Fathers are expected to be the family breadwinner, and perhaps they find this constraint as challenging as women find theirs. But I think I might leave that exploration for another time.
Focusing back on mothers then, the key points are that women struggle with their choices because the options available to them are not the options they want: everything is a compromise. The reasons behind this are complex, with societal and individual pressures leading women (and perhaps their partners) to feel that they need to engage in 'intensive mothering' (Hays, 1996), and discriminatory cultures at work which lower mother's status in the work place and fail to accommodate family needs. Clearly women's opportunities in the workplace are dramatically different and better than they were a generation or two ago. But we're not there yet and it is important to keep the discussions going.
References
Hakim, C. (2006). Women, careers, and work-life preferences. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 34(3), 279-294.
Hewlett, S. A., Luce, C. B., Shiller, P., & Southwell, S. (2005). The hidden brain drain: Off-ramps and on-ramps in women's careers. Harvard Business School Press.
Kanji, S., & Cahusac, E. (2015). Who am I? Mothers’ shifting identities, loss and sensemaking after workplace exit. human relations, 68(9), 1415-1436.
Lovejoy, M., & Stone, P. (2012). Opting back in: The influence of time at home on professional women's career redirection after opting out. Gender, Work & Organization, 19(6), 631-653.
McGrath, M., Driscoll, M., & Gross, M. (2005). Back in the Game. Wharton Center for Leadership and Change, Pennsylvania, PA.
McKie, L., Biese, I., & Jyrkinen, M. (2013). ‘The best time is now!’: The temporal and spatial dynamics of women opting in to self‐employment. Gender, Work & Organization, 20(2), 184-196.
Ranson, G. (2012). Men, paid employment and family responsibilities: Conceptualizing the ‘working father’. Gender, Work & Organization, 19(6), 741-761.
Reitman, F., & Schneer, J. A. (2005). The long-term negative impacts of managerial career interruptions: A longitudinal study of men and women MBAs. Group & Organization Management, 30(3), 243-262.
Stone, P., & Hernandez, L. A. (2013). The all‐or‐nothing workplace: Flexibility stigma and “opting out” among professional‐managerial women. Journal of Social Issues, 69(2), 235-256.
Williams, J. (2000). From difference to dominance to domesticity: care as work, gender as tradition. Chi.-Kent L. Rev., 76, 1441.
Woolnough, H., & Redshaw, J. (2016). The career decisions of professional women with dependent children: What’s changed?. Gender in Management: an international journal, 31(4), 297-311.
Zou, M. (2015). Gender, work orientations and job satisfaction. Work, employment and society, 29(1), 3-22.
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