Having a baby shouldn't be a career-killer
For mums on the fence, a common fear is the impact on their work – the stress of juggling pregnancy/a newborn/a toddler with a demanding job. Over dinner with friends the other evening, the only mum-of-two at the table matter-of-factly validated these worries. The juggle might just about be manageable with one. It isn't with two.
It's too late for me to stew on that one, because I'm due to have a second baby any day now. There's enough on my mind without thinking about my career imploding like an overflowing nappy. But the politicians around the world urging people to have more babies as fertility rates plunge would benefit from earwigging in on some of these conversations.
There's a clear concern among working women in their mid-to-late thirties that having another means everything they've worked hard at for the last two decades could unravel. As the mum of a toddler asks on Reddit: 'How do career-focused mums have more than one kid without cracking up?'
For someone who is about to have a second, the answers make for grim reading. 'I cracked,' reads the top answer. 'Cracked here, too,' goes another. 'We are DYING. Dying I say,' reads a third. Oh dear. The only respondents who seemed ok said they had bucket loads of help.
Intellectually, we all know that having kids is a poor career move. That's at least the case for women, not men – research points to a 'motherhood penalty' versus a 'fatherhood bonus' when it comes to earnings post-kids and anecdotally, that's exactly what I see happening.
As women have children later, the enormous life transition of starting a family tends to coincide with a more senior footing at work. The issue isn't necessarily the lack of flexible working options, which have grown substantially in recent years as more people cut their days or work from home, but an unofficial writing off of those who take these options up.
Mums talk about feeling sidelined and having their confidence destroyed, something we rarely hear from new dads. Many careers never recover, especially for those forced to drop out of the workforce for a few years because of the extortionate cost of childcare.
But this isn't rocket science. It shouldn't be unusual for senior women who want to spend more time at home to job-share, even if just for those crucial early years, or for parents to be able to do a school or nursery pick-up and then log in from home later without feeling like they're being a huge burden.
One idea, which I've been told has been pitched to some government officials, is to give businesses tax breaks for encouraging four-day weeks for 90pc pay to new parents for a certain period of time, the aim being to break any taboo over asking. Our current culture makes parents (mums and dads) feel like they could offend their bosses or won't be considered serious about work if they dare acknowledge that they want to spend more time with their children.
In some sectors, the career damage is done at the first sign of a baby bump. Around 74,000 women a year lose their jobs for getting pregnant or for taking maternity leave in the UK – a 37pc increase from 54,000 in 2016, according to the charity Pregnant Then Screwed.
A third of women polled also said they were sidelined or demoted whilst pregnant, on maternity leave, or when they returned from maternity leave. With our culture having such a hostile attitude to working mothers, and the UK having some of the most expensive childcare in the world, it's no wonder that the fertility rate has crashed from a peak of 2.42 children per woman around a generation ago to an average of 1.44 children now. Economists pay close attention to this figure because a country requires a fertility rate of 2.1 to maintain its population size. A population with more deaths than births brings big problems.
There is another reality where having a child, or going from one to two or two to three, doesn't mean a complete reset on a woman's working life. But getting there will require radical cultural change. Although we shouldn't overlook the fact that the global drop in fertility is linked to better education and work opportunities for women, many still feel that they can't have more children because the system is stacked against them.
Paula Sheppard, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, believes the UK has a fertility gap of around 0.3 children – meaning that for every three children wanted, only two are born. It's stressful enough trying to juggle an inflexible job with one child, let alone two or three. Parents don't want to miss out on these crucial early years because of work.
There's a 'c'est la vie' counterargument here that nobody can have it all – we all have to make decisions and sacrifices in life, and having children is a huge blessing and responsibility.
But mums aren't asking for special treatment – most are happy to accept that fewer hours means less pay, they just don't want to be shoved aside for the rest of their careers because for a few years, they need some extra flexibility to cope emotionally and financially.
It's a waste to let talented new mums either drop out of the workforce or feel unable to have more kids if they want to, just because work is so unaccommodating for this brief, highly intense period of life. If workers could one day be forced to wait until as late as 80 to draw their state pension (the state pension age is set to rise to 68 by 2048, but is now under review), then what we are fussing over here is just a tiny fraction of a working life.
Working life should be able to ebb and flow with big life transitions better than it does now. Labour is telling us all to have more children, but there are fundamental cultural issues to tackle first. I suspect I'll have more ideas in a few months.
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