Having it all. Or not?

My baby turned one recently. I officially have a toddler! This milestone has been the cause of much reflection for me. My daughter’s first birthday means I have been a mum for a year, and out of full time employment for a little longer.

As I start to reenter the workforce there’s no doubt my perspective on life has shifted. I remember wondering before I had my daughter how parenthood would affect my attitude towards my work. Would I prefer being at home with my child to being in paid employment outside the home? Or would I be desperate to get back into the workplace? Having spent my career watching women make a range of choices about the role of paid employment in their life after having kids, I was genuinely curious to see what I would want to do.

What I have since realised is that for me personally, I still love working as an Organisational Psychologist and want to continue to do so. I also really love being a mum, so need to find the right balance of the two.

However, the reality is that despite all the progress countries have made on women’s participation in the workforce, dual career couples still face many hurdles in order to make a life in which both parents work outside the home manageable and enjoyable.

Working in a country that has paid parental leave provisions (although New Zealand ranks very poorly on this front compared to other wealthy nations ) and being able to choose how much paid work I do after having kids is certainly an enormous luxury that many don’t have access to. As is access to affordable childcare.

But many of the barriers are much less tangible. For example, the willingness of organisations to adopt working practices that enable both men and women to achieve a work life balance. That doesn’t mean writing a flexible working policy and then wiping their hands clean. It means grappling with the range of factors needed to make work life balance achievable for staff - for example the cultural change required to enable flexible working to be easily adopted, or changes to organisational or job design to reduce workloads and the need for long hours.

And then there are the attitudes of leaders. I have a very clear memory of a senior leader once saying to me

“there are so many young women with great leadership potential in this organisation, but they all want to go off and have families”.

He never considered the double standard he was setting by not saying anything similar about men, or the assumptions he was making about what having a family meant for women’s career aspirations.

As this HBR article highlights, recent research has in fact concluded:

Women weren’t held back because of trouble balancing the competing demands of work and family—men, too, suffered from the balance problem and nevertheless advanced. Women were held back because, unlike men, they were encouraged to take accommodations, such as going part-time and shifting to internally facing roles, which derailed their careers. The real culprit was a general culture of overwork that hurt both men and women and locked gender inequality in place.

The societal shifts required to enable families to make genuine choices about how they achieve the right balance between work and family are huge. The reality remains that women tend to take on far more of the work in the home than men - and of the families I have spent my days with since going on parental leave, 95% have Dads that work full time in paid employment and Mums who, if they do work outside the home, tend to do so on a part-time basis. It doesn’t help that in many countries, including New Zealand, the paid parental leave provisions very much support a model in which one partner stays home and other very quickly goes back to work. And it certainly doesn’t help that organisations assume men will continue to work as much as they did before having kids, and women won’t.

So with all of this in mind, it’s no surprise that most families tend to adhere to more typical gender roles when it comes to work in the home and outside it. It is simply the easier option - even if it’s not the best option for a particular family.

While Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In has had mixed support in recent years, one of her key points has always stuck with me - we are not ever going to achieve gender equality if we don’t seek to achieve that equality both in the workplace and at home. Expecting that women can work more outside the home and men can work just as much and our home lives will continue to run smoothly is simply impossible. Society needs to become much more comfortable with men taking on more responsibility inside the home and doing less in the workplace when that is what a particular family choose to do. And we need to stop this trend of ridiculously high expectations of work hours. Only then will women be able to stop having to make career sacrifices and men family sacrifices.

So what can you do to support better gender balance?

If you’re in a leadership role, consider to what extent your working practices allow staff, both male and female, to work while also spending time with their families. While flexible working should be offered, don’t assume it is the only solution (and if it is taken up, make sure you really support it - I know far too many women who are paid to work 4 days a week but end up working full time hours anyway). Perhaps there are other steps you can take like reducing workloads and expectations around long hours.

And please, don’t assume that only men can be both ambitious at work and want a family. And that only women want time at home with their kids.

There is no one size fits all approach to balancing work and family life - but choices will only become genuine ones when societal, organisational, and family norms change. And we all need to do our bit to make that happen. I will certainly be doing everything I can to ensure my daughter faces fewer hurdles than me if she chooses to have kids of her own whilst pursuing a career.