For parents, getting the work-life balance right is an ongoing as well as a universal problem
ANNE-MARIE Slaughter’s recent article in The Atlantic about leaving a high-powered job in the Obama administration to spend more time with her children attracted more than a million readers for a reason.
She may have a far more high-flying career than most women reading it but her problems are similar: how to get the work-life balance right.
Yet Breda O’Brien (Why the dream of having it all is an impossibility, July 28th) brands her as being “unrepresentative” for ignoring women who choose to become full-time mothers. O’Brien figures that Slaughter will “annoy the many Irish women who are not career-focused but feel they have to work just to survive financially”.
Does she think they will be annoyed because women, whether they are career-focused or not, don’t want to be reminded of the difficulties of dividing their time between work and family and don’t want these problems addressed?
Or maybe she is suggesting that the battle between the two spheres of life is unwinnable and women should just throw in the towel and get back into the home?
Her comment on the need for a “radical redefinition of success” based on achieving “a humane and fulfilling life” has a particular bitterness for women struggling with work and family. Is she suggesting that if you work outside the home while raising a family you won’t have a humane or fulfilling life?
Women who choose to work full-time in the home should be supported in their choice. But most women can’t do this or don’t want to. The fact that the majority of graduates from Irish universities are women indicates that most don’t just go to work because they have to pay the bills. They want a meaningful career that will test their talents and skills.
Many of the bright young women leaving education will achieve this and will rise up the ladder of their profession in their 20s and early 30s expecting the sky to be the limit for their career.
But once they start a family, often in their mid-30s, they will begin to question the mantra that has been put out that you can have it all as the struggles to maintain the demands of work conflict with the needs of the home. They will often have to make sacrifices in both spheres.
But while mothers will indeed develop “the bone-deep desire”, as O’Brien puts it, to spend time with their children, most will also want to maintain their work outside the home. The question is whether the workplace and men’s attitudes make it too hard for women to do so.
Slaughter describes the “time macho” culture of workplaces, which emphasises the hours spent in an office rather than what you are actually achieving while there. Proposals by the HSE last week to get staff to work two extra hours a week and scrap flexitime arrangements show that this culture is alive and well in Ireland.
Slaughter suggests tackling the default male behaviour of workplaces where family is rarely spoken about or taken into account.
I think we need to go one step further and incentivise men into also making sacrifices by playing an active role in child-rearing. Some European countries give fathers the option of sharing leave with mothers after the birth of a baby. In Sweden they are given two months leave which cannot be used by the mother.
If men as well as women were taking time out to spend with children, workplaces would become better attuned to the needs of parents. It would mean women, and some men, who take time off would be less likely to risk being sidelined in their jobs.
I realise this idea will be laughable for Irish fathers who are not even allowed one day’s paternity leave under the law. But not encouraging or facilitating fathers is doing no one any good – men or women.
This issue should not just be the concern of professional women who aspire to stellar careers. Failing to address it is threatening our future.
Fertility rates across developed countries are low; in the EU no country currently hits the replacement level of 2.1 children born per female. Ireland at 2.04 children per female (2011 figures) has the highest fertility rate across the EU but it may only be a matter of time before Irish women in numbers follow their sisters in other countries in choosing a child-free life and career over a life plagued with struggle and guilt.
These women are being attacked for being selfish but who can blame them when society makes it so hard to reconcile being a mother and an employee?
JUDITH CROSBIEis an Irish Times journalist