I am supposed to be wrapping up the second chapter on Mothers Work so I can send it off to the publishers on Wednesday (via a very nice friend who’s an author with this particular house and by golly I’m praying they give me a break) but I’ve been distracted by all the posts in response to Lucy Cavendish’s article in yesterday’s Guardian, “Motherhood – Stay at home or back to work.”
I blame anxiety for all the bitchiness that Lucy reports, although I’ve not come across it (bitchiness) myself.
The Sainsbury’s man brings 8kg carrots as part of your weekly shopping delivery as opposed to the 8 you though you’d ordered. What do you do? It depends what kind of mother you are. As a half reformed perfectionist I firstly went to check who’s mistake it was (mine) and then let go of the idea of making best use of all the carrots (carrot soup, carrot cake, roast carrots, carrot pate). I saw the funny side, went off to twitter about needing to find a ravenous rabbit and then handed out bags of carrots to other parents at nursery whose days were no doubt brightened by the daftness of another frazzled parent. (Talking of frazzled parents I got my G.E.M. message onto p18 of April’s Prima Baby as a way to comabt the ‘fed-up and frazzled’ feelings so may mothers experience on an ongoing basis).
I didn’t get time to fit the carrot story in at The Vitality Show on Friday, although I shared plenty of other stories about what it is to be a G.E.M. because I truly believe that when you work and combine a young family you have to let some stuff slide. We have to go for ‘good enough’ with a lot of stuff and as I said on Friday ‘boll*cks to perfectionism’. I was astounded by the number of women in the audience who said they iron t-towels, bed linen and their kids clothes. Noooooooooooooo! What are you doing? Life’s too short and anyway, our kids trooping off to school in crumpled clothes surely comands respect from other mothers (a salute even?) as they nod away thinking ‘yes, another woman who’s got better things to do than priortise the crsipness of their kids!
Ambitious women, overqualified in underpaid jobs
Women are as ambitious as men when it comes to their career. Just as men they find a decent salary and reward opportunities the most important career drivers. Having children does not influence these priorities. Yet working women too often are overqualified for the work they do, whereas men are not. This means that there is a lot of potential on the labour market that remains untapped because women are frustrated in their career ambitions. This picture emerges from an international comparison of the factors influencing women’s decisions to work, involving 43 countries. The picture becomes worse still, since working mothers on the whole are paid less than working women without children. The burden of household and child care in combination with being underpaid for the work they do, puts working mothers in a dead-end street.
These findings are based on a sample of 345,000 data collected by WageIndicator online surveys in 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 in those 43 countries. The data was analyzed by Income Data Services, the British research partner of WageIndicator, on behalf of ITUC, the International Trade Union Confederation. The results are published on March 8, international women’s day.
