The Fear of Slower Progression or Being Overlooked After Children
Time to read: 5-6 mins
My career path has been a varied one; I’ve worked in the corporate world, been an entrepreneur and also worked in a freelance capacity and all of these I’ve done as a working mum, perhaps not totally on purpose, but it’s given me great experience and I can tell you first-hand that all of these various working styles have been difficult as a mother.
Let’s start at the beginning, when I was interviewing for a corporate job with the full knowledge that we were trying for a baby, that hopefully if we were lucky enough, I could be pregnant within the first year of starting out at a new company. Practically, I needed to know about the maternity package at this company and although everything in my educated, empowered, feminist brain told me to ask HR and that they couldn’t discriminate against me if I did, I resisted, worried that they wouldn’t ‘take me seriously’ and that it might ruin my chances of getting said job. The fact that I felt I couldn’t ask still pains me to this day but if you are part of an interviewing panel at work, please make sure this information is readily available to employees. This example is from one of the largest and most successful companies in the world, not a small family run business that might not have come across this before.
I got the job and after a few months it was very clear I was being prepped to take over my boss’s job as the Country Lead. Since it was covid and work was fully remote I could hide the fact that we did indeed manage to get pregnant just a few short months after I started. About 7 months into my role and 4 months into the pregnancy I told my boss I was expecting. Whilst they were supportive and congratulatory about it, all conversations of the next role were removed almost instantly. Again, this is a huge company and one who regards themselves very highly for diversity and inclusion. I couldn’t help but feel so angry and cross about what had happened. Looking back, I wasn’t right for the Country Lead role and they bought in somebody else who was more qualified but why the step change when I announced my pregnancy? Why didn’t they explain any gaps in my skillset before I told them my news? Perhaps unfortunate timing but there was a strong gut feeling that wasn’t quite it…
I spoke to a few close friends to see if they had ever experienced anything similar. One of my best friends said the reason she hadn’t gone for a promotion at her job as a fashion producer was because she was having IVF and hoped to become pregnant soon, that despite being overqualified she knew the job above would require too much for her mentally and physically through IVF, pregnancy and eventually motherhood.
Another friend divulged to me that when she told her boss she was pregnant that she wasn’t surprised in the slightest because her previous boss had written into her reference that she once expressed she would like a family so to ‘be aware’. Highly illegal and extremely unprofessional.
Now it’s true that I did in the past, use being childless to my advantage at work. I could outwork almost anyone, in the evenings, on weekends and we even upped sticks to relocate to a new country for work (not that you can’t do this with children but it’s certainly easier without). And it paid off, Greg and I both promoted time and time again.
Now that we have a child our working days are limited. Even with full time childcare the mornings are frantic and chaotic. Once spent working out, meditating, or putting together an amazing work look, now we arrive at work having been up for hours prior, feeling (and looking) slightly worse for wear. And we can’t start until we’ve dropped our child to nursery, so all of our child free colleagues are miles ahead of us from the moment we begin our working day.
During the day we often need to pop out of meetings to take calls from the nursery then profusely apologise on returning to the room, once again feeling like they don’t think we ‘take our job seriously’ because we’ve taken the call in an important meeting despite the fact that our heart drops and our anxiety spikes whenever we see that nursery number flash up on our phones.
Then there’s the dropping off a meeting ‘early’ to do the nursery pick up. Again, raging guilt even though the meeting has run over and could have kept time if the fools at the beginning of the meeting hadn’t spent 10 minutes making small talk about the weather.
A close friend and extremely well accomplished businesswoman and partner at her firm recently divulged that she hates the fact she can’t put her child to bed every week night but that after a few months of the other partners in her firm revisiting ideas that she had heard nothing about, that she made arrangements to go to the pub once or twice a week with them after work as in their words ‘ this is where they came up with some of their best ideas’.
I’ve found myself struggling to keep up with these demands and thinking often of Amy Westervelt’s working mom dilemma,
“We expect women to work like they don’t have children, and raise children as if they don’t work”
I’ve often wished that I was content with being a full-time mum or on the contrary that I was still working all hours of the day and didn’t miss my child or want to put them to bed. I highly suspect that if you’re reading this then like me, you fall somewhere in between.
In the last year or so I’ve become really interested in the philosophy of going above and beyond at work or what some companies might call going the extra mile. This was a minimum requirement at my last corporate job – daily they would use the line that employees were constantly raising the bar, it’s how they kept their competitive edge but also meant that employees found it harder and harder to get promoted, to get a pay-rise, to take time off, to do anything that wasn’t somehow bettering themselves or their work because the bar was constantly raising around them. As a juxtaposition to this philosophy, I started to do a lot of research around quiet quitting and its negative connotations but do you know that quiet quitting is simply the idea of the employee completing their job’s tasks without going the extra mile? I got a bit worried that perhaps this is all I could manage in my first few years of parenthood.
I used to be inherently against this idea, in fact I remember sitting around our kitchen table and talking to Greg about how I thought that some of our once seemingly ambitious friends had moved out to the suburbs to have children and were coasting at work. I remember saying that I never wanted to be like that, that I was petrified of slowing down after children and being adamant that we would keep striving and racing to the top despite children. I just had no idea of everything going on behind the scenes.
While I don’t want to stop striving, I’ve seen first-hand how it’s just not possible to operate at the same pace at work after having children. You need to be more creative about how and where you spend your time. And we only have ONE child with all the luxury of good childcare.
Greg’s response
Where do I start responding to this! Firstly I feel like a dick for my lack of empathy to colleagues managing work and childcare. I was that guy who would sleep 8 hours, get up at 6am and run for an hour, hit the desk at 8am and wonder why they didn't have my ‘energy’. Now I regularly watch 2 hours of Paw Patrol before work, I get it!
I feel guilty too, to the extent that I wanted to take action and took a 5 month Paternity Leave from my corporate FTSE100 global company (read more here). The response; I was applauded and promoted, the irony! I was misunderstood too, especially by other male leaders who didn't get or take the opportunity to do it and sacrificed too much. But all of that is irrelevant to the understanding I now have. I had those in-built unconscious bias’ (can you promote a heavily pregnant leader?) which are now so obviously wrong, without my pat leave or Zoe I wouldn't have been able to accept this and change.
My role as an ally to work parents now is crystal clear - listen, support and aid the transition back. Parents who make some of the best leaders, because when supported they can juggle more priorities, delegate and empower others greater and have the perspective that companies need. That's the leadership every company needs. It's a great advantage if you can see it through the new perspective Zoe outlines above.
TAKEAWAYS:
Double down on your top skills and go HARD for them at work. Delegate anything you can that falls outside of this. You don’t have time or mental capacity to be a great all-rounder anymore. Sad but true and the sooner you admit that you can lean into your strengths and then promote that with your team so that they know your exact value.
Do your work as soon as you can, whenever you can. Gone are the days you finish off a presentation an hour or so before. That hour or so before might come after a sleepless night or be taken up looking after a sick child. Don’t rely on your free time tomorrow anymore.
This one is hard to do but do NOT apologise for leaving on time, not being able to come in on your delegated WFH day etc. You’ve agreed to these things with your boss, and they are breaking your deal, not the other way around. At the end of the day everyone has to do what is best for themselves and their families.
