Women's Work

How Mothers Manage Flexible Working in Careers and Family Life

Young, Zoe

• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781529202069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What's it really like to be a mother with a career working flexibly? Drawing on over 100 hours of interview data, this book is the first to go inside women's work and family lives in a year of working flexibly. The private labours of going part-time, job sharing, and home working are brought to life with vivid personal stories. Taking a sociological and feminist perspective, it explores contemporary motherhood, work-life balance, emotional work in families, couples and housework, maternity transitions, interactions with employers, work design and workplace cultures, and employment policies. It concludes that there is an opportunity to make employment and family life work better together and offers unique insights from women's lived experiences on how to do it.

1

Women in the Middle

Emma’s story

Emma progressed quickly during the first ten years of her career, faster than her husband had in the same profession, but right now she feels that her career has plateaued and his is taking off. They both work full-time and always have. They have three children aged 2, 6 and 8 and depend on a combination of school, after-school clubs, a nursery and her recently retired mother’s support to make time available for their work. Emma is about to cut her paid working hours and work from home a little more, and it is this employment adjustment that is the focus of the research explored in this book. Emma talks about why she is transitioning to a flexible working arrangement, and what she sees as having influenced her decision. She talks about how her role in the family and her relationship with her husband influence her career opportunities and choices, and what it feels like to combine a professional job with motherhood on a daily basis. Extracts from the first of three interviews with Emma in one year illustrate the central themes of this book:

“It’s not that I want one or the other [family or work], I want both … If it was just me making decisions about me, on my own, it would be so much simpler, but my decisions to make about my career come in the context of this incredibly complex network of logistical, emotional, practical, lifestyle and ideological issues for each one of us.”

“Having three small people’s lives in my head all the time is mentally taxing. The day-to-day grind of family life, you know? … It was like someone had let the air out of the balloon. I very much felt it happen to me consciously I thought ‘I can’t do this any more’. The momentum just wasn’t there. Something had to give.”

“My career has been plateauing anyway. I mean, I do what I need to but I can’t do more, and doing more is how you develop your career … in a way this flexible working thing is about me trying to catch up with a reality that has been imposed upon me. I cannot work full-time any more because I just can’t find the energy … the nursery not having a place for my daughter allowed me to say to my husband, ‘There’s a situation and this is what I am proposing to do about it.’”

“My husband is a feminist so he doesn’t think that we should do different things in relation to our work and our kids. And because he wants to work full-time he also wants me to work full-time because that kind of fits his ideological model. I have enormous respect for that, but he works [away from home] three days every week so de facto, when he’s away he’s out of the picture. So the reality, or practicality of the way we live, doesn’t actually make the ideal possible.”

“My hope is that [cutting my working days from five to four per week] will give me a sense of entitlement that I’ve never had, entitlement to not be working. Just a day when I am not working and not feeling guilty about it … that day out will bring us all a little bit of space, a bit of slack in the system.”

Like most of the 30 women interviewed for the research that informs this book, Emma is making room for motherhood by going part-time and seeking additional flexibility around when and where she works. Her simple ambition to have both a family life and a career introduces complexity and a level of cognitive, physical and emotional energy that in this moment feels impossible to sustain. Emma’s narrative reveals the multiple and intersecting factors that explain the circumstances of her transition from full-time to part-time and flexible work: her relationship with her husband and how they each understand and operationalise their gender roles in the family; a critical event – the breakdown of their childcare arrangements; a gradual slowing of her career progression in a work environment that had speeded-up and become more competitive; being physically and mentally tired having sustained for nearly a decade the lion’s share of day-to-day parenting alongside an increasingly intensive full-time workload.

Emma reflects deeply on the significance of her professional and maternal identities to her sense of self and the sense of entitlement she feels to express it through metering the amount time she gives both to her paid work and her family. The sustained experience of work–life conflict has sapped her energy and drive to advance her career. Emma’s account encapsulates the modern dilemma for professional women in liberal economies: how to balance breadwinning and caregiving simultaneously as well as advance in their careers?

Women in the middle

This book explores the limits and potential of flexible working arrangements through the lived experience of women in professional and managerial jobs who adjust their employment because of their motherhood. They are part-time, job-sharing, location-flexible, flexi-time working lawyers, doctors, academics, accountants, civil servants, bankers and senior managers in marketing, human resources, communications, research and technology, and they are all mothers of at least one infant or toddler, school-age child or teenager. They are members of a generation of highly educated women starting their careers in the late 1990s and early 2000s who, arguably, are the beneficiaries of family-friendly employment policies and equality rights and protections aimed at them. They are argued to have the potential to achieve economically as much as men and their moves into more flexible ways to work are thought part of a rising trend. Estimates suggest that 63% of the working population in the UK already has some flexibility in either hours, schedule or location of paid work, and 87% of workers want more flexibility (Wolf, 2013; Timewise, 2017).

Evidence discussed in this chapter will show that there is a life and career stage when women tend to get stuck or get out of the pipeline to the top jobs in large organisations and it corresponds with motherhood. The women whose experiences inform the research explored in this book are at that stage. They are women in the middle. They are experienced professionals who hold jobs in the middle and upper tiers of organisational hierarchies and they are also mothers and most (not all) are in dual-career couple relationships with men who are the fathers of their children. They are in the middle of organisations and they are also positioned in the middle of a network of social relationships in the family. As Emma eloquently expressed it: the needs, wants and aspirations she has for her career are positioned in relation to those of her partner, to the needs of her children, and to the expectations of her employer, and signal the difficult trade-offs that women make when they become mothers and attempt to craft a life that combines a professional career with family care.

Their planned employment adjustment is not without risk. Persistent inequalities in pay, promotions and prospects over the life course disadvantage women and bite particularly hard on mothers. Approaching 50 years since the introduction of the Equal Pay Act (1970) women remain disadvantaged in the labour market. The gender pay gap currently stands at 18% in the UK and has been largely static for three years, which means that, on average, for every £1 a male worker earns a female worker earns 82 pence. After ten years of motherhood the pay gap widens to 32% and worse in the elite sectors of financial and professional services (Costa Dias et al, 2016). That we know this is a step in the right direction, and the visibility of pay inequalities will increase as new legislation requires large organisations in the UK employing at least 250 people to publish their gender pay gap data for the first time in 2018 and annually after that.

Poor-quality part-time work and the lack of women in the most senior and highly paid roles in large organisations are two key drivers of the gender pay gap (ONS, 2016c). It follows, then, that addressing women’s over-representation in poor-quality part-time jobs, and under-representation in the high-paying top jobs should matter to employing organisations minded to close the gap. This study speaks to both these drivers in its close examination of why highly educated and highly skilled professional women choose part-time and flexible working, and how the experience of doing this influences their careers.

Context is everything, and the women whose shared experience of transition into part-time and flexible work informs this study are women living through a shift in cultural context. The second decade of the 21st century is an emergent point for new so-called ‘choosing’ forms of feminism and conceptualisations of gender progress that emphasise that success in life depends on making the right choices and taking personal responsibility for one’s own opportunities and development (Hatton and Trautner, 2015). The cultural image of the professional working mother as Superwoman is receding and Balanced Woman is gaining ground (Rottenberg, 2014). Fulfilment and success in both occupational and domestic domains is presented as something for middle-class women to strive for. This balance quest is perhaps no better epitomised than by the rallying call issued by Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg (Sandberg, 2013) to professional women to hold on to their ambition and Lean in to their careers upon motherhood. The implication being that if women made the right choices and tried harder to balance their lives, they would be happier and workplace inequalities would be a thing of the past. Yet it seems that the decision to combine paid work with childcare remains a dilemma for mothers when few would question fathers’ employment because the ‘idea that paid work conflicts with men’s domestic responsibilities simply never arises’ (Durbin and Fleetwood, 2010, p231).

When academic and former US government senior official Anne-Marie Slaughter hit world headlines with her reflective essay ‘Why women can’t have it all’ (Slaughter, 2012), her simple explanation about why many professional women continue to feel divided between career and family touched a nerve. Slaughter’s essay exposed what feminist cultural scholar Rottenberg (2013, 2014) describes as a hidden truth: that the field of play for men and women at work is not quite as level as mainstream liberal discourse implies, and the contemporary cultures of business, management and politics remain as gendered as they ever were. It seems that equality of choice and the opportunity to develop organisational careers and be at least a ‘good enough’ parent (Chodorow, 1978) remains an enduring challenge for working mothers who continue to carry responsibility for the ‘hard labour’ of family care (Gatrell, 2005). This challenge, and how greater flexibility at work assists its resolution, is at the heart of this study.

Exploring narrative

This chapter begins with elements of Emma’s first interview because women’s narratives, their stories of their transitions from one work–life configuration to another, form the core of the material explored in this book. Exploring narrative has proved fruitful in the study of motherhood, assisting discoveries of how women’s identities form and transform through becoming, adapting and moving through motherhood over the life course, and exploring the sense that women make of their feelings and experiences (Miller, 2005; Thomson et al, 2011). Personal narratives are equally revealing of the social and cultural contexts in which individuals operate, offering a window into the complex dialectics – the interactions and tensions – between the individual and their social environment (Tuider, 2007; Bold, 2012). In using personal narrative as a window into the links and compatibilities between the individual and the social, I place emphasis on its content and interpretation, not its dialogic construction. In other words, I explore what professional women say in a series of research interviews about their experiences and attend less to how they say it. This story-telling use of narrative is reflected in my treatment of the rich qualitative data generated in a series of narrative interviews with women over one year. Their words and their stories illuminate this text.

In the evolution of qualitative research approaches, narrative and related biographical methods had taken hold by the beginning of the 21st century, inspired to some extent by the tradition of oral history that facilitates people in telling their own stories. The so-called narrative turn in the social sciences also reflects moves to increase the role and power of participants in research (Cresswell, 2013), offering a way of retaining faithfulness to the told stories and placing participants as experts in their own lives (Chamberlayne et al, 2000). The narrative form of research interviewing has proved illuminating in its attention to context and also in its application to research that attempts to access people’s inner worlds as well as the explicit contexts in which their decisions and actions are taken (Wengraf, 2001; Bold, 2012; Hollway and Jefferson, 2013). Narrative methods have offered deep insight into a wide range of social issues in the context of people’s own accounts of their personal development and histories and are much employed in the study of transitions and processes of becoming, for example Walkerdine et al’s (2001) seminal study of the intersections of age, class and gender in Growing up girl, and Miller’s (2005, 2011) narrative studies of men and women becoming parents.

The research that informs this book draws on over one hundred hours of rich and detailed narrative insight. It illuminates the ways in which professional working motherhood is steeped in and shaped by moral and cultural framing of who mothers and professionals should be and what they should do, and wider cultural scripts about good and good enough mothering, about professionalism and careers, work–life balance and flexibility.

Looking at individual situations in a common culture permits analysis of the forces and influences that produce women’s common and distinctive experiences of professional, flexible, working motherhood. This approach puts the everyday experiences of doing professional work and mothering into focus and locates in a wider system of meaning the things that women do that might be taken for granted as normal. This is important because understanding how what we do every day complies with or resists what is socially expected of us signals both the target and the potential for change and transformation. Philosopher de Certeau (1984) argues that the agentic ways in which we practise, or ‘do’ everyday life may either reproduce or resist social norms. The social context for the ‘doing’ in this study is the family and the workplace. These are not understood as static institutions; rather I conceptualise them as sites of social practices where individuals, in their actions and interactions with others, comply or resist conventions, and in so doing may reproduce, sustain and occasionally transform them (Morgan, 2013). This work therefore engages with narrative to explore the transformational potential of flexible working as it is currently understood and practised by women in the context of the family and the workplace. Reay (2005) argues powerfully that the work of social reproduction is located in the interlinking of the domestic sphere with public institutions, and if this is the case then women are on the front line.

Choices within constraints

Debate about the extent to which individuals have agency and choose the life they live, and the extent to which social structures enable or constrain those choices, are central in sociology and fundamental to this analysis. The link between the individual and the social has been articulated in many ways across the disciplines of the social sciences. Theories of structure and agency pivot on the tension and interactive dynamism between voluntarism and determinism in shaping human experience. Structures can include legislative and policy frameworks, workplace processes, and material circumstances such as financial and non-financial resources including education, skills and status; and McRae (2003) argues structures can also be normative, and include the limitations we place upon ourselves and on others to comply with social expectations. Through McRae’s lens then, shared ideas in society about gender roles within families, about mothering practices and about ‘breadwinning’, ‘caregiving’ and careers become structuring influences on both men’s and women’s opportunities and choices. For Giddens (1984, 1991), structure and agency are two sides of the same coin, both the mechanism and the outcome of the practices they organise, and structures can be both constraining and enabling. Margaret Archer (1982, 2007) is critical of Giddens’ emphasis on agency and the enabling qualities of social structures, arguing that Giddens’ structuration thesis fails to account for the conditions under which individuals’ choices are more enabled or more constrained. Archer views social structures, institutions and conventions not as what people produce, but ‘what people confront and have to grapple with’ (1982, p463) and argues for the analytic distinctiveness of agency and structure, rather than what she considers their misleading conflation. Archer’s realist account emphasises the interactive dynamism of structures and agency through time as what leads to either reproduction or transformation of social structures, what she terms the morphogenic cycle. The theoretical framing of this study therefore, pivots on that dynamic interaction of agency and structure through time. It explores how women negotiate and construct the maternal and professional lives they seek and, in so doing, comply with, resist or even transform gendered structures and expectations in employment and inside the family.

A simple assumption underpins this study. It is that being able to engage in productive and meaningful work and to be an active participant in family life are desirable outcomes to be achieved in most industrialised societies (Sen, 2000; Bailey and Madden, 2017). The concept of work is central to this analysis of women’s lives and labours, and in this is informed by the relational and inclusive framework developed by scholars promoting the ‘new sociology of work’ (Pettinger et al, 2005), which includes paid market work and unpaid labour in the home in a holistic definition of ‘work’. In the tradition of feminist scholarship I extend the definition of work to include both the work of the body in reproduction and infant nursing, and the cognitive and physical activities of mothering and caring as work (Oakley, 1974; Gatrell, 2013; Phipps, 2014). Other forms of work extend my definition still further to include the expanding repertoire of ‘emotional work’ that mothers do to manage their own and others’ feelings in the family and in the workplace (Garey, 1999; Hochschild, 2012), and to the ‘identity work’ in which mothers engage to make sense of who they are at different points in their lives (Miller, 2005; Bataille, 2014; Hollway, 2015). Conceptualising work in this holistic way permits my analysis of the effort involved to achieve it and in so doing addresses what Thomson et al (2011, p175) propose is a missing sense of the ‘kinds of emotional, psychic, and creative work involved in being a good enough parent and a worker’ in debates about what activities constitute work in contemporary society, and which, Thomson et al (2011) argue, are inadequately served by the concept many might assume highly relevant to this debate, that of work–life balance.

Despite its entry into mainstream discourse there are problems with work–life balance as a concept. Notions of work–life balance promote a false possibility of an objective and equitable division of life and self across what are positioned as two competing and conflicting domains (Smithson and Stokoe, 2005; Gambleset al, 2006). Feminist critique argues that work–life balance is a flawed and simplistic concept that underplays the complexities, constraints and trade-offs that characterise women’s lives, and their attempts to reconcile the competing tensions between work and family demands. The conceptualisation that paid work exists in binary opposition to life, rather than being one part of it is, therefore, particularly diminishing...