Media Work, Mothers and Motherhood

Negotiating the International Audio-Visual Industry

Susan Liddy, Anne O'Brien, Susan Liddy, Anne O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367536008
• eBook ISBN: 9781000376265
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Business

This interdisciplinary and international volume offers an innovative and critical exploration of the impact of motherhood on the engagement of women in media and creative industries across the globe. Diverse contributions critically engage with the intersections and overlap between the social categories of worker and mother, and the work of media production and maternal caregiving.

Conflicting ideas about, and expectations of, mothers are untangled in the context of the working world of radio, film, television and creative media industries. The book teases out commonalities between experiences that are evident across a number of countries, from Hollywood to Bollywood, as well as examining the differences between class, religion, maternal status and cultural frameworks that surround working mothers in various nation states. It also offers some possibilities for ways forward that can improve the lives of women workers who are also mothers.

A timely and valuable contribution to international debates on equality, mothers and motherhood in audiovisual industries, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of media, communication, cultural studies and gender, programmes engaged with work inequalities and motherhood studies, and activists, funders, policymakers and practitioners.

1 Motherhood and media work

An introduction

Susan Liddy and Anne O’ Brien

Mothers, motherhood and the pandemic

A growing body of research, including contributions in this volume, has already identified that mothers carry a disproportionate care burden in societies around the world across a range of sectors, including in the audiovisual industry, which is our focus here (e.g., Conor et al., 2015; O’ Brien and Liddy, 2020; Russell et al., 2018). While this book was underway prior to the outbreak of Covid-19 and, hence, does not specifically feature an in-depth analysis of the ramifications of the pandemic, it is clear that Covid-19 has compounded women’s and mothers’ unequal burden of care. Even before the pandemic women were doing three times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men, but this already ‘gross imbalance’ quickly accelerated (United Nations, 2020, p. 13). The lockdown, the closure of schools and creches, and the exponential increase in the numbers of people working from home, coupled with the sudden unavailability of family members to supply care, boomeranged most of the responsibility back onto the shoulders of parents, principally mothers (NWCI, 2020).

The pandemic has devastated lives across the globe and has impacted on women and men, young and old. However, women are more likely to ‘bear the brunt’ of many of the social and economic consequences that result (Burki, 2020). Indeed, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, notes that ‘nearly 60 per cent of women around the world work in the informal economy, earning less, saving less, and at greater risk of falling into poverty… . Millions of women’s jobs have disappeared’ (Guterres, 2020). Similarly, the World Trade Organisation has pointed to long-standing issues around wage and educational disparity, limited access to finance, greater numbers of women in informal employment and social constraints ‘exacerbating existing vulnerabilities’ (International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2020).

A report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that ‘mothers in the UK were 1·5 times more likely than fathers to have either quit their job or lost it during the lockdown’ (Burki, 2020). Evidence of disproportionate consequences is amassing across the board; for instance, it has been suggested that women’s participation in academic research work has been compromised by the pandemic (Fazackerley, 2020). Similarly, the pandemic is ‘hitting female scientists especially hard’ as more people are forced to work from home and women face a double or triple burden (Kramer, 2020). Indeed, there are fears that the impact of Covid-19 on academia itself will ‘increase gender and racial inequity in teaching and service’ (Malisch et al., 2020). Guterres is concerned that the limited progress that has been made on gender equality and women’s rights could be reversed by Covid-19. To compound the problems, there are already signs that the pandemic is likely to impact livelihoods well into 2021.

The creative industries appear to be no different as many workers were faced, and in some cases continue to be faced, with delayed or cancelled productions and are experiencing, even more sharply, the precarity of their everyday working lives. In a survey of members undertaken in March and April 2020, Screen Producers Ireland reported that four productions ‘were stood down, a further 59 companies reported having to delay the start of production and many projects have been delayed in post/distribution’ (SPI, 2020). Concerns have been expressed by Women in Film and Television (WFT/WFTV), who identify the gender-specific problems their female members are facing. WFT/WFTV is a global network with over 40 chapters and in excess of 10,000 members working to enhance the interests of women in screen-based industries across the world.

WFT Australia identifies specific Covid-19 effects on its members as ‘sudden shifts in childcare access, home education or carer’s isolation’ (WFT Australia, 2020). In the UK, a WFTV survey revealed that 90% of the members who responded had lost all income; 39% had lost their jobs completely and 57% had work either cancelled or paused (WFTV UK, 2020). In a WFT Ireland survey circulated in April 2020, which attracted over 90 responses, there were many concerns articulated about the way in which the Covid-19 crisis was gendered: ‘women have been completely left out of conversations on workplace measures, quarantine procedures, how schools and childcare facilities operate, [it] will fall on women in the workforce… . who is hearing all our voices?’(2020). And to the question ‘are there gender-specific problems arising from the Covid-19 crisis?’ Of those who said yes, the answer was: ‘Childcare. Childcare. Childcare’ (2020).

Despite a slow and hesitant return to production, armed with Covid-19 production guidelines, it is unclear what the long-term impact on the industry will be or whether, indeed, there will be new outbreaks resulting in further lockdowns in the year ahead.

During Covid-19 many people found refuge and consolation in film, television and radio. At the end of a long day of juggling childcare with remote working, often at a kitchen table that doubled up as a home office space, many women sought the distraction of entertainment and the escape provided on-screen. But how often did those same women see their stories reflected on-screen? To what extent do mothers participate in the creation of those stories? A growing body of international research has shown that work in the creative and cultural industries is heavily gendered (Cobb et al., 2016; Conor et al., 2015; Mayer et al., 2009; Wreyford, 2018). Women experience structural and cultural exclusions from media production work (Liddy, 2016; Liddy, 2020a, 2020b; O’ Brien, 2019). Often in the public imagination and in common understandings these exclusions are connected to women’s status as mothers. It has been established that motherhood is a significant cause of women’s withdrawal from work (Creative Skillset, 2010). The existence of a ‘maternal wall’ has been evidenced (Stone, 2007; Wajcman, 1998; Wiliams, 2004), showing the impact of motherhood on careers vis-à-vis women without children. Frequently, however, motherhood is used as the single explanatory variable to account for women’s under-representation in the audiovisual industries. It is assumed that women (choose to?) leave work in order to care for children (Hakim, 2006). However, O’ Hagan suggests that women’s decisions about the ways they will combine motherhood and paid work ‘frequently amount to no more than a series of unsatisfactory trade-offs masquerading as choice’ (2015, p. 77). In reality, there is rarely a straightforward or direct reason why women ‘opt’ to leave work. Many push and pull factors inform women’s constrained choices with regard to ‘quitting’ their careers to engage in care work (O’ Brien, 2014).

Reinhold argues that women who are impacted by ‘a company’s rigidity or insensitivity to family life’ are more likely to quit a job than to speak up and ask for what they need to make that job manageable (2005, p. 47). Gill (2014) has also examined the sector’s failure to create family-friendly contexts for mothers. More often, difficulties are overcome with exhaustive individual juggling, mainly by women (Liddy, 2017, pp. 21–25), and these adaptations in the name of care are usually understood as ‘private troubles’ rather than public issues (O Connor, 2006, p. 8). In an analysis of Irish society, but one which resonates in many countries across the world, Byrne-Doran observes that the ‘traditional and dichotomous thinking of men as providers and women as carers’ still exists and is an influential factor in the lives of working mothers (2012, p. 108). Much remains to be understood about how motherhood affects workers in the creative industries, and that is the central focus of this book.

Despite the fact that many women leave creative work on becoming mothers, some women nonetheless attempt to sustain both their working lives and their caring commitments. Yet, relatively little research attention, in the form of monographs or edited collections, has been given to mothers who continue to work in creative and cultural industries. This book aims to address that gap by examining the experiences of creative work that are particular to mothers in the international audiovisual industry.

Key analyses in chapters

This book offers four key analyses of the ways in which women experience the overlap of media production work with their status as mothers. Firstly, mothers in creative work are penalised because of their parenting role. Contributors outline multiple ways in which motherhood is generally not seen as a benefit but rather as a liability in the formal work context. The slights and rejections that women endure in their working lives are set out across a number of national contexts including Australia, Nigeria, Sweden and Hollywood.

In their chapter on Australia, Gregory & Verhoeven use qualitative and quantitative data from a recent national survey detailing the experiences of over 600 carers and parents working in the screen industry to map the challenges faced. They explore how caring and motherhood are discussed in the industry, what the impact of the invisibility of caring and motherhood is on employment in screen work, what policy interventions might be effective and what a film industry that cared more about care might look like. The chapter includes a discussion of forms of care such as ‘self-care’, ‘ethics of care’ and ‘complex motherhood’ to reveal how women’s employment and relational demands are a site of competing tension. The authors also demonstrate that there are Australian stakeholders who want to create a more caring film industry. Ganiyat Tijani-Adenle reviews how women in Nigeria are excluded from broadcast journalism work in the early days of maternity leave and while nursing children. She notes how, during this time, they are removed from hard beats and critical desks and are relegated to ‘pink’ ghettos that affect their progression to management and editorial positions, sometimes resulting in them leaving the industry. Her chapter reviews maternity leave policies in three radio and three television stations in Nigeria and catalogues women’s experience of the industry while nursing babies. Tijani-Adenle also engages with media managers about the implications of maternity leave policies and politics on the status and experiences of women in Nigerian broadcast media.

In their chapter on Sweden, Jansson & Wallenberg combine an analysis of women’s experiences of mothering and film work coupled with an analysis of representations of motherhood on-screen. Their study is based on interviews with women film-makers who belong to different generations, and the authors draw on five films representing caring for children in different ways. The need to secure economic subsistence and to cope with ideals of being a present mother are common themes in the interviews. The chapter tentatively argues that women film-makers’ experiences of caring, or being cared for, in a society which defines women as mothers first and foremost affects how women film-makers present mothers on-screen. Further, the films analysed reflect societal changes and continuities in how motherhood is constructed, but, more prominently, they evade any easy or stereotypical interpretation of mothers. Moving to 1930s Hollywood, Tsz Lam Ngai’s chapter unpacks the ideology of motherhood that underpinned understandings of stage mothers during the Great Depression and reconstructs the impact of such mothers whose care work blended with formal work but was often co-opted by the industry to its own ends.

Drawing on a case study of Gertrude Temple, the mother of child star Shirley Temple, the author examines Gertrude’s labour and elucidates how film studios attempted to exploit stage mothers like her to train child actors and incorporated motherhood into publicity stunts that forged child star personae. Many mothers of child stars struggled to maintain their power in the field; the public were ambivalent about them because of their media representations as ambitious and self-serving managers – traits at odds with hegemonic definitions of the ‘ideal mother’. However, Lam Ngai explores the ways in which Gertrude Temple effectively manipulated the system to position herself as an ‘ordinary’ mother driven by maternal love and was held in high regard throughout her daughter’s stalwart career.

The second key argument presented in the book is that mothers experience exclusion within creative industries in ways that are complicated beyond gender by other aspects of their class, religious, or family identities. Black feminist theorist Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality is used to unify the various analyses offered in this section. It shows how aspects of social and political identity combine to create unique modes of discrimination not experienced equally by all women. These analyses are offered in the contexts of media production in Malaysia, Colombia and Britain. In her chapter on Malaysia, Nur Kareelawati Abd Karim draws on qualitative data to examine the position of Muslim women in the TV industry. She explores how Muslim women perceive their professional identity, roles and position in the context of a diminishing female Malay workforce. Malay-Muslim women in 2017 occupied the highest rates of unemployment compared with other ethnicities at 142.3 per thousand. The chapter looks at women in three television organisations who hold behind-the-scenes roles in production and asks. It asks why Muslim women choose to stay or leave television work and to what extent their sociocultural norms, upbringing and religious beliefs shape their decisions to remain with or leave the broadcast organisation employing them.

Castano-Echeverri and Correa-González explore issues raised by social class and motherhood in the Colombian audiovisual industry. Through a survey of 79 women and in-depth interviews with 13 respondents in Antioquia, the authors identify the emergence of a recurrent theme – the sector is not pro-mothers, particularly as a consequence of the long working hours. The industry is populated with more fathers than mothers and with more young, single, childless women than older women. The latter, if they had been in the industry for more than 20 years, tended to hold managerial positions. The authors examine how class intersects with motherhood and how, depending on women’s position in the value chain of audiovisual production, women and mothers have different capacities for negotiating their working expectations and conditions. Rowen Aust looks to the United Kingdom and at how women who do not have children feel about the status of non-motherhood in their workplaces. These women do not acquire the advantages of being male in the television production workforce nor do they access the potential dispensations that having children can offer their mothering colleagues, such as networks and adaptations that mothers can sometimes facilitate for each other. In a longitudinal study based on interviews with women working in television production from the 1970s to the present day, Aust explores how women executives, presenters, writers, actors and producers are bound, or not, by experiences of non-maternity. This chapter records some of the specificities of gendered expectations of the non-maternal within the televisual field from a previously unaddressed angle.

The third section of the book explores how the combination of care duties with formal work burdens is internalised by mothers and examines some of the social-psychological impacts of that double burden on women’s work and lives. This section goes beyond describing women’s structural experiences of inequality to explore other cultural or subjective dimensions of the clash between care and work. It illustrates how industry operationalises motherhood to generate stigma, which undermines women’s labour value in the UK context. It also examines the ways that women self-narrate and frame their experiences of negotiating caring responsibilities with work and how they react to inequality in Scotland. The section also outlines the ways in which hegemonic understandings of idealised gender are disseminated via media content about Bollywood actresses as a result of their celebrity status. In her chapter on the United Kingdom, Tamsyn Dent examines how motherhood is seen as a negative and devaluing attribute in the context of creative ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• 1 Motherhood and media work: an introduction
• PART 1 Who cares in screen production?
• PART 2 Intersectionality and media mothers
• PART 3 Stigma, subjectivity and celebrity
• PART 4 Solutions for better futures
• List of contributors
• Index