London - Working moms, listen up. They’re on to us, we’re going to have to go into hiding (I’ll be at the school gates — it’s the last place they’ll look).
Our secret is out and it’s all in a new book published next month.
I Know How She Does It by Laura Vanderkam is the result of a study of the timetables of 1 001 financially successful working mothers. And it concludes we’re all faking it. Well, sort of.
It’s a bit more fuzzy round the edges than that, but we are, it seems, being economical with the truth when it comes to the battle of home versus work. After analysing the diary data of how the moms spent their working week, Vanderkam, an American mother of four, sets out to bust the long-held myth that working your way up the career ladder means gigantic time sacrifices on the family front.
She also attacks the idea that successful career women are an unhappy bunch, tortured by the guilt of never seeing their children and that their ambition to do well comes at a terrible maternal price. According to Vanderkam’s research, the reality of a working mom in a so-called “big job” is that she is much more involved in family life than you’d think. How does she do that? By being an undercover mother at work, quietly blending her life with a purposeful secrecy.
Three-quarters of the diary entries showed mom-based activity during standard work hours. It’s mothering by stealth; slipping off to sports day without formally asking for time out, leaving early for the end-of-term play but working unseen into the night after it’s done.
Many of the women in the book didn’t request flexible hours from their employers because they knew they’d be turned down or that asking would mean a black mark against them. They asked for forgiveness after the fact rather than permission before by arranging their day to include important mom stuff without saying what they were doing.
Vanderkam concludes there’s an army of working moms “quietly but consistently doing just fine with the struggle to juggle”. She calls the assumption that any woman who chooses to work her way to the top will never see her kids a “faulty narrative” and her work shows that this view is an old-fashioned one. Phew!
So, at last, there is hard evidence that if you have managed to slip through a chink in the glass ceiling and land a “big job”, you haven’t actually had to make a big trade-off at home.
But there’s a problem here, I think. By hiding their “momness” in this way, those trail-blazing women are making it look easy. More importantly, they’re letting employers off the hook for not recognising that making time for family doesn’t mean you’re less committed to a job done well.
It’s a conundrum. Part of me wishes women weren’t so secretive about flexing their own time. Anyone who gets to the top of their chosen career is a role model for those coming up next - and ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ as the mantra goes.
And the reality is it isn’t easy to blend work and family. Getting up at 6am to finish work projects, sprinting back and forth between the office and school for show-and-tells, sitting silently in meetings that over-run knowing your little one will be the last picked up from a school trip is stressful.
But no female employee wants to be the one leaping up and saying: “Sorry I have to rush off and look at some mis-shapen pottery. Doesn’t sound important to you, but it’s really important to my four-year-old.”
The real problem with our juggling in this covert way is judging what warrants secret time out and what doesn’t.
But news of the book has given me a glimmer of hope about this “having-it-all” dilemma. Maybe, just maybe, these new-found statistics and facts will encourage us all to be more honest about how we can achieve a work-life balance.
Daily Mail
Lorraine Candy is editor in chief of Elle magazine.