As a girl child I was taken to work on a couple of occasions. I remember being mind-numbingly bored.
But to be truthful, going to work was less boring than doing domestic chores. So I suppose going to the office as a girl may have been a factor in making me choose to be a working mother. That and the support I get from my spouse, child-care provider and extended family. If this was absent, I would not be at work.
In part, some of the difficulties I experience stem from the fact that I am a management consultant. This is a difficult job at the best of times. Add to this a constraint on the number of working hours available postpartum. My child minder leaves at 5pm - pretty much the halfway mark of a typical consulting day. In addition, the increased levels of the hormone oxytocin that accompany lactation have been known to impair short-term memory. Oxytocin also makes people more trusting and benevolent. This can be absolutely fatal in the corporate environment.
From a strategic point of view, working mothers are what Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter calls “stuck in the middle”, constantly at risk of losing market share to more focused competitors, be they ambitious male or childless colleagues at work or the child minder at home. Porter’s solution - become a cost leader or a differentiator - sadly has no parallel for working mothers.
Research conducted in the US in 2001 revealed that 42% of female executives aged between 41 and 55 were childless. I have yet to see similar research on SA’s women executives. The burden of professionals who are mothers in SA may well be lighter than that of their counterparts in the US and Europe because of their ability to transfer much of their child-rearing responsibilities to a workforce of often disempowered domestic workers at low cost.
I would speculate that the primary cause of the relatively low number of female managers or professionals in SA is not girls’ perceptions that careers are for men and housework is for women. But, surely, if we want to encourage women to participate in the workplace, more attention must be paid to enabling them to reconcile the responsibilities of motherhood and the demands of the workplace. According to the 2001 census, almost 80% of women under 50 are mothers. Roughly half have no spouse. More than one-third of mothers under 50 have children under the age of four and a further 40% have children of school-going age.
For us to create a society where women choose to contribute in the workplace, we need men to be supportive of that choice.
We also need corporates to do more than endorse a day. Cell C, like the vast majority of SA’s corporations, does not offer childcare facilities for employees. While it offers generous maternity benefits, its paternity benefits (three days), in line with corporate norms, do not appear designed to encourage equal parenting. It is difficult not to be sceptical of corporations that prefer to spend on high-profile campaigns than to effect change from the inside out.
?Melzer is a new mother and full-time consultant at Eighty20.