This section focuses on the issues facing young women and their partners who are interested in balancing family and working life on a fairly equal basis as a couple. Issues relevant to the career mother include:
- Personal confidence required to continue with working life despite the responsibilities assumed for women once they have children;
- Challenges involved in raising children by organising quality childcare at an affordable cost;
- Encouraging her partner to take a more equal role in family life; and
- Quality of life versus hard work involved in balancing two lifestyles working/family.
With few examples of others who have successfully combined working and family as a couple, it can be difficult for young women to imagine having a family without their daily involvement. Consequently, young women continue to restrict their career options anticipating that they will want to have a family.
This explains why women often enter professions with more flexible working conditions (and lower pay) because they anticipate needing to combine any career with the needs of their partner and the demands of family life. So women continue to seek careers that will complement their role as a mother, not necessarily challenge their capabilities as an individual. Even though, in theory, women should be able to aspire to the same personal ambitions that a man hopes for (dependent only on shared family obligations).
No one would expect a person to do a job that takes a person’s whole commitment (president of a country, for example) and still participate in family life on a daily basis. The traditional model for family life allows men to focus on work because women raise children by themselves. These men do not gain the full benefits of family life because you only get back as much as you put in. If a woman wants to benefit from family life she either has to share the family role with her partner or decide to focus on her career and do without children (as Dolly Parton did).
“You can just about cope with working, looking after kids and running a home, but you can’t do all that and run for public office as well.” Margaret Hodge (British politician) The Times newspaper Jan 5, 1998.
Costs of childcare
It is possible for young women to combine family and career, especially if they have the support (practical and moral) of their partner. However, a young woman still has to be much more determined than average if she is to continue with her career once a couple has children. She needs enough confidence in her role as a parent to be able to delegate the care of her children. She also needs enough confidence at work to ensure that she maximises her earnings so that she can justify paying for childcare.
A man once told me how his wife would like to work but it didn’t make sense because she didn’t earn enough money. Interestingly I calculated that it was quite likely that as a couple, they had a very similar income to that of my partner and me. So couples take the whole of the childcare cost and offset this against the woman’s earnings in order to judge whether her income is worth having. The fact is that both parents are responsible for paying the cost of childcare. Unfortunately, we often assume a man works as a right whereas a woman works only by choice.
It is a mistake to calculate the costs of childcare as the immediate direct costs of third party care. If a woman has a potential earning ability that she is able to maintain through working, then the costs of child care can be off-set by the gains in her future earnings and pension. During their lives, a couple has to save for a house loan, higher education costs for their children and pensions costs for themselves. Increasingly as a society, and as families, we will need to generate more economic advantage from the education that is being invested in women.
“We have immature democracies in the sense that women are not playing a full part in politics and citizenship.” Dr Madeline Arnot (Lecturer in Gender Studies) The Times newspaper Jan 5, 1998