Let’s go back to the boardroom. Outside the boardroom, in fact, where I’m making a phone call.
‘I’m running late,’ I whisper. ‘Can you give them a bath and I’ll be home as soon as I can?’
The weekly board meeting starts each Tuesday at 3 p.m. and I always hope we’ll finish by six. That’s three whole hours. Enough time to cook a turkey the size of two newborns or have a heart bypass operation.
But, even with the combined brains and talent that is the Harvey Nichols boardroom, the meetings always run over.
I’m lucky that I don’t have to leave. I have a nanny, as well as a husband, on his way back from work, who can look after Mylo, who’s two, and one-year-old Verity.
But, even so, I’m looking at a ten-hour working day. Surely it’s enough.
Seemingly not.
There is nothing else for it. I pretend I need to pee and nip out to make a call rather than admitting I must phone home. Any other day you might find me surreptitiously picking baby sick off my collar or forcing myself to smile after yet another broken night’s sleep.
Once I even managed to stagger in on time after cutting my eye when I smacked into a lamppost. I didn’t see it coming as I rushed to make a meeting and turned around to see Mylo peeping up as he stood in the window of our house.
All I will say is this: a lot of energy went into maintaining the illusion that my home life evaporated as soon as I stepped into the office. And while this was more than twenty years ago, I think many women today would say the same.
By the skin of my teeth, and a lot of hard work, I’ve managed to combine my career with being pretty involved in bringing up my children.
That’s not to say it’s been easy.
I have done more than my fair share of turning up late, not turning up at all and forgetting class trips, only to rush into a corner shop near school and wonder if a bin bag with two holes cut into the sides could double as a waterproof.
But it’s impossible to cover every base when you combine a career with motherhood. Even if, like me, you think you have a foolproof plan to make sure it all goes smoothly. I’d waited until I could afford a nanny to cover my unpredictable, and sometimes long, hours. I’d also made sure I was indispensable at work so that I couldn’t be replaced.
Then I had Mylo and Verity in quick succession – just twenty-two months apart – because I figured a one-off period of just-about-controlled chaos was better than returning to normal and plunging back into disarray three years later.
Unsurprisingly, though, my strategy came unstuck. Because the one thing I couldn’t plan for was how much I would desperately love those two little people – or how much my priorities would change.
Graham and I were certainly lucky that we could afford to pay someone to help us. My sister, however, had to get on the bus with her son in his buggy on the days her husband was using the car, do a fifty-minute journey, then push the baby to his granny’s for the day, before she even started ‘work’ as a nurse.
But while combining work with my life was certainly easier practically, money didn’t solve every problem. Knowing that my children were looked after didn’t lessen the intense pull of home, the splitting of myself into two people – mother and worker – or the fact that my kids wanted to spend time with their parents, not a nanny.
These two elements – the practical and emotional – are the reality of working women’s lives. (Working fathers, too, to some degree, but it’s still women who are most often the primary caregivers.) And while I was better off than many when it came to the first element, I still couldn’t escape the second.
Because even though I had childcare, I was still largely in charge of the minutiae of my children’s lives in a way that my husband was not. Just like most mothers are. And being the primary carer for a child takes up a whole heap of headspace and emotion that being a secondary carer doesn’t.
In 2017, a cartoon by the French artist Emma called You should have asked tapped into this issue and went viral. In her clever and pithy drawings, Emma depicted how most women are carrying the mental load when it comes to our homes and children. Men help when they’re asked but are not as plugged into it all.
If you’re the manager of the home, Emma said in her cartoons, you’re ultimately responsible for and therefore thinking about all aspects of the task.
We already know women do more physical work: in both the UK and the US, we spend double the amount of time on housework and childcare as men do.50 And even if you’re the main earner, you’re still 3.5 times more likely to do all or most of the household work than male breadwinners.51 In fact, the unpaid work we do in the home is valued at around £77 billion a year.52
But, as Emma highlighted, it’s the thinking that really gets us, the mental energy required to plan and file away information on everything from vaccinations to food shopping and produce it at a moment’s notice. My name was even at the top of the ruddy vet’s contact list if the cat ever needed picking up.
Men certainly pitch in but they aren’t usually doing all this thinking about the thousands of details that make up running everyone’s life. A friend of mine recently left her husband in charge of their seven- and ten-year-olds when she went away. She also tacked up a schedule on the wall of where everyone needed to be, when, with what food and clothing on, so that just about every waking minute was accounted for.
‘Looking after kids isn’t that bad, is it?’ her husband said, when she got home. ‘It’s quite easy, really.’
Well, it is when everything apart from going to the lav is written down for you.
And, in my experience, physical care eases as children get older but the mental load increases as the questions and emotions get more complex.
Men today are, of course, far more involved in their children’s lives than a generation ago. Both American and British fathers have at least tripled the time they spend with their kids over the past fifty years.53 But they’re also paying a price for how we divide up paid and unpaid labour.
One really interesting piece of research from the US found that men’s psychological well-being and health gets worse the more financial responsibility they take on – while women’s improves. Apparently it’s because men are expected to do that stuff and feel the pressure to perform, while women are going against the grain by being a family’s main earner and are admired for doing it.
‘The psychological experience of being a breadwinner for men and women is really different,’ said sociologist Christin Munsch. ‘Men don’t get any Brownie points for being a breadwinner, it’s just the status quo. If they lose that, it’s seen as an emasculating, bad thing – you’re more likely to get teased by your peers saying your wife wears the pants in the family, that sort of thing.
‘For women, being a breadwinner is not the expectation, so when you are a breadwinner, people look up to that. And if you lose that, you don’t become a loser, it’s just the status quo.’54
It’s clear that men face their own challenges. But what Emma was saying, and I certainly agree with it, is that women usually carry the mental load when it comes to our families.
And it’s not just mothers. It’s all women, whether they have children or not, because we’re usually the carers. When elderly parents are sick or a friend is diagnosed with an illness, we are the ones who turn up, tune in and get stuff done. Children or not.
This is the mental load. And – single dads aside who are doing all this too – women usually carry more of it. Fact.
This is what I call the elephant in the room: it’s taking up a lot of space even as we’re mostly pretending it isn’t there. Because while there’s been revolution in terms of women’s participation in paid work, there hasn’t been one in the unpaid work we do at home after we have children. We are effectively now doing two jobs: one at home and one in the workplace.
Before children, we live pretty equal lives to men. Then we give birth and often wake up in the 1950s. Whether we’re working or not, we’re still mostly in charge of the home, kids and, increasingly, elderly parents.
Research suggests, though, that gay couples share both domestic work and childcare more equally. One study from the US found that 74 per cent of same-sex couples shared the responsibility compared to just 38 per cent of heterosexual couples.55
The reason is that same-sex couples seem less hemmed in by what they ‘should’ be doing because of their gender. Heterosexual couples will often assume the roles they’ve seen their father and mother play during their childhood, almost by default, conditioned to see putting on the washing-machine as female labour while doing the DIY is male, for instance. Gay couples do not replicate that model in the same way. When it comes to housework, say, there’s less ‘You mow the lawn while I do the dishes’ and more a division of tasks according to who wants to do what.56
What I’d like to see, of course, is a world in which the unpaid job of caring and the consequent mental load are equally shouldered. But we’re far from there right now and, despite a lot of chat back and forth about this issue, it feels like much of it is nothing more than lip service.
Some businesses are doing great work to try to make caring for our families a more shared load but, once again, it comes down to the culture we’re working in. We’re still far away from living and working in a way that does not just accept but truly accommodates employees’ role as carers and, because women are doing more of this, it disproportionately affects us.
Alpha culture still seems to view having children as a career obstacle – rather than the vital job it is – and puts taking time off to do it in the same bracket as a week in Spain. Until it adapts, I doubt many men will take over the job – or even share it equally with women – even if they want to. Far too often, it’s still considered career suicide for a man to work flexibly or take more than the standard paternity leave. The way we work ultimately forces one person to be the primary carer – and it’s more often than not a woman who pays a price in terms of earnings and promotion.
When it comes to caring, alpha culture is working against us all.
I’m pretty sure all of these issues would have been ironed out long ago if men were the ones caring primarily for children. How is it we have a tax system that allows businesses to write off first-class flights for their executives but doesn’t allow someone who is self-employed to claim a penny for childcare? Ask a single mother if turning left on a plane or having her child looked after while she works is a more crucial business expense and I think we all know what the answer would be.
Or talk to the female commuter who works part-time and can’t get a part-time season ticket on the train so ends up forking out more money proportionately on travel.
The irony, though, is that working mothers should be a force to be reckoned with. And businesses that aren’t understanding this – and acting on it – are missing a trick. After all, English mothers with kids at home have seen the largest increase in employment rates over the past twenty years.57 Nearly three-quarters of mothers now work and there are fewer and fewer stay-at-home mums – both because women want to work but also because the cost of living has increased to the point where, for many couples, it’s no longer an option to survive on one salary.58
But here’s the rub: until our children are eleven or older, we’re more likely to work part-time than full-time, and the hourly rate for part-time work tends to be lower than that for full-time.59, 60 Part-timers don’t see the same kind of year-on-year salary increases that full-timers do either.61
This – plus the career breaks we take to care for kids (and, of course, the mental load we carry for our families) – means we’re often stuffed when it comes to earnings and promotion, and therefore pensions too. Yet we put up with it almost uncomplainingly because it’s ‘normal’. You make a choice to work or not to work, it’s argued, with little regard for how the system penalizes women who do.
Lower pay and career breaks are key drivers of the topic that was on everyone’s lips as I wrote this book: the gender pay gap.
Let’s start by making it clear that this is a separate issue to equal pay. It’s technically illegal to pay women less for doing the same job as a man. But it’s also a grey area. Everyone, from female care workers to TV presenters, has argued that they are getting paid less for doing the same job as male colleagues.
Meanwhile, the gender pay gap is about the difference in median pay – the mid-point between the highest and lowest – of men and women in an organization. This means it gives a pretty good snapshot of the dynamics of the workplace: the bigger the gap, the more one earns compared to the other on average – which usually means more men are at the top earning bigger salaries and more women are at the bottom earning smaller ones.
Remember what I said about power, where it lies and how it affects our lives?
The UK’s average gender pay gap for full- and part-time workers is 18 per cent.62 But when the government forced companies with 250 employees or more to release data on their gender pay gap in 2018, we discovered that there are also huge variations within this figure. Bonuses for female investment bankers at Barclays were 78 per cent less on average than those of their male colleagues. Across the bank’s international division as a whole, women were earning on average about half what men earned.63
EasyJet’s gender pay gap? 52 per cent. Why? Because most pilots are men and they earn the biggest salaries.64 Phase Eight fashion retailer? A whopping 65 per cent. Low-paid shop workers are mostly women, while men do more of the more lucrative head-office jobs.65
My heart dropped when I read those results. It’s just unbelievable. And then I read that the World Economic Forum predicts the economic gap between men and women won’t close in Western Europe until 2078.66 And my heart dropped a little more. That’s about the time my daughter Verity will retire. I’ve told her often that she can be and do anything she wants but she will never see economic parity in her working lifetime.
So just to recap: over the past fifty years, we’ve managed to fight several wars, map the human genome and use the internet to revolutionize everything from how we fall in love to telling us when the milk’s about to go off in the fridge.
Yet we haven’t sorted out women’s pay?
To say it’s complex is an understatement. But, in a nutshell, lots of long and complicated defences are given for the gender pay gap: men do more overtime and qualify for more bonuses, for instance (which begs the question: why are they able to do those extra hours?); it’s a meaningless statistic based on bad data.
But given that girls are now outperforming boys in education, surely something is going seriously wrong if they end up so consistently worse off in the workplace. Men who are less qualified are quite simply moving higher up the ladder and earning more. Women are disadvantaged whichever way you slice and dice the data.
And I’m off for a lie-down before I explode.