Two stories for you.
In the first, a friend called Mark is working as the head of sustainability for a big supermarket chain. He’s working so much that he isn’t seeing a lot of his kids and decides to do more of the school run. Arriving late at work means fighting for parking so the company has allocated some spaces to ‘mums on the run’. Mark asks his boss if he can use one on the days he takes the kids to school.
‘No!’ his boss replies. ‘They’re for MOTHERS!’
In the second, Caireen is asleep in a hotel room in Sydney. She’s there on a business trip when the phone rings late one night. It’s someone from her son’s nursery. He’s sick and needs to be picked up.
‘I’m in Australia,’ she says. ‘Have you tried my husband?’
‘No.’
‘Can you call him, please?’
‘Of course.’
So far, so normal. Mothers are the ones who get the call first, aren’t they?
Not in this case. Caireen’s husband is at the top of the contact list for their son because she travels more. But the person at the nursery is so programmed to ring mothers that what’s written down in black and white doesn’t compute.
More than ten years separate Mark wanting to do more of the school run and Caireen travelling to the other side of the world on business. During that time we’ve seen the rise of flexible and remote working, shared parenting leave and job-sharing. But apparently nothing much has changed when it comes to the expectation that women are the ones who will do the looking after.
‘My partner and I are both journalists and the only way we could be more professionally equal is if we were the same person,’ wrote Hadley Freeman.123 ‘And yet I’m still seen by others as the caretaker: I’m the one the doctor calls if something is wrong and I’m the one whom other parents contact to make play dates – and by “other parents” I invariably mean “other working mothers”.
‘If my boys ever skip school, Ferris Bueller-style, I’ll be the one the headmaster calls, even though I work in an office and my partner works from home.’
The culture of female care is still deeply ingrained in the way we live. And this has really got to change if we are ever to find a new way to work.
We’ve already covered childcare, haven’t we? We know things are at best challenging, at worst stymieing to women and their careers. So why am I coming back to this? Because if I left you feeling a bit depressed earlier about how bleak things are right now, I’m now going to offer hope in the form of innovative ideas on how to improve them.
A key change is better options for working flexibly, and more – and cheaper – childcare. (More of that soon.) It’s also critical that we examine our attitudes to who is responsible for caring for children, because while we’ve embraced the idea of women working outside the home, we haven’t yet done the same when it comes to men working inside it.
Anne-Marie Slaughter was the first woman to become the director of policy planning for the US Department of State and wrote a book called Unfinished Business that’s all about how we must care in the future. At the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2015, she said:
We have liberated women and we have not liberated men [she says]. We have liberated women to be our fathers [ … ]. Our daughters are raised to be anything. [But] our sons are being raised the same way my father was.
Your worth as a man is determined by what job you get, and how much money you make and how much power you wield. But [ … ] that’s a half-finished revolution. [ … ]
Men care just as much as women care. Men love just as much as women love. We need to get to a place where being a good man, a strong man, a sexy man, includes being a man who can say, ‘You know what? I’m supporting my wife with care rather than cash.’ [ … ]
I’ve never met a male CEO who didn’t have a lead parent at home. It’s going to be the same for women. I think part of this has to be [that] men have to have a conversation [ … ] and have a much broader concept about what a good man is.124
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Let’s start by looking at flexible working because it’s a really important way to help people integrate their work with caring for kids, the elderly or sick. And that’s something we’re going to have to do more and more of in the future if the state of social and child care right now is anything to go by.
Some 7.3 million British workers are now working flexibly – men in almost equal numbers to women – and that means anything from later start or earlier finish times to nine-day fortnights, working from home and job-shares.125 And it’s only going to become an increasingly important feature of how we work because we know that Millennials want to work this way. If we get this right it will enable them to co-parent more than most of us do right now.
It’s not a hard equation: if both of us can fit work around school and child-minding pick-ups, sick days and homework, then we can share the job better.
Caireen works from home on Friday because she wants to have at least three full days of the week without care for her kids. I know as a mother what that means. Parents (and non-parents) at Portas are encouraged to work in a way that best suits them – whether that’s flexible hours or part-time.
But there’s still resistance to flexibility among many employers, particularly the large ones, who find it hard to trust employees with flexible hours because strong relationships aren’t in place. The rewards, however, can be huge – particularly the staff goodwill it engenders.
So, while employers talk about being open to different ways of working, they don’t seem to be seeing this through to their recruitment processes and employment practices.
While many people negotiate flexibility in jobs they’re already in, just 12 per cent of positions with salaries over £20,000 are advertised as such.126 That doesn’t show a massive commitment by employers, does it?
Make no mistake, though: this is a tough nut to crack. Some businesses just cannot offer flexible working – however much they want to. And then there’s parental leave, which is another thorny issue.
More and more large businesses are now offering up to a year’s paid leave, but I wonder how many women are taking it. A year out is a huge amount of time if you’re ambitious to reach the top and know that someone else is often ready to jump into your spot. This length of time is also a significant stress on smaller businesses.
It’s hard to know the right answer. I remember going back to work when Mylo was weeks old and it felt way too early. The night before, he lay on my chest as I sobbed because I just wasn’t ready to leave him. I wouldn’t want another woman to go through that.
But figuring out how to manage children and work is the same for millions of women. The world isn’t filled with high flyers who get back to their desks within a week. It’s filled with mothers who are trying to make life and work hang together, and businesses can do more to help them because juggling work with care isn’t just about what you’re paid when you’re off. Just as important is how you integrate your personal and professional lives when you come back. That’s why businesses have to do more than talk about this and offer financial packages.
At Portas, in addition to three months’ full pay to primary caregivers of either gender who’ve been employed for two years or more, we also have a ‘menu’ of options that parents can choose from. You may need emergency childcare if yours falls through. Or a night nanny if your child is going through a bad sleeping patch. We’ll provide those things.
Or you may want some career coaching, a staggered return to work or an allocated ‘buddy’ when you’re off to help you keep in touch, as well as plan when and how you’ll come back.
We want to empower people to be able to solve their own challenges rather than create a blanket policy for everyone because being a carer doesn’t stop when you return to your desk. It’s a lifetime job.
All the company policies in the world on flexible working and parental leave won’t work if we don’t get a lot more creative about childcare, and there are some fascinating ideas about possible solutions out there.
How about an insurance scheme for small and medium businesses that would cover the cost of parental leave? We all know smaller employers can be nervous about recruiting women of childbearing age, so surely this makes sense.
Or we could look at other countries, like Canada, the US and New Zealand, where ‘co-produced’ childcare, which sees parents offer time and help to nurseries in exchange for fee reductions of up to 50 per cent, is well established.127
Most importantly, though, the government needs to sort out the exorbitant cost of childcare, and there are many ideas on how to do this.
The Women’s Budget Group and the Women’s Equality Party have costed out the financial implications of providing free universal childcare – and say it would pay for itself. Upfront costs would be offset by increased taxes, National Insurance and VAT payments, as well as a reduced benefits bill.128
Another suggestion came from the Family and Childcare Trust and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which detailed how parents would still pay but government subsidy would lower costs. Childcare would be free to low-income parents and fees would then scale up to a maximum of £4 per hour for those with a salary of more than £66,000.129
These all sound to me like workable solutions to a crippling problem. So why isn’t the government doing more about them?
Companies can also contribute, and those that take childcare seriously have proved it works every which way, from employee well-being to financially.
The outdoor-clothing brand Patagonia, well known for its environmental and social commitments, has provided onsite childcare since 1983. It says 91 per cent of the costs are recouped through tax breaks, employee retention and employee engagement.130 So the argument about childcare costing too much for large employers to provide doesn’t seem to hold much sway, does it?
Why aren’t more big corporations following in Patagonia’s footsteps? I’m baffled that they’re not because the effect Patagonia’s childcare ethos has had on women working at the company is incredible. In the five years to 2016, every mother working there returned after having a child. The company also has around a fifty:fifty gender split in management.131 If that doesn’t prove how critical good childcare is to women’s careers then I don’t know what does.
Or we could look further afield, to a small German town called Unterföhring, to see what an innovative strategy on childcare at a local level can do.
It’s a suburb of Munich and home to twelve thousand residents, as well as businesses ranging from large insurance and media companies to tech start-ups and independent film production. It’s also close to beautiful Bavarian countryside so there are farms, rivers, lakes and forests.
Oh. And childcare is free.
Yes. That’s right. Childcare for any child aged over one and living in the town is free until they leave school, so that means full-time nursery as well as breakfast and after-school clubs.
The people of Unterföhring have this because they, as a community, decided they wanted it. (I told you it all started with one simple decision.)
German towns receive income from the businesses located there as well as from the state. But in the late 1970s, instead of choosing to build swimming pools or theatres, Unterföhring’s mayor suggested fully subsidizing childcare as a way to draw more people to the town and make it prosperous.
The people of Unterföhring have remained committed to the principle of more childcare, more work, more tax, more community ever since. Today the town is packed with young families. Among them is Sonja Hein, with her husband Ralf and their three children. She is a lawyer, he is an engineer, and both work full-time.
When their children were born, Sonja took a six-month maternity leave, then split childcare with Ralf for the next six: they both worked half-days. Then all three kids went into free high-quality childcare. It’s not all perfect. Sonja says that house prices have risen – which risks pricing out lower earners – and feels that many parents don’t contribute a lot to a town that gives them so much. In Germany taxes are raised and distributed differently from the UK so we couldn’t just cut and paste the idea.
But what impact has almost four decades of free childcare had on women in Unterföhring? Well, Sonja lives on an estate with thirty-eight houses and just one mother doesn’t work. This is collective culture working at its best – a community’s commitment to looking after its children well that also enables women to go to work.
Passports at the ready. Let’s all move to Unterföhring.