The fish finger hour…

There’s been a lot of debate recently around women’s continuing under-representation in key professions and domains of power: parliament, boardrooms, top graduate jobs etc.  And the message seems to keep coming that it’s a mixed picture: not just structural issues, but ‘choices’ and attributes and preferences of women themselves.  A good old structuralist like myself rather baulks at the ‘failings of women’ account – women lack confidence, step back when they should go forward, fail to negotiate pay and position effectively, are caught in a double bind of working hours and domestic responsibilities – to my mind these factors are symptoms of underlying structural issues, and ingrained attitudes to types of labour, pay and value – rather than being sources of inequality.  Nonetheless, one would have to be a fairly mindless sceptic not to concede that the kinds of ‘solutions’ posed by these more individual accounts (networks, mentoring, giving less of a proverbial about what others think and just getting on with it) are not quite effective in the career paths of contemporary professionals – especially those with children.  And of course we can’t all occupy positions of power – we don’t all want to – and they can be out of reach for all sorts of structural and personal reasons. It is enough for most of us simply to be able to sustain employment and income whilst having children – but for many it’s not simple at all.

The killer often seems to be the fish finger hour.  The fish finger hour is that gap between end of children’s days and beginning of the rest of the evening. It coincides neatly (and infuriatingly) with the end of the conventional working day.  The thing about the fish finger hour is that it seems to last forever – both in itself, and through the power of repetition. For many it is hard to afford having someone else take it on  while you stay on at work, or even to find childcare that operates the right hours to cover it.  For those who are not employed, it can be the gap between a long day with others and a chance to do something else. It is filled with mealtimes, clearing up one day, thinking about the next.  The stresses imposed by managing it (or rather, perhaps finding you’re not managing it very well) can be a source of frustration, exhaustion and guilt.  Both quality time with children and harmony with partners can be distant in the fish finger hour. How can you escape the daily grind of rushing between end of activity/school/work/childcare and feel good about what you’re doing inside and outside the home? How can the fish finger hour be just a period of time, rather than the barrier between you and what you really want to spend your time doing?  Some do seem to get stuck in a permanent fish finger hour: a lack of good-quality part-time and/or flexible work can spell the difference between being able to keep involved in work, and finding yourself full-time at home because it’s all too complicated to organise, for too small a monetary return.

If you do step off the career ladder to cover fish finger hours, and expect to step back on, it can be punished in employment terms.  As a senior someone said to me recently ‘it’s not that people think the worse of you, it’s just that you haven’t been there’.  To which I replied ‘not there when? Could it be in the crucial years between lower-middle and upper-middle rankings for many people in organisations?’ Quite likely.  So the question is how to square the circle – how to be there and not be there? How to take a break ‘strategically’?  How to make the system work for you? Have I done it?  Only a little at times… How many men are asking themselves any of this?  That is a fundamental question.

All this pondering led me to the classic analyst position of turning the problem on its head.

When was the fish finger hour joyful rather than interminable?  Sometimes when you try something new and involve the children in making tea – so they pour in something, stir the panful, read out instructions: they have ownership and are delighted by the results (however they taste). I’m sure there’s a management manual there – make people feel helpful and they’ll do anything for you: even behave while you phone someone else entirely….. the power of the transferrable skill. After all, most careers have fish finger hours of their own – e.g. the gap between current position and next progression; the gap between useful discussion and the end of a meeting …

The domestic fish finger hour can also be brilliant when spent with like-minded others – benign neglect or intense involvement of children follows – either can work in team activity. The addition of wine and spicy snacks (for which the management manual has probably been abolished by now) can also help – handled correctly it can be ‘a way’ of doing things: less transferrable with unknown quantities (either people or alcohol)…. Whatever the way, what makes the fish finger hour bearable is throwing some energy and creativity at the problem – even when you don’t feel like it. Sounds all the more like work…..

Issues of affordability of childcare have been much in the news lately, and rightly so.  The UK has some of the most expensive childcare in Europe, coupled with long working hours and still not enough flexibility in jobs or in childcare services.  The fish finger hour is what we really need to fix: enabling working parents (of either sex) to sustain position in the workplace whilst picking up their children’s needs in the evenings – and not incurring enormous costs for either doing so for a period, or outsourcing the job.  The fish finger hour offers some clues as to how to mix employment and home life better.  At the end of the day, the fish finger hour should be just that: an hour of necessary and sometimes enjoyable activity, not an eternal barrier to working out how to get to where we want to be.

Dinner at 6? If only …

My heart sinks at Yvette Cooper being quoted as saying that Ed Balls ‘would have starved’ if he was the kind of husband who expected ‘dinner at 6’.  Why? Because in most even moderately senior jobs the idea that anyone, man or woman, would regularly be home in time to cook a dinner served at 6 has become a pipe dream.  In term of work-life balance, dinner at six is just not the issue any more; how either or both parents manage to fit in any family life at the end of each day is what matters.  A man ‘expecting dinner at 6’ would not only be frequently disappointed, he’d be a dinosaur.   Whilst I am very much in support of the idea that we should all be able to read about how people ‘at the top of their game’ sort work-life balance, I’m not sure this kind of comment is either realistic or helpful.  Let’s face it, how many evenings is Ed (Shadow Chancellor) let alone Yvette (Shadow Home Secretary) really home at six? If their reality reflects that of senior echelons of corporate life in terms of hours and responsibility, then the answer must be ‘rarely’.

The idea that dual-earning heterosexual couples might find that the main obstacle to equality is his desire for an early dinner, really should be given its own early bath.  Most ‘work rich time poor’ couples might be grateful if dinner were regularly possible at 8 (and cooked by either party).  The issues for most men and women whose jobs earn enough to justify absence from the six o’clock tea table, are how do they afford the child care to cover this gap in the timetable, or who is going to take the career hit to get the flexible hours which might accommodate feeding their children at six, if not the whole family.  In fairness, I haven’t read the whole piece and maybe this quote is taken out of context, but it does a disservice to both men and women to suggest that sitting down to a full meal at six is really the main issue here.  Long working hours, perceptions of prestige and the inequalities imposed by the gender pay gap keep many of us arguing until midnight, rather than expecting dinner at six.  

2013: a year for action on gender equality?

Oscar Wilde once said that ‘the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about’. On that basis, 2012 was something of a triumph for women’s issues – violence against women, rape and the need to achieve greater gender equality the corridors of power,  all remained high on the public agenda.  However, in terms of rape and violence against women, the talk often reminded us how jawdroppingly sexist many powerful men remain (I blogged on this in August); and in terms of gender equality in business and politics, the talk has been accompanied by little concrete action -  in this country at least. We now have a smaller proportion of women in the Cabinet than before the re-shuffle, and attempts to introduce quotas for women in boardrooms throughout the EU have been thwarted for the meantime.

Against this backdrop, it was something of a tonic to read the UN’s gender equality timeline   for the year, which shows that there has been some progress in women’s position in society and in power in many parts of the world.  Among the highlights, Algeria and Senegal have significantly increased the proportion of women in their parliaments to just over 30% and 43% respectively (the UK falls in at 60^th in the world, equal with Malawi, with just over 22% of parliamentarians being women). The Council of Europe adopted a Convention of Preventing and Combating Violence against women and Domestic Violence which has been signed by 25 member States, but still requires countries to ratify it in order that it may come into force.  In October, the first International Day of the Girl Child highlighted the costs of child marriage and measures being taken to prevent it.  And just before Christmas, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution banning Female Genital Mutilation – a practice discussed here in July.

So, sometimes slowly and iteratively, sometimes more rapidly, progress in gender equality can be made.  As India confronts its poor record on sexual violence and Pakistan donates to a fund for girls’ education named after Malala, we should all resolve to make 2013 a year of action in gender equality.

Turning round the oil tanker: parental leave and flexible working reforms

Recent reforms of parental leave entitlements, and the extension of the right to request flexible working arrangements to all employees, may be seen as an attempt to change the culture of work/life balance in the UK.  Attempts at culture change are often contested and incomplete, and this one – born out of a restive Coalition – is no exception.

Many have pointed out the possible shortcomings of changing mothers’ basic entitlement in maternity leave to 2 weeks: possible expectation of early return to work; difficulties maintaining breastfeeding; inadequate recovery time following birth. However, mothers do remain entitled to extended parental leave beyond this brief maternity leave. Men’s entitlement to parental leave can only come to them via employed mothers who return to work and transfer remaining leave to them – this has been identified as a lost opportunity for greater sharing in parenthood. Both sets of concerns are worth voicing, but it is the second which is likely to prove more decisive in terms of (lack of) impact on the ground.  In practice, without independent entitlement to parental leave, the number of men taking up the opportunity to care for their infants is limited. In practice as well, all the evidence is that women will continue to take a substantial period of leave in their children’s early lives. The Scandinavian countries show not only that ‘daddy months’ work effectively to encourage fathers to take leave, but also that women continue to take up more parental leave.

Why does this matter?  Anyone interested in gender equality has to acknowledge that the ‘traditional’ pattern of men-as-workers, women-as-carers has a long reach.  For all our progress, it is still all too easy to assume that men remain worker-providers first, whilst women have a ‘choice’ between paid employment and full-time motherhood, or some mix of employment and childcare spread over the working week.  In reality, of course, both men and women balance lives as people, partners (or not) and parents, and employment enables families to survive economically. Yet the ‘working father’ is barely a concept.  Meanwhile the ‘stay-at-home’ mother or father can be labelled as variously yummy, unproductive, emasculated or just plain ‘lucky’ in an economy and society which fails to value unpaid work,  and which is often judgemental about those not in paid employment.

You could say that the ‘flexible working for all’ aspect of the reforms is welcome, ‘de-stigmatising’ requests for flexibility from the ‘mummy track’.  But of course, it is still only a right to request flexibility, rather than an obligation on employers to provide it, so we will have to see how fast the culture of long hours and presenteeism can be turned around. Holding your breath may not be the best strategy.  The reforms have at least wakened up the debate around the possibilities of remote working, or, more radically, the greater distribution of employment throughout society, if shorter hours became a norm.  But some jobs can never be done anywhere except on-site, and we still have the problem of maintaining adequate earnings, made only greater in a climate of wage stagnation. There’s a lot of attention on providing more childcare in the pre-school years to facilitate parents’ employment, but there’s still a big gap between school hours and working hours which creates a whole other problem, lasting over ten years for most families.

All these issues are still confounded by the ‘standard worker’ being seen as a man who works full-time away from home, and whose period of maximum career and earnings progression coincides with the peak years for childbearing.  If we really want equality, we have to enable men to take breaks for parenthood, as well as encouraging women to maintain positions in employment. That way unpaid work becomes everyone’s work, and paid work can be sustained more easily, even with breaks.  There’s still a lot to do.

 

Should there be a Power List for women?

The Woman’s Hour Power List: is this really a case of too much of a metropolitan good thing?  Perhaps the ‘Power List’ of 100 influential women would be less problematic if we women actually had more of the stuff it’s measuring. A Guardian article recently described the list as ‘patronising’ which seems overdoing it in a context of high female unemployment, and sexual harassment figures which indicate it’s by no means a matter of ‘case solved’ for British women. The collective sense of women as disadvantaged used to be a rallying point, and this sense of disadvantage does seem to have shifted, which is a good thing.  But shifted to what?  A situation where as long as you are educated and childfree you are all right? – lapse in either or both, and access to any Power List becomes much more precarious for many. Even this year the gender pay gap stands at 15% in the UK.

The Power List can show that women (some mothers) are achieving highly in the workplace and in terms of status; the real breakthrough will be when it doesn’t matter whether they are women or not.  We don’t seem to be in that place yet, which is why we still need reminding.  There are women out there – not necessarily always in the CEO posts –  but who are at the heart of how and why their workplaces operate effectively, and who have innovated in specific fields, and the list should show them up.  With more equally-shared  parental leave (as in Scandinavia) more fathers and mothers could work more flexibly and spend less time in separate spheres. Then we might have a more level playing – and paying – field.  In terms of future prospects perhaps I have to trust my son who’s in secondary school.  He says that ‘in my generation we don’t think gender matters’ …. I’ll believe it fully when he can still say it aged 40. Until then keep reading – and discussing –  the Power Lists.

Sex and Politics

Once upon a time I had dinner in the House with family members invited by a Labour Lord.  The lord was old-school of humble origins and had worked his way up with self-taught alacrity.  One thing he said always stuck with me: ‘Politics is what happens when there’s more than one person in the room’. It’s rather a good reminder that how we relate to one another (or not) quickly becomes about judgement, relative status, rules and conventions, and, yes, power.  What makes the whole shebang so interesting.

Sex, on the other hand, does not automatically happen when there’s more than one person in the room: but listening to the Assange extradition controversy – in particular the ramblings of Galloway (and his depressing echoes elsewhere) you begin to wonder if a surprising proportion of the male establishment really thinks so.  The fall-out from Akin’s rape comments in the USA is similarly unedifying. Rape is defined as sex without consent – that’s it. How sex comes about is by consent: if that’s not there, the act is reduced to one of power.

Those who champion Assange at the expense of the women bringing charges in Sweden show that they have confused sex and power – and that they see it all as power politics – ironic for all the talk of free speech and open democracy. Whether you think there is a conspiracy or not is irrelevant to the sexual assault charges: the charges must be answered. Is it a coincidence that those defending Assange most vociferously are predominantly male, while those speaking out for his need to answer charges have been predominantly female?  Surely that’s not politics is it?  It certainly isn’t sexy.

FGM in the UK: not ok

The debate around female genital mutiliation (FGM) has gained some prominence through the reports from Sue Lloyd Roberts, featured on Newsnight last week.

It’s not the kind of subject anyone really wants to dwell on, but perhaps it’s about time we did.  It’s always interesting to see the differences between British and French responses to similar problems.

At the intersection of individual, cultural, and societal rights, the French are consistent: if you live in France, you are subject to French law and the separation of cultural and legal rights and practices.

In Britain, in over thirty years of outlawing FGM, we have prosecuted no-one for cutting females, even though the practice is illegal; in France a hundred cases have been prosecuted in the same time period.  French medical professionals routinely examine children’s genitalia in health check-ups to ensure that carers are clear that the practice is illegal, and any mutilation can be surgically corrected as far as possible.  Although figures are extremely difficult to collate, anecdotally the UK is viewed as a ‘safe haven’ for those who wish to practise FGM on their daughters.  There is a view that examining young girls’ private parts may be awkward or even rights-infringing in itself, but this is hard to equate with the impact of FGM in terms of physical pain, trauma and psychological and sexual consequences.  Isn’t this a far greater infringement than any qualms one may have over checking that a young girl’s genitals look as they should?  On Newsnight last week, a group of young women from Bristol who have made a film campaigning against FGM, made this point.

Women should not be deprived of their sexuality in the name of ‘tradition’.  In Britain we should be doing everything in our power to ensure that FGM does not occur on our watch.