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Sophia
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52
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,1...1232242,00.html
It beats working
Women fought hard for the right to be working mothers - but now many want to step off the career ladder and swap the boardroom for full-time motherhood. Is this the failure of one movement or the beginning of another?
Lisa O'Kelly
Sunday June 6, 2004
The Observer
It is Monday morning. Caroline Sherwood, mother-of-three, has just finished
the school run. She heads for a coffee shop in the high street of the affluent district of west London where she lives. By the time she gets there, the tables are already packed with women like her,
mo
thers in their thirties and forties, some with toddlers in tow. If you ignore the Juicy Couture gym clothes and mobile phones, it could be a scene from the 1960s - except for the fact that most of these mothers have degrees.
Caroline has a BA in history and the group of friends she is meeting are graduates in economics, law, English and politics.
They all have impressive CVs, across a range of professions: banking, the law, publishing, advertising. But recently those CVs have not been updated. Furthering their careers is not on these women's agendas at the moment, nor at any moment in the near future. They have opted out.
'I prefer to say we've seen the light,' says Caroline, who gave up a job as a showbusiness agent to stay home with her children. Her friend Janet, a corporate lawye
r who stepped out of the workforce when her second child was born, agrees. 'Doing well at work is some people's definition of success,' she says. 'But not mine. Not any more.&
#39; <b
r>
There are more women like Caroline and her friends around these days: educated, purposeful, high-flyers who are no longer prepared to make the compromises required of a mother who works. Ann Grafton, creative director of Colefax and Fowler, resigned from her Ô�Å¡£250,000 job to spend more time with her children. Lisa Gordon, former corporate development director of Chry
salis, the media group, made headlines when she said she was leaving the fast lane to concentrate on her family. So did Helen Liddell MP, when she resigned last summer as Secretary of State for Scotland. Among my own university-educated friends, only two now work full-time.
Not so long ago it seemed not only perfectly possible but absolutely inevitable that women would take over the working world. Think back to the end of the Nineties. Ther
e had been a feminist revolution over two decades which was all about women grabbing their fair share of power and making as much money as men. There had been a female prime minister
(although s
he was arguably no friend to women).
It was the time of the superwoman - Nicola Horlick was the role model, admired even by the Daily Mail. We expected that by the new millennium women would be leading half of the FT Top 100 companies, running the judiciary, dominating the Cabinet, overseeing the BBC. We saw no reason why women, be they single or mothers, could not d
o - and have - it all.
So what's happened?
In many respects, the barriers of 30 or 40 years ago have come down. There are many more women than men in higher education - over a million, in contrast with 785,000 men. Sixty three per cent of undergraduates at British medical schools are female, as are 60 per cent of law students. On business courses, 55 per cent of students are women. After graduation, they are recruited by top firm
s in all fields.
Then they stop. Despite all those women qualifying from medical school, only 20 per cent of hospital consultants are female. Although they outnumber m
ale law graduat
es by 10 per cent, only 37 per cent of solicitors are women and just 24 per cent of those are partners in the firms where they work. In the top 10 law firms, the number of female partners is only 15 per cent. Among the FT Top 100 companies, 22 now have more than one woman on their boards, yet 32 have no women at all. There is still just one woman chief executive, Pearson's Marjorie
Scardino, and one female chairman, Baroness Hogg at 3i.
The story is the same in America. A survey by research firm Catalyst found that 26 per cent of women at the cusp of the most senior levels of management don't want promotion. A fifth of those mentioned in Fortune magazine's list of most powerful women over the years have left their jobs - mostly voluntarily - for a better home life.
We used to blame these kinds o
f figures on the glass ceiling. But the talk today is all about the 'maternal wall', which means that if you have children and you want to see them for more th
an a couple of hour
s a day, then you are blocked from doing the kind of job that is generally defined as high-powered. It is not that mothers are inca pable of doing such a job; it is rather that they are increasingly finding they do not want to.
This is controversial territory. There are still many committed mothers out there who are also ambitious and talented and successful. There are also committed mothers who
are ambitious and talented and would be more successful if they weren't thwarted by lingering double standards and chauvinism. However it is not necessarily always the case that the workplace has failed women. It is also true that women are rejecting the workplace. Obviously not all women can afford to take time out from work. Those that do are often from the female elite who can afford to choose, who have partners who earn
enough for two. But these are more than likely to be the very same women who used to strive for boardroom clout.
'There is definitely a change in
climate.....
MUCH MORE AT LINK
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,1...1232242,00.html
It beats working
Women fought hard for the right to be working mothers - but now many want to step off the career ladder and swap the boardroom for full-time motherhood. Is this the failure of one movement or the beginning of another?
Lisa O'Kelly
Sunday June 6, 2004
The Observer
It is Monday morning. Caroline Sherwood, mother-of-three, has just finished
the school run. She heads for a coffee shop in the high street of the affluent district of west London where she lives. By the time she gets there, the tables are already packed with women like her,
mo
thers in their thirties and forties, some with toddlers in tow. If you ignore the Juicy Couture gym clothes and mobile phones, it could be a scene from the 1960s - except for the fact that most of these mothers have degrees.
Caroline has a BA in history and the group of friends she is meeting are graduates in economics, law, English and politics.
They all have impressive CVs, across a range of professions: banking, the law, publishing, advertising. But recently those CVs have not been updated. Furthering their careers is not on these women's agendas at the moment, nor at any moment in the near future. They have opted out.
'I prefer to say we've seen the light,' says Caroline, who gave up a job as a showbusiness agent to stay home with her children. Her friend Janet, a corporate lawye
r who stepped out of the workforce when her second child was born, agrees. 'Doing well at work is some people's definition of success,' she says. 'But not mine. Not any more.&
#39; <b
r>
There are more women like Caroline and her friends around these days: educated, purposeful, high-flyers who are no longer prepared to make the compromises required of a mother who works. Ann Grafton, creative director of Colefax and Fowler, resigned from her Ô�Å¡£250,000 job to spend more time with her children. Lisa Gordon, former corporate development director of Chry
salis, the media group, made headlines when she said she was leaving the fast lane to concentrate on her family. So did Helen Liddell MP, when she resigned last summer as Secretary of State for Scotland. Among my own university-educated friends, only two now work full-time.
Not so long ago it seemed not only perfectly possible but absolutely inevitable that women would take over the working world. Think back to the end of the Nineties. Ther
e had been a feminist revolution over two decades which was all about women grabbing their fair share of power and making as much money as men. There had been a female prime minister
(although s
he was arguably no friend to women).
It was the time of the superwoman - Nicola Horlick was the role model, admired even by the Daily Mail. We expected that by the new millennium women would be leading half of the FT Top 100 companies, running the judiciary, dominating the Cabinet, overseeing the BBC. We saw no reason why women, be they single or mothers, could not d
o - and have - it all.
So what's happened?
In many respects, the barriers of 30 or 40 years ago have come down. There are many more women than men in higher education - over a million, in contrast with 785,000 men. Sixty three per cent of undergraduates at British medical schools are female, as are 60 per cent of law students. On business courses, 55 per cent of students are women. After graduation, they are recruited by top firm
s in all fields.
Then they stop. Despite all those women qualifying from medical school, only 20 per cent of hospital consultants are female. Although they outnumber m
ale law graduat
es by 10 per cent, only 37 per cent of solicitors are women and just 24 per cent of those are partners in the firms where they work. In the top 10 law firms, the number of female partners is only 15 per cent. Among the FT Top 100 companies, 22 now have more than one woman on their boards, yet 32 have no women at all. There is still just one woman chief executive, Pearson's Marjorie
Scardino, and one female chairman, Baroness Hogg at 3i.
The story is the same in America. A survey by research firm Catalyst found that 26 per cent of women at the cusp of the most senior levels of management don't want promotion. A fifth of those mentioned in Fortune magazine's list of most powerful women over the years have left their jobs - mostly voluntarily - for a better home life.
We used to blame these kinds o
f figures on the glass ceiling. But the talk today is all about the 'maternal wall', which means that if you have children and you want to see them for more th
an a couple of hour
s a day, then you are blocked from doing the kind of job that is generally defined as high-powered. It is not that mothers are inca pable of doing such a job; it is rather that they are increasingly finding they do not want to.
This is controversial territory. There are still many committed mothers out there who are also ambitious and talented and successful. There are also committed mothers who
are ambitious and talented and would be more successful if they weren't thwarted by lingering double standards and chauvinism. However it is not necessarily always the case that the workplace has failed women. It is also true that women are rejecting the workplace. Obviously not all women can afford to take time out from work. Those that do are often from the female elite who can afford to choose, who have partners who earn
enough for two. But these are more than likely to be the very same women who used to strive for boardroom clout.
'There is definitely a change in
climate.....
MUCH MORE AT LINK