Mums returning to work
Women returning to work after children have a tough time convincing employers they have relevant skills and commitment, writes Lynnette Hoffman.
WHEN she had her first child at 36, Kirsten Lees had already racked up years of experience and built a successful career in technology management and educational publishing.
She took a break from her job and promised to be back soon, but things didn’t go exactly as planned. Lees, author of Let Go of My Leg, a guide to returning to work after children, had a second child quickly after her first, and her planned short sabbatical stretched to three years. When she was ready to return to work, her employer had closed down.
She soon realised that finding meaningful employment allowing time with her family wasn’t going to be as effortless as she had hoped. “It was a terrible shock to my ego,” Lees says. “For months I barely got a call back, and that really made me stop and think I had changed, and the way I approached the world out there needed to change as well.”
Like many professional women returning to work after children, Lees had high expectations. She wanted a well-paying, challenging job that made the most of her plentiful skills, just like she’d had a few years earlier. “But I also knew that I was no longer prepared to work 70 hours a week to get it,” she says.
According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data from 2001-2002, there are almost 700,000 women at home who say they would like to either work fulltime, or work more hours than they currently are.
But for many the process of taking that next step is daunting, says Lees, who interviewed 60 women for her book. “You’ve invested all this time in your career and in your sense of self, etc, and then you go through this change in your life that informs you and expands you, but also shifts your perspective — and there’s no one out there to help you.”
She says the barriers are both real and perceived. Many women worry whether their skills will still be valued. “Often they don’t know how to promote themselves, or they’ve forgotten how to ask for what they want.” The reality is that most employers want the best person, so if two CVs are sitting on the desk, both from qualified, skilled applicants, but one has been actively engaged in the workforce and the other has similar experience from a few years back, you can guess who most employers will pick.
“If your experience is three, five or seven years out of date you are in a weak position next to someone with the same qualifications but more recent experience. It is as simple as that,” Lees writes. “And there is prejudice,” she says.
Employers do worry about divided priorities, and do continue to equate long hours with hard work despite studies showing that’s not always the case.
Melissa Kemper, general manager at the Sydney-based IT consultancy Directory Concepts, knows first hand about prejudice. Kemper was “made redundant” from her previous position as a financial planner at another Sydney company just three days before her maternity leave was to begin, despite the fact that she had trained someone to take over part of her job.
She had notified her employer, supplied all the right paperwork and sent multiple emails asking to negotiate her work after the baby — saying that ideally she’d like six months off before returning three days a week, but would be willing to work fulltime if required. She received no response.
“I started getting less work and then my desk was moved downstairs into a corner. I could feel that they were pushing me out,” she says. The experience cast shades of doubt when she began looking for work four months after her daughter, Charli, was born. “When I was looking at returning I was apprehensive about telling employers I was a new mother. I wasn’t sure if I should bring it up. Because of my past experience with my previous employer I was concerned that I’d be put on the bottom of the list. There’s a perception that you’ll either get pregnant again, or your child will get sick and you’ll need to take more time off.”
In fact those scenarios are often off the mark, and because many mothers are keen to prove themselves they are often “very effective and efficient” and will work weekends or make time up elsewhere if they do ever need time off to care for a child, Kemper says.
But sometimes getting the opportunity to show that proves the hard part. If there’s one rule of thumb when it comes to making a comeback, it’s that persistency pays. It can take time to find a role that strikes the balance of flexibility and challenge that many parents returning to work are looking for. Many women become sick of searching and opt to start their own businesses, which is ultimately what Lees did when she began a Sydney-based consultancy.
“I started trying to find a job with someone else because I wanted clear lines between home and work and an opportunity to mix with other people during the day, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t find what I was looking for,” she says. But doing nothing wasn’t an option either.
“If I waited from the time my first child was born until my last child was in preschool that would be eight years. My brain would be soggy by then.” For Lees, consulting from home and writing a research and interview based book helped keep her foot in the door.
Kemper’s path back to the workplace was considerably less painful than she imagined it might be after her initial difficulties. Three or four companies approached her offering work — a result of networking more than luck — and six months after her daughter was born, Kemper had a three-day-a-week job for Directory Concepts, a company she describes as “proactive”, and “very supportive”. She gradually expanded her role from financial controller and now works four days a week as general manager. Still, it’s not always easy.
“The hardest thing is the perception of other employees, even though they don’t say anything and are never disrespectful. You feel they are conscious of the fact that you have to pick up your child at 5pm and so you can’t stay late like they do, and sometimes you feel guilty. So I work as hard as possible when I’m here. I skip lunches. I just try to get all my work done between 8 and 5 and do things as efficiently as possible.
