Why Would Any Boss Hire a Woman?by Alexandra Shulman
Last week, I had a couple of days off. I spent a half-term afternoon with my son and wandered through the neighbourhood in search of ingredients for a slow-cooked sausage sauce for supper. Slow-cooked? Not a phrase in my usual domestic repertoire. As I walked through the residential streets toward the shops, the world appeared surreally quiet. There were women with pushchairs, the odd gang of teenagers, old men puffing cigarettes outside pubs – but to one used to the momentum of a bustling office at 3pm, it seemed both strange and stifling in its implacable ordinariness. It reminded me of how alone I felt during my maternity leave when I was one of those women pushing my baby home from the park as dusk began to draw in. That stroll encapsulated the conflicted way so many women feel about their working life and their need to balance home and family. I treasured what for me was stolen time to be a mother and homemaker, yet it also made me appreciate the liveliness and richness that my work brings. It is also the very issue that drives a stream of women into my office to discuss their futures, their maternity leaves, four-day working weeks, possible job shares, all now encouraged by recent legislation. Nobody can legislate a route through the conflict between work and motherhood. Nobody can predict the visceral love you feel for your children, the fear you have when they are small that when you are not physically there, they might come to harm. Neither can laws help the sickening exhaustion of endless, sleepless nights combined with working days and the seeming impossibility of achieving success as a worker, a mother, a wife, even at times as a human being. But while a slew of government policies are aimed at helping working women achieve a more satisfactory existence, are they not losing sight of the real workplace picture? And are they ignoring the evidence, not documented but heard in the beat of the tom-toms if you listen hard enough, that some of this legislation might even be harming women's chances of employment? I completely understand the decision of any woman to give up their job to stay at home with their children.
And it seems entirely reasonable that in many situations a woman who becomes a mother will want to trade in her role for something less demanding. But what I don't understand is the idea that you should be able to keep exactly the same job, with all the advantages that entails, and work less for it, regardless of how that affects the office or colleagues. I don't think I'm a monster. I currently employ a 90 per cent female staff on the editorial team at Vogue. Of them, 98 per cent are of childbearing age. Babies, children, the possibility of children, the difficulties in conception, the problems once they arrive – that is the stuff of the water cooler debate around here. I was in the same job when I had my one and only child in 1995. I took 18 weeks off. I remember when Sam was 12 weeks old, my boss called me to see 'how I was getting along'. He hoped I'd be back soon. It was meant to be an encouraging phone call, but I, like so many other women in that situation, felt a bolt of panic. What if I didn't get back soon? Would they still want me? Would I still be able to do the job? Legally, I and the several of my staff who were also pregnant could have taken longer off, but we all took the same length of leave and were propelled back to work by financial necessity and the sense that that was what one did. To abandon our job for more time just didn't seem the right thing to do. My mother – a journalist, too – had three children in the late Fifties and early Sixties. She took two weeks off and had to pretend to her male employers that pregnancy was a bit like flu – inconvenient and not worth discussing. November 10, 2009 Copyright © 2009 Daily Mail
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