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The mothers who fit flexible second-chance work around their children

From the Daily Telegraph, 25th October 2008

Does motherhood mean jumping off the career ladder? Tamsin Kelly meets a new generation of women who have ditched the power dressing and boardroom battles for flexible part-time work that can fit around their children

Your maternity leave is over. Your baby is safely installed in a nursery, or with a child minder, or in whatever other child-care arrangement you agonised over. You've managed to fit into your work clobber and get to your job on time. Ta-dah - you're a working mother.

Except it's not quite how it used to be. Perhaps your previous job has been sidelined "because we know you have to get back to the baby", maybe the work simply doesn't have the same interest for you that it did before, or perhaps it's the impromptu drinks after work that you've had to rule out.

You may settle into a practicable routine and not always miss your child. But, unless you're one of the few lucky enough to have a fascinating can't-imagine-not doing-it job and are paid enough to afford an enviable support structure, the arrival of any more children marks the point when working full-time stops making any financial, logistical or emotional sense.

What we women want is to be there for our children and still have a job that doesn't leave us in financial deficit after paying for child care and travel. We want a job that is interesting, challenging and gives us a sense of self separate from family life.

For an increasing number of women, that means a second-chance career with flexible hours, often in an area that wouldn't have occurred to them as an option before they had children.

Since 2003, the right to request flexible working (and have employers give this proper consideration) has been enshrined in law for parents of children under six, and is due to be extended to children under 16 next April, but worries over the survival of small businesses may cause a delay.

Nevertheless, seven million women currently work flexibly, whether part-time, from home or as freelances and, perhaps predictably, only six per cent of employed mothers actually want to work full-time.

In just five years, there's been a dramatic shift in women's perception of work and the realisation that they don't need to shoehorn their new selves into their old jobs. My children's former child minder, Ann Conroy, hasn't had a single request for full-time child care in the past three years.

"I used to look after three children from 8.30am until 6.30pm while their parents worked full-time," she says. Now she keeps a complicated rota of children coming to her for two, three or four days. "I don't know any nannies or minders who look after children full-time now."

Antonia Chitty, author of Family Friendly Working, says we're seeing a loosening of the stark either/or choice between full-time working or stay-at-home motherhood. "We've realised it doesn't have to be all or nothing, we can make choices and have flexibility," she says.

Chitty, 38, from Bexhill, East Sussex, is typical of this trend for a flexible approach. She relaunched her career after having two children (now aged six and three), but cheerfully calls herself "unemployable", in the traditional sense.

"I'm 19 weeks pregnant with my third child, so after a stint at the computer I like to sit in a comfy chair and have a cup of tea," she says. "Add in my ideal of a job that's 9-3, that works around school holidays and one that I can take time off for inset days, school plays and assemblies and, like a huge number of women, I'm basically unemployable."

Nevertheless, since leaving full-time work five years ago, Chitty has forged a career as an author and in public relations. She specialises in promoting the start-up businesses of women with children.

"I was doing that classic thing of spending all my money on child care while resenting someone else bringing up my daughter," she says. "I volunteered myself for a magazine article on women who were unhappy with their work/life balance and had a session with a life coach.

"She pointed out that I had all the skills to work from home and that people would pay for those skills. Now I get to choose the hours I work and spend time with my children.

"Having children does seem to spark creativity. Once you've had a baby, doing a job that you're not very passionate about and that keeps you away from your child just doesn't work any more."

But too often women trade flexibility for work that falls far below their skills and experience. If, pre-children, you've managed a sales team and had a 20-year career, are you really going to be fully stimulated as a classroom assistant?

The dilemma of how to start second-chance careers and reprioritise working life around children is aggravated if you've had a break of many years, never mind if it's been spent micro-managing children's diaries and running the Parent-Teacher Association. The title of New York novelist Meg Wolitzer's book, The Ten-Year Nap, may have made some bristle with its intentional irony, but the subject of four women at odds over what to do after 10 years out of the workplace is familiar to thousands of women.

"My husband is very keen for me to go back to work, obviously because it will help financially, but also because, as he puts it, 'Now you'll see what it's like for me,'" says Emma Symons, 45, a former IT consultant whose last child has now started in reception class.

But it won't be the same as it is for her husband. She'll face the double whammy of feeling like a dinosaur in an office with technology and jargon that's moved on, while knowing that her children will miss her.

"I'm torn, thinking of 101 excuses why no one else can do school pick-up like I can, and yet I can't devote the rest of my life to piano practice and swimming lessons," she says. "I'll go nuts."

Three years ago, Karen Mattison and Emma Stewart started Women Like Us (www.womenlikeus.org.uk), matching women who wanted to find part-time work after children with employers who wanted to tap into an experienced talent base of "lost women".

They were inspired by meeting so many others like themselves at the school gates - women at a career crossroads with experience and intelligence to offer, but without the confidence to find a job that suited them.

From a kitchen-table start, they now have two offices, employ 40 staff and cover the whole of London, with a recommendation for national expansion by the Government commission Women in Work. They recruit school-gate mothers from 120 locations, putting mailshots in children's school bags and holding regular coffee mornings. In addition to recruitment, they offer career coaching.

"Women might come for coaching to build up confidence, especially after a career gap or a bad interview experience, or for help with updating their CVs, but most often it's because they just don't know what they want to do and how to transfer the skills they already have," says Mattison, who has three children (10, seven, and two) and works three days a week in the office.

"It can be a very emotional moment, because for many women it's the first time they've had the opportunity and space to think about themselves, not just their children or their partner, and what they really want to do with their lives.

"We want to encourage women to realise their full potential within part-time work."

For case studies visit the Daily Telegraph web site.

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