Can't stay, must pick up kids
- MARGUERITE MCKINNON
- 4 July 2008
Photo credit: ANTHONY GEERNAERT
“No I’m not a super mum!” laughs my colleague Laura, a mother of two who works three days a week in the office, and at home for the rest. Laura’s one of those people you have to admire: one of the growing workforce of mums who are returning to work because they love it or because the cost of living has given them no other option.
But a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald took an entirely different view of working mums that may produce a few howls of protest. On 22 April, Louise Robinson wrote in the Heckler column: “Why is it that colleagues of mine with children slink out of working overtime, every time? “When it’s their turn to put the extra hours in at the office, they pull out the ‘but I’ve got a kid at home’ card and magically, they get out of having to stay back. And who makes up for it? Me and all my fellow childless colleagues.” Louise ends her article by asking: “If everyone in my office had kids, no one would get any work done before 10am and we would all be out the door at 4.30pm. How productive would that be?”
For the record, I’m not married and I don’t have any kids so, by this standard, I should be equally furious.
Colleagues of mine who have kids always used to get first pick for time off at Christmas and Easter: “Christmas is a time for families and little kids, you understand?’ So I missed out on the Christmas and New Year break for 15 years, until last year when I had to travel for a family wedding. It was also a common sight not to see those colleagues when a child was sick, or they had to leave early to pick them up from daycare or ‘something came up’.
But unlike Louise, I remember seeing these colleagues before they scampered off looking frazzled and stressed as they clocked off one job, only to clock on to the one job that never ends: being a parent. How could anyone get upset with these people when they are probably doing more work, day and night, than childless workers could possibly imagine? And remember one third of Australia’s 1.66 million small business operators are women! Many are parents too.
Look at the odds against working mums. A University of Melbourne study found new mums who go back to work, even causally, are up to three times as likely to stop breastfeeding after six months than those who stay home. The Federal Government’s Office for Women reports women earn around 20% less than men, and end up considerably worse off when they retire.
So until the Federal Government introduces widespread paid maternity leave, I won’t mind one bit staying back to write an article and cover for a colleague who has to juggle work and parenthood. The good parents are doing all of us a favour by raising good people for the future – hopefully by then, government policies will give parents a break.
Marguerite McKinnon is a journalist for Channel Seven’s Today Tonight.
