The Maternity Leave Gap

A large Italian restaurant, on a regular Friday night. A large round table with 4 mid-twenties ladies sitting chatting quietly and 2 empty chairs. Entering the restaurant, at a rushed pace Jo and I catch the eye of the waiter and order a bottle of dry white wine with 2 glasses and try to squeeze as carefully as possible through the packed tables, with our handbags and document cases we reach the table to the playful moaning of being late. We look at each other despairingly. The other ladies may be our friends but tonight is a girls dinner of 2 camps. The career climbers verses the maternal job squatters.

We all grew up together, we all went to the same school and left that school with the same high almost straight ‘A’ GCSE exams. Yet the differences are clear. Jo and I are the career climbers. Sitting enjoying a bottle of wine, (or two) over dinner chatting about recent events, shows we have been to, restaurants we have recently eaten at, latest holidays, advancements at work and plans for the next few months. Dressed in tailored suits, cracking stiletto heels, and teased hair, we have just left our city offices in the world of financial accounting after a non stop week and we sit on one side of the table facing a panel of our friends.

We can already predict the conversation tonight. We will get questioned about why we don’t want to throw away our calculators, ditch our laptops and drop a baby. The arguments will be ‘why wait’ ‘the job can wait’ blah blah blah. The fact is that we have heard it all before and all it does is help the restaurants takings because it leads to larger, richer deserts, and more glasses of wine.

Our friends don’t understand the concept of building up a career. Whereas Jo and I studied away for the last 8 years to develop our careers our friends have all taken short term jobs to earn them a bit of money, with the long term aim that once married and settled in a house they will drop the job to have children and ‘keep house’. Our friends sit on the other side of the table all predictably selecting the cheapest dish on the menu, whilst sipping at lemonades. Those with children talking purely about the child’s latest development and those without children talking about the deadlines with husbands about quitting their jobs and having children. In a modern world which we believe more and more woman are working career mothers, why do Jo and I feel so alien?

We are not child phobic, by contrast I actually run a childrens’ youth club. We are not against having children but we can’t quite work out how we would fit said children into our lives. We like our lifestyles. We are both married, have good jobs, earning decent money, with good promotional prospects. We work in male dominated offices and have spent years stating our claim to positions and promotions that the men in the office just shrug off with ” they will be off on maternity leave soon anyway” . Our friends have no comprehension of the concept of having to time having a baby into the climb up the career ladder as to avoid coming back a year later to find that all the spaces above you on the ladder have been filled and you find yourself helplessly sliding downwards.

It is especially hard for Jo as she is the breadwinner of her house. This is a concept that our friends have serious problems understanding. Luckily Jo has a significantly higher patience level than me and hasn’t snapped at anyone when they have suggested to her that she would survive if she took 6 months off, worked part time, or even quit altogether.

If I hadn’t been under Jo’s calming influence I would have blurted out that the suggestion we could survive on value brands, careful planning and cancelling all our well loved gym memberships, private health cover, uneconomical (yet fabulous) cars for a clapped out run-around is totally ludicrous and not an idea we actively entertain!

It is not that we think our friends are wrong in their choice. Perhaps we feel it to be a bit of a cop out, perhaps because we feel it to be an old fashioned view; but that makes us sound like big feminists and feminists we are not! Something inside says what a waste that our talented friends are happy working in a call centre, treading career water until the first opportunity arises to skip off and have kids. Perhaps we find it so frustrating because we have started on a route that we can’t walk away from. Success is something difficult to let go of, Perhaps we are just jealous of the route our friends have taken? There is no definite right or wrong answer, so for the moment the dinners will continue in 2 camps and the bar had better keep the wine cellar well stocke