Biglaw, Partner Issues, Women's Issues

Women And The Panopticon Of The Law (Part 3): 'A Working Mother Must Be A General'

Some insights on what columnist Jayne Backett sees working and not working in the context of juggling family and a demanding career.

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family young partner with kidI am lucky to have two children; they’re six and nearly four and they make me so happy, although I’ve had to adjust to mess (see my last post on OCD), noise, and feeling like a constant underachiever on the mom front.

I am the classic depiction of Mila Kunis’s character in Bad Moms, with my bakery bought yum-yums in a plastic box at the school home bake sale, dashing into parents’ evening late and sitting at the back, and sending emails to work whilst I am supposed to be listening to this term’s curriculum.

I’ve fallen out of favor with the other parents at my daughter’s school this term because it’s my duty to make sure my daughter emerges from her school cultured and appreciative of the arts, and so I asked in open forum when the children would learn a musical instrument. The following week, the whole class came home with ocarinas. This was wonderfully educational because: (1) I didn’t have the faintest clue what an ocarina is; and (2) I learned that it makes a sound that makes my ears want to bleed.

I don’t hold any answers on how to manage a family alongside a cripplingly demanding career, but I do have some insights on what I see working and not working in the context of juggling the two, and I have seen it done successfully by single parents, parents where both partners work, and parents where one works and the other does not.

The challenges mostly boil down to this:

1) Expectations on your workplace, your partner, and/or your care network;
2) The expense and reliability of your childcare; and
3) Finding time to spend with your children.

George Banks in Mary Poppins wasn’t far wrong when he said “a British Nanny must be a General,” and since Mary Poppins hasn’t floated in on the East winds to take care of my children, I have had to put some rigid boundaries in place to deal with the issues above.

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1) Setting expectations:

The main source of stress for women in the workplace quite often appears to come from the mismatch of expectations society has on fathers. I see so many mothers having to ask their workplace for all of the necessary concessions to care for children. I see so many mothers having to run home for sick children, pack the school bags, attend the school events, and help their children with homework. Working mothers should not face these pressures alone, which may mean engaging more involvement from the other parent or activating the care network to a greater degree to deal with these things.

I see some grandparent and family and friend networks successfully helping working parents deal with these issues, but we do live in ways that increasingly isolate us from those networks. Gone are the days when hordes of close relatives would arrive as soon as you give birth to rotate the cooking, cleaning, bathing, and cuddling duties. Most mothers now have to do it all largely alone and it’s unrealistic, so if you can’t pay for the help and you don’t have a support network, you have to look closer to home to share these responsibilities more equally with your partner. If that means you cook in bulk one Sunday for the week ahead and he does it the next, so you can spend your second Sunday relaxing, so be it. All should be fair in love and housework.

If one person shoulders all of the burden and makes all of the concessions, it’s feasible that their partner’s career will fly (because they essentially have no commitments) and the conceding partner’s career will flail, because they repeatedly look like a muddled mess fretting over family organizational matters as well as workplace pressures.

I am blessed to have worked in two law firms where the teams place value on family life and agile working has been the norm for men and women. The work being done to a high standard and on deadline is placed above whether my jacket has been on the back of the chair and management in both firms have sent bold messages to the naysayers that the tides have changed and that they are to respect and accommodate different working practices. My experience is that it creates a productive workforce. Certainly, the agile working parents at my last firm were top billers in the team, and studies indicate that increased autonomy in the workplace can be more motivating than money.

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2) Childcare obstacles

For international readers, you should stand shocked at how much we pay in the UK for childcare and how inflexible the business of childcare can be here. The OECD has published a report on the matter indicating that the UK has the highest net income percentage spend on childcare costs of the 35 industrialized countries analyzed. According to this study, we spend 34% of our family net income on full-time childcare compared to 26% in the US, 17% in the Netherlands, and 10% in Germany and France. Coupled with that hefty financial shackle, good nurseries are in short supply and don’t always open and close at hours that suit the needs of their clientele. Until the UK government fully recognizes the barriers that childcare costs have on our economy, the ability for both parents of young children to work will remain severely hampered. Without proper state-subsidized solutions, many families cannot afford to have both parents work because it costs more to pay for childcare than the second working parent would earn. Simple economics rule behavior. I know hundreds of stay-at-home parents who would love to work part-time or full-time, but wouldn’t dream of doing so until they earn more than their childcare costs them. In turn, the economy suffers because the longer someone remains out of work, the harder it is to return. Therefore, more often than not, mothers are forced to give up work and they get into a skills depreciation cycle, they lose confidence, and the result is that we have less working women in our society and, consequently, less chance of women emerging as leaders in their fields.

I always encourage women with children who I mentor to stay in the workplace somehow, anyhow. This can be achieved by doing contract work (which is now very popular in the legal profession), by doing part-time or agile working, or by doing pro-bono/charity work. I would also urge women on parental leave to stay in contact at work on their leave periods (which tend to be longer in the UK than the US), as you want to keep yourself at the forefront of your colleagues’ minds.

3) Precious time

Finally, it’s crucial to find ways to spend quality time with your children when you are a working parent and in our busy lives, boundaries need to be set in stone about what you expect of yourself and what others expect of you. You have to be militant about your time. One way to achieve this is to list out your ultimate long- and short-term goals and then, every time someone puts a meeting in your diary that might result in you missing something that’s important to your children, ask yourself if that meeting is aligned to your goals list. If it’s not, ditch it and get home on time. At weekends and during holidays, carve out chunks of time where you don’t look at work emails or social media or text messages, so you can commit wholehearted attention to your children and, most importantly, shed all guilt associated with these empowering behaviors.

Jayne BackettJayne Backett is a partner at Fieldfisher LLP in London specializing in banking transactions, with a particular focus on real estate financing. Fieldfisher is a 600-lawyer European law firm, with a first-class reputation in a vast number of sectors, specifically, financial institutions, funds, technology and fintech, retail, hotels and leisure, and health care. Jayne has a depth of experience in mentoring and training junior lawyers and has a passion for bringing discussions on diversity in law to the forefront. She can be reached by email at [email protected], and you can follow her on Twitter: @JayneBackett.

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