Give Me a Break:Am I the only working mother in the country to agree with Eddie Hobbs? You'd think the man had advocated child slavery judging by the reaction he's got. If you ask me, when you need a reality check, ask an accountant. A straight-talking accountant from Cork? Even better. The man tells it like it is, writes Kate Holmquist.
Women depth-charge their careers when they have children. Having built up their education and careers in their late teens and 20s, women turn around and destroy it all in their mid-30s by procreating. Their economic value plummets. Their employers resent the inconvenience of the maternity leave involved when a previously cherished employee has a baby - or, God forbid, several babies. I think that's the gist of what he said.
And he's absolutely correct. Anyone who thinks this isn't the case hasn't spoken to any real working mothers lately.
It's highly unusual for a working woman to scale the heights of her career unless a) she's so exceedingly well-paid that she can afford childcare and a cleaner and/or b) her husband (if she has one) is so exceedingly well-paid that he can afford childcare and a cleaner. Because, let's face it, looking after children and cleaning houses is what we women are really supposed to be doing, with maybe time for a bit of flower-arranging or tennis.
If a woman dares to have a career as opposed to a job, if she attempts to succeed equally in it with her male colleagues and not feel guilty about it, then she's truly deluded. With the first baby, she might just cope with balancing work and home responsibilities, but by the time the second comes along, she won't be earning enough after tax to pay for the childcare, much less the marriage counselling fees.
Children are such a pain. A real inconvenience, best seen and not heard. They don't just soak up valuable time and resources - they intrude on a female employee's head space, so that during the ad breaks for Desperate Housewives, she's thinking about how to make her kid do maths homework instead of focusing on the next day's crucial client meeting. Even worse, evenings when she should be working late or schmoozing influential people, she's running home to wash dishes and do laundry. And - don't get me wrong, I'm not sexist - the truth is she starts looking really exhausted all the time, which isn't great for morale in general.
It's well for Kate, you might say - hasn't she got a newspaper column, and didn't I see her on RTÉ last night presenting a TV documentary, and she's written two books. I can tell you now, hand on heart, that if I hadn't had kids, it would have been 10 books. It wouldn't have taken me 20 years in journalism to be able finally to say yes to presenting a TV programme, and I'd have a proper company pension instead of the pittance I have because I worked on contract, instead of as staff, for so many years for the sake of my children. That wasn't because I didn't want to spend more time in the office - I simply couldn't. Either the childcare expertise wasn't available, or I couldn't afford it.
Which brings me to single mothers. The coverage I've read of the Government's plans to get single parents out into education and working has been slightly skewed towards the pejorative, as though they would be forced to work. Over two decades, I've interviewed many young single mothers, and some not so young, and every one I met wanted to be out in education or working to make life better for her children. She couldn't improve her circumstances because she couldn't afford the childcare involved. You have to be earning an awful lot of money to be able, after tax, to pay for full-time childcare and still be able to subsist. Two children? Forget it.
But then, children are such a nuisance, aren't they? Why would any woman in her 20s - and in her right mind - have children, even when, medically speaking, she should be having them? The social convention is for women to wait until they are almost past it, fertility-wise, to even begin attempting to conceive. Yes, it's a pity that so many women can't conceive because it's too late, but isn't that the price they pay for having careers? This is madness - all of it. If we were a society that truly valued children, and truly valued the contribution of women, it wouldn't be an inconvenience to have a child at any age. Women would be assured of equal progress in their careers whether or not they were mothers. Women in their 20s who became pregnant and dared not to have abortions, would receive such wholehearted support in terms of income and childcare that being single would be no impediment at all.
A friend in the legal profession was telling me recently how the vast majority of talented apprentices coming to his firm are female, and yet all the bigwigs in the firm are male. As women solicitors reach their mid-30s and head towards 40, they gradually drop out. Even though women show proportionately more talent, they don't make it to the top.
It's the same in lots of professions. Women keep buying into the sad old "truth", as they see it, that a system that doesn't support working mothers will inevitably beat them down. They expect it to happen. They don't question it.
Which is why it makes me angry that women, instead of saying Eddie Hobbs is right, are in such denial of reality that they think he's being sexist. Eddie Hobbs is just telling the truth. This is a society that keeps women down by enticing them to believe that they can be equal in education and career, while all along knowing that women won't be able to stay the pace because society is engineered to prevent them succeeding if they become mothers.
