Opinion: ‘It’s not only working mothers who benefit from flexible jobs’

In Victorian Britain, working mothers were generally seen as an economic problem – or at least the symptom of one. A mother who had to work for wages was probably someone whose husband had died, was unemployed, had become disabled or couldn’t earn enough to support the family.

As historian Helen McCarthy writes in Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood, the women didn’t always see themselves as victims. As one woman whose injured husband was well enough to take charge of the home told the Fabian Women’s Group: “It is such a nice rest for me to go out to work.”

Almost 150 years later, what it means to be a working mother has changed profoundly. As McCarthy puts it: “What was understood to be a social problem arising from economic pressure on families has become a social norm rooted in a more expansive set of needs, rights and preferences felt and asserted by mothers.”

But that doesn’t mean that mothers and fathers are now on equal terms in the world of work. A study published this month by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) in the UK found that large inequalities remain between men and women in terms of employment rates, working hours and hourly pay. In 2019, working women still earned 19 per cent less per hour than men. The gap has shrunk by five percentage points since the mid 1990s, with women’s improved educational performance explaining most of the change.

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Babies are now the biggest factor. The data show that when men become fathers, their average earnings are almost entirely unaffected. Women, on the other hand, experience sudden drops in terms of labour market participation and hours they work. That sets off a slower but long-lasting gender divergence in hourly wages as women either miss out on promotions or trade down to lower-paid jobs. This isn’t just the result of couples making a rational choice to prioritise the career of the higher earner. The same patterns appear in couples where the woman out-earned the man before the baby was born. Different studies in Denmark and Austria have found that more than 80 per cent of the gender gap can be explained by so-called “child penalties”.

The IFS authors conclude that “norms, attitudes and the policy environment” combine to constrain “women and men from doing the work that they would be comparatively best at and therefore creates a barrier to efficient allocation of resources to economic activity”.

At this point, I should declare an interest: I have moved to a four-day week after the birth of my first child. And while I might be letting down the economy with this inefficient allocation of my time, I have to say I’m really enjoying it.

While people should of course be supported to go back to work full-time if they want, part-time and flexible working isn’t a problem in itself. The key is to make sure it doesn’t automatically put people into the career slow lane. Of course, taking years out of the labour market altogether will have an effect on employability, and not every job can be done part-time. But employers in the past have also lacked the imagination to think about how to design jobs more flexibly, and punished or excluded people unnecessarily who cannot bend their personal lives around the demands of a traditional full-time job.

UK survey

This is not just a women’s issue. A survey by Timewise, a UK consultancy, found that 91 per cent of women and 84 per cent of men who work full-time would either like to work flexibly or do already. Yet only one in four jobs were advertised with flexible working in 2021. It is irrational at a time when employers are complaining about staff shortages to rule out so many potential candidates.

The conversation about flexible work often happens in a white-collar bubble, but it applies just as much to lower-paid jobs. The death of high streets and rise of online shopping means part-time retail jobs are being replaced with roles in warehouses, where 10-hour shifts are common. Onerous working hours which allow no space for family life underlie some of the starkest blue-collar labour shortages in 2021, from meat processing to HGV drivers.

The reasons people say they want flexible work are also instructive. Children feature, of course, but so do other priorities such as education and caring for elderly relatives. The latter is a demand on our collective time which is only going to grow as the population ages.

Working mothers have been trying to balance work and family pressures for more than a century. It should no longer just be their battle to fight. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2021