Women who forgo careers in mid-life are not victims but strategic planners making free choices
NOT SO long ago correspondents to this fine paper got their knickers in a twist when I said that women choose to avoid standard career paths and full-time work. This week the notes from the shrill proclaim that women GPs have every right to choose part-time work. What fun. One week it’s not happening and the next it is but don’t even think about messing with our choices.
So let’s get one thing straight – this is happening. Across the labour force there are undeniable patterns of behaviour that are clearly visible to our own eyes and in all the statistics. CSO figures show that in their 20s, women work more hours than men. In their 30s they start dropping hours until they almost tail off for the over 40s. In the professions more women qualify in medicine, law and accountancy but progress in tiny numbers to become partners, consultants or managers. That much is empirically clear.
What is not so clear is why – or what, if anything, should be done about it. The standard assumption is that this is a matter of coercion rather than choice. I dispute that analysis but, first, a quick word about doctors.
The high number of female GPs, many of whom opt to work part-time, is a legitimate cause for concern. It’s a public health issue if we are short of doctors willing to work weekends or make night calls. There is a strong argument that when the State spends several years and a lot of money training doctors, those doctors have a moral obligation to treat their patients even if they get sick at inconvenient hours.
But moral obligations are unfashionable and, since it’s a free world, doctors have the right to practise any way they want. As taxpayers and patients, we have a corresponding right to fret about the shortage of male doctors who will drive the streets after-hours while their female colleagues put their feet up.
Dissuading women from becoming GPs or compelling them to work full-time is, shall we say, problematic. However, when the State has to deal with the consequences of so many women exercising their right to choose office hours, the response from the usual suspects should be a little less chippy.
The aspect of the female GP issue that interests me most is that it shows that women make long-term lifestyle decisions at an early age. They become GPs rather than surgeons precisely because general practice offers the opportunity to work more sociable hours.
This behaviour is replicated across all social classes and categories of work. The main difference between a female GP and a primary school teacher is the number of points they got in the Leaving Cert. They’re both women after a secure, flexible job. And why not? It’s a smart personal decision to take.
There is far too much hand-wringing about equality and insufficient acknowledgment that when presented with equality of opportunity, most women decide to forgo those opportunities in favour of their families. They’re not victims, they’re strategic planners.
The usual explanation is that this is all about the high cost of childcare. If middle- class women could only pay working-class women half nothing to mind their children, they’d be off ruling the world. I don’t accept that, particularly since women at the top can afford the best childcare available.
Why is the notion that women of any class might actually like to mind their own children and run their own houses so emphatically dismissed as an invalid choice? The theory that gender is purely a matter of social construction is quite dated. We’re biologically equipped to have children and it should be no heresy to suggest that we might like to look after them too.
Looking purely at the numbers, women have a clear preference for a balanced life in which they can engage in part-time paid work that provides intellectual stimulation and financial independence, but allows them to enjoy their personal life too. A side effect means this rules them out of senior jobs or even certain careers, such as politics, where part-time is not an option.
I’m simply not convinced that this is a problem to be solved rather than a choice to be celebrated. As the saying goes, who ever wished on their death bed that they had spent more time at the office?
Of course, if families are a valid pull factor, there is no denying that testosterone is a push factor too. In The Minority Interest, due to be published next week, Patricia Barker makes a fascinating study of the very few female partners in the so-called Big Four accountancy firms. She concludes that one factor in their success is that these rare women possess male characteristics. No, not chest hair, but a style of doing business that harks back to Simone de Beauvoir’s advice that in order to be successful in business women should act like men.
Put simply, in the corporate environment men have a way of carrying on that turns women off. The women who stick around are the ones who carry on that way too. If enough women stayed to fight the good fight, they could infuse the workplace with sufficient femininity to make it a more hospitable environment for women. It’s the right thing to do, but honestly, the one definite thing I can say about women is that we are tired – really tired – and we don’t want to fight. We just want to go home. Please?