Carnival CEO Ann Sherry’s son is 38 years old, but Sherry still has nightmares about the many times she was late to pick him up from school.
Speaking yesterday at our Women’s Agenda breakfast, the comment echoed similar comments made by Naomi Simson at our reader event in April. Simson told our audience then that on more than one occasion, she attempted to drop her kids at school on pupil free days.
These comments are not unusual. They tend to come up at plenty of female-focussed events when prominent, leading women are asked how they juggle family with work. They’re the types of honest responses that remind women that life’s still chaotic and unpredictable, no matter how successful you are.
Such stories usually finish with the line: “They’re absolutely fine!” Aside from Boost Juice’s Janine Allis, who noted at our recent Melbourne breakfast that her son is a, “Bit of a hippy, but a happy hippy!”
Well according to a new white paper published this week by the Harvard Business School, these kids may very well be better than fine.
The three authors Kathleen L McGinn, Elizabeth Long Lingo and Mayra Ruiz Castro, examined how inequalities are affected by childhood exposure to “non-traditional gender role models” in the home. They write that with so many mothers “agonising” over their decision to go to work each day, much more research is needed to ascertain whether such decisions actually have an adverse affects on children at all.
They analysed national-level data from two dozen countries, including Australia, to find that adult daughters of working mothers are more likely to be employed, and to hold supervisory responsibilities, work more hours and earn higher wages, than the adult daughters of women who worked in the home full time. Daughters of working mothers were also found to be doing fewer hours of housework each week.
For adult sons of working mothers, the pattern varied. The authors found little association between adult son working outcomes and the employment of their mothers. But they did find such sons were more likely to spend more time managing caring responsibilities for other family members.
So why is this the case? According to the authors, working mothers challenge tradition gender norms. They suggest working mothers help to transmit more egalitarian gender attitudes onto their children — demonstrating behaviours that make working and domestic duties “right” and “normal” for both women and men. They also speculate (although don’t back this with direct data) that working mothers pass valuable information onto their daughters about navigating careers and exercising power.
The findings are quite different to perceptions. Quoting 2013 Pew Research out of the United States, the paper notes that 51% of men and women believe their children are better off if their mothers are at home — compared with just 8% who believe children receive the same benefit from their fathers being at home. The fact questions about “having it all” and managing guilt still come up so frequently in our local media suggest underlying assumptions about the guilt working mothers should feel still prevail. Recently, we published a piece on some of the cutting comments we’ve heard being said to working mothers demonstrating some of these assumptions. Such comments included: “My wife couldn’t work like you do. She loves our children too much,” and, “You’re one of those corporate mothers. The other mums told me I’d never see you.”
The authors use the research to reinforce calls for national policies to support parental employment, especially affordable and accessible child care. They also call for employers to acknowledge that promoting a culture of excessive long hours will drive both men and women out of their workplace.
It seems the many, many assumptions still being made about working mothers will also need to change.