To work or not?

“There’s almost no point in me working.”

I so clearly remember my colleague’s words, even now, years down the line. She was a woman in her thirties, whose desk backed on to mine. She had returned to work after having a child but found, like many, that the cost of childcare was prohibitive.

I initially put her gloom down to the company atmosphere. We were cycling through yet another round of redundancies and morale was low. Her team had copped more of the losses than most. When I tried to sympathise, murmuring something about said work climate, she set me straight. It was the cost of childcare in relation to her wages that she was talking about. Nearly her whole salary went on nursery fees for her son. 

“I don’t like this job enough to make it feel worth it.”

I couldn’t quite believe it. How could that be possible? She earned a good wage in a career she’d been building for years and yet the cost of nursery was making all that somehow obsolete. 

I think back to that conversation now and feel pretty naive. A couple of years later when a Norwegian friend came to visit, I was reminded of it again. She had a child in nursery fulltime, a child the same age as my colleagues would have been. The cost of my friend’s nursery was about a fifth of my colleague’s. This friend never gave a thought to stopping work because she didn’t need to, but she also said that, had she wanted to, the state would have provided money for her to stay at home. Incredible. Imagine a world where having a child didn’t represent a potentially serious hindrance to your career, earning potential and life satisfaction.

Not for the first time I thought, how the fuck do people do this in the UK? The answer seems to be that, increasingly, they don’t. Across the UK, much of Europe and further afield, birth rates are plummeting. Whatever Trump says about being the ‘fertilization president’ something isn’t adding up for working mothers.

It made me think of all the women I knew that had stepped back from work post children, quietly disappearing from the office and taking their skills and hard won expertise with them. Surely there must be a better way to keep them? I know many want to go part time but the options aren’t always available despite the work of campaigners like Anna Whitehouse. Anna recently went to No.10 to demand more flexibility for working parents but it’s an uphill battle. This was highlighted again recently for me when a friend, who was applying for jobs, said none of the roles were advertised as part time. This started a conversation among our friendship group and it was commonly agreed on that this was the case in other industries too. It’s sometimes an option but generally you have to be in a role for at least six months before you can ask for that.

There are so many things to say here but my thoughts inevitably turned to my own career. Going back to work after my first child was both wonderful and exhausting. Trying to juggle nursery drop offs and pick ups around the demands of the working day was a challenge but the first few nursery bills seemed an even bigger one. Watching the money come in from my job then go straight out the door to the nursery was sobering. How the heck were we going to keep this up? There was government funding and child benefit but it still didn’t seem to touch the sides. If it was this tricky now, how the hell were we going to fund a second place if we had another? Is working full time my only option and will that even help?  Or should I be stepping back from my career for these early years and seeing what I can pick up in the future? Can we even afford to do that? Will there be a place for me in my industry in a few years time if I did? 

I don’t think we settled on an answer. And we did go on to have a second. Foolhardy? Absolutely yes. Will I feel as my colleague did when I go back to work this time and pay two sets of nursery fees. Quite possibly. Am I hoping I can somehow muddle through like many others. Definitely.