Tag Archives: employment

So where are all the EU women?

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Five inter-related thoughts on the theme of where are all the women:

1) I’ve been following an interesting debate over on Twitter.  Life’s a bit complicated technologically at the moment so my joining in Tweets haven’t all got there, but the gist of the discussion is this: why, when there is an EU-related panel discussion, is it so hard to find a panel with gender balance?  Or more than just one woman?  Where are all the women? (@europasionaria, @EuropeanAgenda @maitea6 @euonymblog)

2) Meanwhile, the European Women’s Lobby has drawn attention to the issue of where all the women are in the European External Action Service (just 36% at present – the petition calling for more can be found here)?  Just over one third?  Seriously, where are all the women?

3) At the same time (and there is a link here too, I promise), my care arrangements have suddenly got more complicated: it now offers half an hour less time in the evenings with no good reason offered for the change, meaning a much bigger risk of being late…
Then, for reasons best known to themselves, the public transport system in London has decided that I should have to have a minimum extra half hour journey a day…
And Eurostar has changed the timing of the Brussels train meaning it is now impossible to catch our care at the end of a day at meetings in Belgium…
Argh!  Logistics nightmare!  But I know I’m not alone in this.
Thousands of families have complications. Many sort it out quietly, anecdotally often by having another baby or someone downgrading or giving up work.  Does it have to be like this?

4) Are the EU women working part-time and thus unavailable, or not highly enough ranked to take part in the more public roles?
Short answer is no – not all women are mothers, not all women work part-time. But a big group do.
A quick look at the UK: is it possible to be both successful in your career and work part-time? In the UK public sector, broadly yes.
What about the private and voluntary sectors? Well, the right to request flexible working is out there, for parents and carers at present and with a good take up rate.  It’s less clear how many do not request for fear of career implications or pessimism about being turned down.
Also there is a prevailing view that somehow part-time and full-time labour markets are and should be separate.  Well, this makes no sense given the quality of individuals looking to work part-time whose skills and experience should not be confined to lower level roles (particularly now that the retirement age is gone and older workers might want to reduce their hours without actually leaving work altogether). It also makes no sense given the news that the huge majority of jobs created recently have been part-time (let’s just hope it doesn’t also mean that they’ve been low-paid ones).
Recently there’s been quite a lot of resentment in newspaper letters pages towards demanding parents who have made a “lifestyle choice” to have kids and should not expect any special treatment as a result.
Let’s leave aside for now the “who pays your pension” argument, though it should be made.
More immediately, is there actually anything wrong with parents wanting both to play a major role in bringing up their own children and also using the skills and talents that they’ve spent their lives building up for the profit of all?
And there also seems to be fear about employing women as it is just “more difficult” than employing men (a view openly expressed by working mother Katy Hopkins on BBC Question Time).
So can it be done?  Well obviously yes.
Are there any non-superwoman role models?
The Evening Standard ran a brilliant piece (not available online) on a London mother working a very senior design job at a well-known designer store part-time three days a week – but noted that her father had given her the role with some resistance from other decision-takers. Dammit, why does it take a father to demonstrate that it can work?

What about the EU institutions and related organisations?  Given that the institutions staff are not covered directly by EU legislation on part-time working etc., how exemplary are the institutions as flexible employers?
And what about the lobbying industry?
Or the voluntary sector in Brussels?
Do they expect the Belgian childcare system to step in so parents can work full-time? Is there any scope to work part-time?
And, given the likelihood that family are not close by, what happens when meetings run on past the 6pm childcare cut-off point? Or the essential networking sessions are all held in the evenings?

5)  Final thought: the gender pay gap (notional average wage difference figure) and indeed everything affecting where the women are job-wise, are complex and interconnected.
Not least because it all matters for men too.
Measures taken now might not have immediate effect, but it does not mean no action is necessary.  Governments across the EU, and the institutions themselves, are realising this and trying to do something about it.
Gender balanced panels would be one small step, but a visible one.

So are you going to have another one?

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I’m losing count of the number of times I’ve been asked this question.

At best, it’s when my adorable toddler is running around being cute.

At worst, it was during a job interview – something which I think it is actually illegal to ask me.

But every time I wonder what exactly I’m supposed to answer.
Generally it’s a well-meaning question.
But actually it risks being quite personal and intrusive.

Think about it in the context of work.
Now I’ve had some months to think it over, I think the correct answer would have been: “would you be asking that if it was my husband sitting here in this interview and not me?”
If it’s a question that an employer might want an answer to from a thirty-something woman, then there’s a whole load of assumptions that go behind that.
It correctly assumes that I would have to take time out of the office to have a baby and deal with the immediate issues with breastfeeding a newborn and postnatal maternal health – that’s one thing a father can’t do instead.
But I suspect it goes rather further than that, assuming that I would be taking the parental leave for any future child all by myself.  While for a couple, you may think of yourselves as a unit, at the moment your employer almost certainly doesn’t.
It’ll be interesting to see, if our law changes in 2011 to a system of shared parental leave, whether the assumption shifts from being that one parent will take all the leave to an assumption that each will take half.
And what did I actually say when I was asked?  Well, it was suffixed by, “I hope you don’t mind me asking…” and I think I said, “no it’s fine, and not at the moment“.
But it was sufficient for me to feel negative about the idea of working in that team.  What would’ve happened if I had joined and then got pregnant?  A sense that I’d gone against what I’d said before joining the team and therefore betrayal and untrustworthiness?

But it’s not just parental leave that figures in that sort of thinking.
What if my toddler or newborn was ill and I needed to take time off to be with them?  The rough truth is that childcare doesn’t do child illness.
You hear about “pink medicine babies” – the guilty reality that if the child is just a little under the weather most parents will shove a spoonful of calpol down their throats and deliver them to the childcare provider anyway.  They then spend the day dreading the call to say that their little bundle has a temperature and needs picking up NOW.  It’s not ideal from an employer’s perspective.  It’s not ideal from a parent’s perspective.  It’s certainly not ideal from the child’s perspective.
But – particularly in a recession, where it’s a financial imperative that people are in work- it happens.  All because people are afraid to take time off work to be there when their child is ill in case their work decides it can do without them, permanently.
Is it any wonder that the lesser-earning parent is often the one that takes the time out?   But again it is not always a matter of choice.  I keep hearing about employers who don’t exactly say to fathers that they can’t take time with their children but imply that they are letting themselves and the team down. But wouldn’t it be better if that didn’t automatically mean Mummy had to let hers down?

So are you going to have another one?
Is the question any better in your personal life?
It happened to me yesterday.
I was just getting my hair cut, and my toddler was pushing one of the chairs around the salon.  I’m sure she only meant it in a he’s-cute-wouldn’t-it-be-lovely-to-have-more way.
But it’s a risky question.

What happens if the answer is “Good God, no!  Awful little blighters, don’t know why we had the first one!”  Not the case for us, thank God, but how would the questioner feel if that was the answer they got?

Who knows what circumstances the family are experiencing?  May be they are sandwich generation, with adult caring responsibilities as well as a small child?  Not having a second one might be a matter of necessity rather than choice.

Who knows if the person they’re asking has tried and failed for months? Miscarriages are not exactly a bundle of laughs and not usually the thing to share in smalltalk situations.

The thing is, unless you are already pregnant with the next one, which I am not, it is impossible to answer that question without sounding defensive.

And you get all kinds of advice offered to you as if to compensate for the embarrassment caused.  Sometimes it just digs the hole deeper.
But ultimately the old platitude is the best: “it’ll happen when it happens“.
I don’t think you can really go wrong with that, as when it happens may be never…

A few thoughts on feminism…

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MotherhoodImage(Image from the brilliant http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/101408.html)

I’ve joined the British Mummy Bloggers social network. While the new blog hasn’t covered much parenting yet, it will do.
I was struck by the categories used as forums on the site, and joined the foodie, writing and feminist groups immediately.

Feminist?
Yes, I feel a bit uncomfortable with the word.
Here’s my comment on the forum in all its glory…

For me, feminism is not about being and acting like men, but about gaining respect for things that are important to me as a woman.
The dungaree-wearing, man-hating, bra-burning stereotype seems to me to be fading away, but feminism still seems to be a dirty word.
It tends to be used rather than in the equality sense as a way of portraying strong women as being in relentless pursuit of men to put them at a disadvantage, or used by usually younger women that take their clothes off in public to justify what is essentially titillation as something that makes them feel less uncomfortable ethically about something that’s earning them a lot of money…
I feel inherently uncomfortable with the term – having gone to a girls school and having had it thrown at us as an insult and often used as if it were a synonym for lesbian as opposed to a political position.

The most obvious issue on which I feel feminist is work – while of course my workplace is pretty good, why does it continue to be acceptable in the main to require parents (or others with caring responsibilities) to fit to a working pattern than causes stress and complication in their lives?
Surely you’d get the best out of people by acknowledging that they are in fact people and have lives outside the office?
Why isn’t there more term-time working/ work patterns that fit with school or nursery hours?
Do workers that work flexibly and/or part-time get taken as seriously?
Is working long hours a prerequisite for good annual reports and/or promotion prospects?
And is enough being done to help younger women focus onprofessional jobs with prospects and a future rather than just hairdressing, childcare, etc.? I hope so these days, but this is in itself complicated because in order to work I need some people providing childcare that doesn’t cost so much that it’s not worth me working…
These are the issues that I feel are what the modern feminist should focus on.

I also think that feminists need to be making the case that having children is not a “lifestyle choice” but an essential part of the continuation of the human race, and raising them is as valid a way of spending time as pursuing a “career” (I say this as someone attempting to do both, of course) but that we have the right to do both to the best of our abilities.
Women are our own worst critics – we seem to trumpet the superiority of our personal situation over those of our sisters (older women saying that younger shouldn’t have it easy because they didn’t, the constant SAHM – v- working mum rivalry, the look our best -v- accept us as we are arguments…)

But it’s more complicated than that, of course. I don’t think that being taken for fools by fashion that’s designed with an eye on women changing their bodies to fit an unattainable flat shape rather than the curves we’re meant to have (size zero? The UK average is a 16 – who are we kidding?) is something that we could or should accept – fat is a feminist issue as it used to be said.

And to continue on from that, I think that feminism has lost its way a bit.
It’s not about a right to be near naked in public or to sleep with as many men as possible and not be called a slag when theres no real male equivalent term.
It’s not about telling Muslim women not to wear a headscarf (more about listening to each woman’s reasons for choosing to do so or not, and being supportive either way).
It’s not about championing abortion as if it is a consequence-free event, ignoring the support that women need if they choose to end a pregnancy (which is a lifechanging event).
It’s not about coveting the next designer bag, latest clothes, perfect hair and grooming – we should be valuing women no matter what model of beauty they do or don’t conform to.  (I myself am Reubenesque and so a few centuries out of date…)
For me, it’s about championing the idea that women, collectively and individually have as much right to do things their way and develop as individuals and members of families and society as men do and to be encouraged, supportedand taken as seriously as men are while doing it.

I simply cannot understand why we have fewer women in politics than some in some developing countries (and was horrified by the comments from one man that only pretty women would make it past selection procedures), and so few women in very senior management roles etc. unless timeserving counts more than anything else (such as decision-making ability, leadership) and unfair selection procedures are in play somewhere in the process.  Of course a good way of doing something about this would be to incentivise men’s flexible and/or part-time working so that there was a more equal balance of men and women taking on caring roles so that this element could not be built into decisions on employing a woman as opposed to a man so easily as there would be a much more even “risk” of them needing not to work all the hours God sends…

I think feminism will either get a bit of a shot in the arm – or will be susumed into a wider set of issues of a similar nature - once you get more Generation Y in the workplace… bear with me on this.
There seems to be an expectation amongst employers that the current attitude that is perceived in GenY will eventually be replaced and that they’ll knuckle down and conform, as if thinking they can have it all their own way is youthful naiveity.
I disagree – I think that in a world where there’s no job for life, no final salary pension etc., the attraction of being a corporate drone is much less than it was say a decade ago.
This is a generation used to downloading what it wants to, instant communication with friends, mixing the personal and professional with confidence.  They’re a product of the 1980s and 1990s in which they grew up – consumerist but green, individualist and (perhaps because of having spent more time in educational or childcare environments?) more used to being indulged by working parents.  They do no easily accept being told “no”.
The only downside if you like is the constant exposure to rap music with its objectification of women and the risk that this passes over into the generational attitude… but then my husband points out that “Skins” is not actually a documentary…

So let’s hope in particular that GenY women kick up one hell of a stink if they feel they’re being treated unfairly in the workplace, or in life.  And let’s hope the men do too – after all a fight ofr recognition of the needs and diversity of the individual applies to them as much as to women.
And as the generation before them, let’s be helpful, supportive feminists to help them get there.

Getting competitive… getting in to the European Commission

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Berlaymont building - European Commission headquarters

Who’d want to work in the EU institutions? 
Thousands, apparently, including me. 
It’s not easy to describe the job of a European Commission official, but in reality the actual work is not so different to the work of the civil service in any of the EU Member States.  And the pay, the tax rates and final salary pension – despite the recent reforms – are pretty attractive too.

So how exactly to you whittle down thousands of applicants to the couple of hundred you need to fill the vacancies that are available in the EU instututions?  Until recently the answer was essentially this: set a multiple choice quiz on EU related issues, and a numeracy test.  Put all prospective candidates through this in their second language (preferably English, French or German), then get them to write essays against the clock on EU-inspired subjects which, despite all the research and practice would not actually be marked unless the candidate passed the multiple choice and numeracy parts of the test sufficiently well…  there were further rounds with interviews etc, but as I didn’t reach them that aspect’s a bit less familiar to me.
Julien Frisch had a very interesting post over at http://julienfrisch.blogspot.com/2009/08/epso-criticised-by-european-court-of.html on the criticism of the European Personnel and Selection Office (EPSO – interesting to note that the Commission uses “personnel” long after other adminstrations have swtched over to “human resources”) by the Court of Auditors.  It’s worth reading, even if this post is a couple of weeks old now, not least because ESPO officials have actually joined in the debate below.
It is clear now that future methods of staff recruitment will be via Assessment Centres, a process familiar to many job applicants.  And the new approach is aimed at ensuring that it’s not just a way of identifying those with the time to study EU trivia (e.g. those still in educational environments).  Instead, the approach is supposed to allow demonstration of skills that would be required when doing the job.

So, with a decade of relevant experience, relatively good French (some remaining Spanish – and I’d have to improve at that in order to get a promotion within the Commission once in) and having entered my career for the purpose of gaining the skills to do this, am I actually going to enter the next concours?
I’ve been taking some time on my holiday to think about this.  Basically we’d be happy about a move to Brussels and I want to sit the concours.

But there’s a but.

I’m working part-time in the office and full-time as a mother.  While the UK Civil Service is actually pretty good about recognising the contribution that I can make, it’s not actually as easy as I’d hoped because face-time in the office does still count for something, especially as you get more senior. 
So I’m not sure the Commission would want me. 
Unless they’ve changed the rules that were in place when I did my stage that as Directives (e.g. those covering maternity rights) are addressed to the Member States so they don’t actually have to be exemplary in terms of employment law when it comes to part-time and flexible working?  They must’ve done – I gather there may even be some jobsharers now, but no one’s yet been able to point me to where within the Commission they work (and at what level).  
And with many highly qualified candidates attempting to find themselves the ideal post by appealing to the relevant DGs, who’d take on someone that only wanted to work part-time?  Several of the people I knew that passed the last concours have given up on trying to find a post – in other words they went through all of the stages I mentioned above, officially “got the ticket” but still have not got a job at the end of it.
Could I really put myself and my family through the extra stress of preparing for the different stages of the concours? And the extra stress of trying to get a job as a part-time employee?

The other thing is that, with 10 years experience, I’m not terribly keen on starting at the bottom again (moving from middle management to policy administration without a team).  Now, if there was to be a Head of Unit concours in the near future I can imagine that that would really be of interest…  So unlike my normal work-self, I’m feeling a bit indecisive.

There are probably people out there thinking that I’ve no right to expect to be employed as a part-timer.  That by having chosen to have a child and – let’s be honest about this- the likelihood that I’ll want to have another at some point, I somehow forfeit the right to be pursuing a professional career too.  Especially when you read some of the comments that are attracted by articles on this sort of subject on the Daily Mail’s website or even Comment is Free at the Guardian’s site. 
My brain hasn’t switched off.  I’m no less good at the decision-making or subject analysis or line management aspects of my job than I was before I had a child.  
What I can’t do any more is work more than my official conditioned hours, unless there’s a real emergency and/or I’ve had a chance to arange alternative childcare. 
My childcare is timelimited.  Even if it wasn’t, there’s a tiny little person who loves me and is dependent on me, and would not understand if he suddenly couldn’t see his mum.  
But the thing is, should there be an expectation that you’ll work more than conditioned hours on anything other than a rare occasion?

May be I’d better go and try to find the latest version of the Staff Regulations, and then think about it some more.  I’ve got a few months to find out…