Women Working the System by Necessity not Choice

A new opinion poll specially commissioned by the Centre for Policy Studies from YouGov found that only 12% of mothers wanted to work full time and 31% did not want to work at all. Only 1% of mothers with children under five thought that the mother, in a family where the father worked and there were two children under five, should work full time; 49% thought she shouldn’t work at all. Fathers asked the same question offered an almost identical response: only 2% thought mum should work when her husband worked and the children were under five; and 48% thought she shouldn’t work at all.

Christina Odone from the Centre for Policy Studies hails this poll as groundbreaking and draws the conclusion that women prefer to be at home looking after house, husband and children rather than in the workplace.

In her new book 'What Women Really Want' Odone lambasts what she sees as the vocal minority of careerist women who seek self-realisation in the workplace and impose their values on the majority of those desiring fulfilment in the home.

I disagree with Ms Odone's conclusions. The glaringly obvious detail amongst the percentages is the word 'children' and particularly 'young children under the age of five'. Women with children have always had to consider working around childcare so when asked about working hours it is no surprise that they have taken that into consideration when contemplating working hours. This is not choice; it's necessity. It's not what women really want; it's about woman working an indequate system.

Recently, two single mums from Aylesbury came to an informal arrangement over childcare to allow them to jobshare as policewomen. They were found guilty of criminal offence under Ofsted's bureaucratic childcare registration rules but a huge public outcry showed that many mothers identified with their plight having had to juggle similar arrangements because of the lack of good, affordable social childcare.

The persistence of women's inequality in the workplace today is largely due to the burden of personal responsibility for childcare.

Ms Odone states that her findings call into question government initiatives such as wrap-around schools and day care centres that have cost £21 billion since Labour came to power. This seems a convenient justification for cutting costs at a time when all political parties are proposing slashing public spending. Women will be forced back into the home by necessity - not choice. Is this really what women want?


Another interesting statistic from the report highlighted by Ms Odone states the following:

While 19% of women
working full-time wouldn’t work if they didn’t have to, a
whopping 28% of men working full-time don’t want to.

The fact that more men than women expressed a desire to give up full-time work seems to reveal rather more about the general 'anti-work' climate that prevails today. The workplace is portrayed as a site of stress and interpersonal strife rather than as an arena for the self-realisation of one's potential within society. This is a relatively new phenomenon and is being dicussed in the Work Strand at the Battle of Ideas weekend conference at the end of this month.