work compared to other influences?
8.2.1 Daughters’ feelings about how their mother’s worked
In answer to this research question, the thesis has identified a variety of impacts from growing up with a mother with a career who worked mainly full-‐time on daughters’ thinking about combining motherhood with work. Almost all the daughters thought it did them no damage to have a mother who worked long hours away from the home. Many daughters gave specific reasons why having a successful working mother was of benefit to them. This included, for example, seeing the advantages of a satisfying career as well as family life modelled for them by their mothers, having learned to be independent and the lifestyle and opportunities that came with relative affluence. Only three daughters out of 31 are exceptions in thinking that the way in which their mothers had worked had affected them negatively. The reason for this seemed to be best explained by their feeling of being different from their peers. These negative feelings were compounded, in two cases, by being the only child of lone mothers with absent fathers. They therefore felt their mother’s absences from home most keenly.
8.2.2 Did observing their mothers work long hours result in the daughters wanting to work fewer hours?
Questions have been raised about whether the daughters of full-‐time working women want to give as much time to work as did their mothers (Vere 2007; Gerson 2010). Almost all the daughters were planning or had entered careers classified at the same level of skill as their mothers and research shows that SOC 1 and 2 career roles are strongly correlated with full-‐time employment (ONS 2011a).
Chapter 5 of this research shows that only a small minority of the daughters said they did not want to work as hard as their mothers. The daughters did not base this judgement on how stressed/conflicted they thought their mothers were because most daughters did not think that stress or negative emotions typified their mothers’ relationship with work or with their daughters. Therefore, observing their mothers working long hours did not, for the majority, result in the daughters wanting to work fewer hours. This corroborates the findings of Galinsky (1999) that parents comfortable with their choices were more responsive to their children whether they worked or not. Instead, the main reasons the minority of daughters gave for not wanting to work the same long hours as their mothers
was their feeling that they did not have the physical stamina to work as hard. Some were also concerned that their mother’s work had impacted negatively on their parent’s relationships or their physical health. The mothers who had experienced divorce,
separation or severe relationship problems agreed that this had a more negative effect on their daughters than their working hours. Very few observations were made about their mothers’ experiencing difficulties combining work and motherhood so consequently the daughters did not think that their mothers working hours had been damaging to them. This research contributes to the debate because little directly comparable research exists that examines the perspectives of both mothers and daughters and that focuses on mothers with successful careers. However, the finding that there is no significant relationship between mothers working long hours and specific negative outcomes for their children is broadly confirmed by several qualitative and quantitative studies (Backett-‐Milburn et al. 2011; Mendolia 2014; Milkie et al. 2015; McGinn et al. 2015). A key and surprising finding, discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, is that even though the vast majority of the daughters felt that it had been fine, and positive in some ways, for them to have a mother who worked long hours out of the home in a career she found satisfying, this did not lead most to think that their working long hours in a demanding career would be fine for the children they anticipated having or had. The significance of this finding is that over 50% of the 31 daughters who participated in this study intended to or were working part-‐time. Of the ‘daughter mothers’, only one was working full-‐time hours over five days a week. Most of the others worked part-‐time (substantially reduced hours from their pre-‐pregnancy roles) and the others worked flexibly in some way. The daughters’ decision to work part-‐time is partly explained by maternal influence, even though this was rarely consciously acknowledged, in that many had mothers who expressed an ‘Idealistic’ attitude to combining motherhood with work. These mothers had felt guilt about working long hours out of the home whilst their children were growing up. An original contribution of the research, made in Chapter 4, has been in identifying a subset of mothers who, by contrast, displayed a ‘Pragmatic’ attitude to combining motherhood with work and felt positive, on the whole, about the way in which they had managed both. The daughters of the ‘Pragmatics’ did not show a particular tendency towards either working full-‐time, flexibly or part-‐time. This may be because there was no clear idea governing the
‘Pragmatics’ notion of the way they should ‘do’ motherhood. However, the more powerful explanations for this desire to substantially cut working hours are: the cultural script that working part-‐time would give them the ‘best of both worlds’ as mothers and workers, the perceived lack of examples of satisfying flexible career paths within organisational careers
for men and women, the role of partners and gendered assumptions about maternal roles. These influences will be summarised below.
8.2.3 The belief that part-‐time work gives you the ‘best of both worlds’
Chapter 6 has identified that the notion that part-‐time work offered the ‘best of both worlds’ was firmly entrenched in most of the daughters who did not have children. This idea is mainly influenced by the sticky cultural idea that mothers should take primary responsibility for their children (Stone 2007; Miller 2005). Most of the daughters who did not have children did not report having career role models to follow in terms of flexible working and were only vaguely aware of potential working models other than part-‐time working. This study adds evidence that many of the daughters notice and discuss the struggles experienced by women with children in their workplaces. The greater the daughters’ exposure to the workplace, the more the idea of combining motherhood with work made its way into their accounts and many started to feel conflicted about how it is possible to combine work in a demanding career and be a good enough mother. The findings confirmed Gatrell’s argument that the idea of having children impinged upon many of these daughters’ decisions about work (2008). The ‘daughter mothers’, discussed in Chapter 7, knew more about different flexible working practices. They did not tend, however, to be thinking ahead about the effect on their careers. A plausible explanation is that their experience of the immediate present, whilst their children are very young, is of being emotionally intertwined with their baby as discussed by Baraitser (2008) and therefore their feelings in the present about ‘being with their child’ (Faircloth 2013) is more likely to influence their decisions than ideas about a hypothetical future career path. These findings are important because that the idea that part-‐time work offers ‘the best of both worlds’ is contested by the growing body of research that shows that there are career penalties for women in high status roles who work part-‐time or work flexibly (Drew and Murtagh 2005;Durbin et al. 2010a; Durbin et al. 2010b; Gatrell et al. 2014).
8.2.4 Role of partners
This thesis has shown that most of the daughters who did not have children expected that they would share responsibility for childcare. Despite these expectations, women continue to be positioned as having primary responsibility for the emotional and physical well being of their children (Miller 2005, 2012; Lyonette and Crompton 2015). It is therefore probable that many of these daughters would not go on to experience parenting with equally involved partners. However, more fathers are highly involved with parenting responsibilities than ever before (Burgess 2011; Miller 2011). Of the mothers and
grandmothers who participated in this research, more than 25% had egalitarian relationships. An original finding of this research has been the demonstration of a clear link between egalitarian parenting and those mothers with a ‘Pragmatic’ attitude who reported fewer fundamental concerns about the effect on their children of their careers. Having an involved partner and father mitigated the effect of the everyday stresses and trade-‐offs that come with busy lives upon both the mothers and daughters. This
conclusion also applied to the ‘daughter mothers’ who were currently experiencing the challenge of managing work and childcare. A key factor influencing women’s positive feelings about combining work with motherhood is the way parents share the caring. However, this leaves 75% who were taking primary responsibility for their children whilst also working and had much to say about how this added to their negative feelings about the project of combining motherhood with work. This confirms the work of many that the level of domestic involvement of fathers is strongly linked to work-‐life conflict (for
example, Crompton and Lyonette, 2008) and the ‘emotion management’ affecting mothers’ relationships with work and family members (Hochschild 1983, p.44). These findings illustrate the need to reframe parenting as an issue for both women and men in order to remove barriers to women’s equality in the workplace.
8.2.5 ‘Other Mums’: Gendered social attitudes
The views described above were reinforced, especially for the ‘daughter mothers’
discussed in Chapter 7, by contemporary cultural scripts about mothering that they access in all the public spaces, both virtual and physical worlds, where mothering takes place (Baraitser 2009). The accounts given by these women with careers suggested that they identify with the ‘intensification of responsibility’ (a term coined by Thomson et al. 2011) to describe increasing social scrutiny and advice from ‘experts’, the media and other mothers about what is expected of them. Individual mothers are expected to take charge, with little support from outside the immediate family. At the same time, almost all of the participants identified as both mothers and workers (Bailey 1999; Garey 1999; Laney et al. 2012) and the social expectation that mothers will work (Adkins 2006). The effect of these cultural scripts is to set expectations that are unrealistic for those who work long hours which leads to negative feelings about not doing anything well enough. These findings add support to the conclusions of many motherhood experts (Gatrell et al. 2004, 2008, 2013, 2014; Miller 2005, 2011; and Thomson et. al. 2011) that there are still pressing work, childcare and relationship issues to address to help lessen the life load of working mothers.
An original contribution illuminates a key difference between the feelings of the mothers’ and daughters’ generations. That is, as motherhood has become more public, daughters feel that striving for success in a career seems to be combined with or even superseded by the idea of being a success as a Mum. I theorise that the popular discourse about
motherhood is arguably and ironically becoming more draconian whilst attitudes to work become more malleable with the trend towards and debate about the desirability of flexible working for parents. The greater availability of flexible working represents a change between the generations and one key difference that lay behind the more positive feelings of some ‘daughter mothers’ about combining work and motherhood is the level of flexibility and autonomy that their employers offered. However, progress in gender equality has not been straightforward between generations. Gendered inequalities still persist because flexible work is still largely constructed as women’s work. That so many women feel that to be good enough mothers is possible only by substantially cutting their working hours presents a significant barrier to gender equality in the workplace.