Public Servant Lifestyle

Employers who want to retain women staff who are having a first baby would do well to help mothers-to-be better plan their return to work before they go on maternity leave.

This is one of the most important messages from Paid and unpaid work in early parenthood: psychological causes and consequences - new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) - which reveals that many women who fully intend to go back to work find their return is hampered by poor planning at the pregnancy stage.

Domestic Level

Forward planning at the domestic level is also sometimes poor. A full 16% of fathers-to-be believe that the mothers’ plans on work involve something different from what the mothers themselves say are their plans. “Support at work from colleagues and from the family certainly makes it easier for women to continue working”, says psychologist Dr Diane Houston, at the University of Kent, in her latest findings on mothers and work as part of the ESRC Future of Work Programme.

Many women are seen to struggle in trying to combine work and young children. Very few women who have a second child manage to stay in full time work. Put another way, only 17% of the sample of more than 300 women are still in full time work by the time that their first child is celebrating their third birthday. Of women working full time, 67% have only one child, while 72% of women not in paid work have two children.

The research project iss split into three parts: an extension of earlier research which examines the work behaviour of first-time mothers to the point of the first child’s third birthday; a survey of first-time parents, comparing the views of fathers and mothers during the mother’s pregnancy and in the first year of their child’s life; and a survey of women who work full-time, comparing them with women who have no children.

Differences in domestic responsibilities between women who work part-time and those who work full- time, as well as women who do not do paid work, show up in the findings. For instance, women who work part-time shoulder much more of the burden of domestic chores than mothers who work full-time, on a similar scale to women who are not in paid work. The differences in the allocation of time spent interacting with their child, however, is less marked, with women working full-time not dramatically reducing the amount of time they spend in this way.

Responsibilities

“Working full time seems to free women from domestic work and at the same time, it allows them to prioritise time with their children”, says Diane Houston. For instance, on the bedtime routine, those doing no paid work do 69%; part-timers do 62% and full-timers 64%. The distribution of responsibilities is similar for tasks like reading to children and bathing them.

Full time and part time workers, and mothers who do not work, all do more than fathers, however, in most tasks – domestic, child related, and child interaction (the exceptions are DIY and car maintenance). Women working full time, for instance, say they do an average 50% of most child-related (playing, reading, bathing, etc) and domestic tasks, while their partner dO 20-30%, and a further 10-20% is done by ‘another person’.

Another part of the research compares the views of working women without children about working women with children. Women without children rated working mothers significantly more negatively than did women with children - whether working full or part-time – in terms of their efficiency, commitment and competence in the workplace. Working women without children also have significantly higher levels of marital satisfaction than women with pre-school children, and are more satisfied with their partner’s share of doing the domestic chores.

The ESRC is the UK's largest funding agency for research and postgraduate training relating to social and economic issues. It provides independent, high-quality, relevant research to business, the public sector and Government.

The ESRC invests more than £76 million every year in social science and at any time is supporting some 2,000 researchers in academic institutions and research policy institutes. It also funds postgraduate training within the social sciences to nurture the researchers of tomorrow.

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