Family plus career: How women's rights become responsibilities
Mom pulled out a box with children's drawings. We flipped through dozens of painted A4 sheets (my impressionistic period was frankly unsuccessful), early stories, and self-made postcards. At one of them I, still of preschool age, drew Jasmine from the cartoon "Aladdin" and attributed below: "Congratulations to my mother on putting the balance." My mother is an accountant. While my younger brother and I grew up, she worked from home and combined cleaning, cooking and caring for children with night work on documents.
She was not alone. According to statistics, 72% of women are already working when their child is 1.5-3 years old. This may be due not only to the financial situation of the family (although it often happens), but also the understandable desire of the mother to return to normal social life. Open an instagram or a glossy magazine: photos of powerful women who hold Skype meetings with one hand and playing educational games with children with the other hand tell us that a successful career and children do not contradict each other. Or, to put it another way, women can have it all.
"A girl becomes a woman when people come out of her vagina to trample her dreams," Louis C. Kay once said. This is a rough, but fairly accurate formulation of how many women feel after giving birth. As the writer and teacher Robin Wasserman noted, we are increasingly seeing the echoes of this in popular culture - it is curious that lately the “Girl” in the title of books has been encountered more often than “Women”. Recall, for example, “Gone Girl”, or “Gone Girl”: the gorgeous Amy refuses from a career in favor of her husband and regains her “girlhood” only when she feigns her own death, literally reborn after the experience of family life.
Numerous girls of pop culture - Lena Dunham in "Not That Kind of Girl", Kim Gordon in "Girl in the Band", the heroine of Sleater-Kinney's song "Modern Girl" - it’s not for nothing that they revise the standard "both family and career." The mantra "You can have it all," which Cheryl Sandberg stubbornly repeats, and the pastry mothers on Instagram, does as much harm as good. Yes, she allowed the generations of women to dream a little bigger. But at the same time she hides the problems of social order, because of which millions of women who fail, blame themselves and only themselves.
We ignore simple questions: Is the professional environment so comfortable for workers with children?
Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of the acclaimed article “Why Women Still Can't Have It All,” recalls how a colleague tried to dissuade her from a program speech, believing that such a statement from the mouth of a successful woman, a model to follow, would be a terrible signal for young girls Others expressed in a more dismissive tone: "To me never had to compromise andat me wonderful children. ”But because of the logic“ I’m guilty ”, we forget that those superwomen who manage to combine work and family act contrary to, and not thanks to. We ignore simple questions: does the professional environment for workers with children? What exactly do working mothers face? Finally, why don't the same requirements apply to men?
The idea that labor is the main tool for the emancipation of women was actively promoted in Soviet times. This was explained not so much by respect for the ideas of equality, as by the needs of industrialization; from 1922 to 1940 the proportion of women in the total number of workers increased by one and a half times. Nominally, the Soviet government advocated for the liberation of women, and the patriarchal way of the family was replaced by the "equal union of the proletarian and her comrade." Now this is one of the favorite arguments of Russian opponents of feminism: for decades, women can work on a par with men, including in "traditionally male professions."
However, not all so simple. Women were charged not only to build communism, but also to be "keepers of the hearth" - housework was still a woman’s work. That is, in fact, women had not opportunities, but responsibilities. According to statistics, in the early 60s, caring for a family took 6-7 hours a day. At the same time, a huge number of women were engaged in labor, which required practically no special qualifications; Often this work required heavy physical effort or it was held in dangerous for health conditions - for example, women accounted for 90% of all workers on the conveyor. Women worked in various fields, from catering and trade to education, where wages were much lower than in other industries, which made a clear difference in the incomes of men and women.
Over the past decades, ideas about gender norms have practically not changed - we continue to demand that women not abandon their families when they decide to build a career. According to the Superjob survey, in 2015, only 2% of men went on leave to care for a child and 39% of respondents allowed for such a possibility. The myth that a woman can succeed in career and in raising children - if she tries, of course - not only supports young women, but also plays into the hands of their partners.
All this does not mean that women in general cannot combine career and family and be equally successful in both spheres. But it is not easy for them to do it in the present conditions. Not all companies can boast of egg-freezing initiatives, but there are a few simple things that can make life easier for employees with children. One of the main ones is the ability to create your own schedule. Women with children often have to adapt to the work of schools, vacations and additional classes of children - therefore, it is necessary to take into account their wishes and, for example, postpone important meetings in the morning when school hours are going on, and let employees go home in the afternoon.
It is equally important to negotiate with your partner about the division of responsibilities - it will be easier for both to combine working and personal life. Cheryl Sandberg spoke about this exactly to the graduates of Barnard College: "The most important career decision you have to take is whether to make a partner and who exactly this partner will be."
Employers are still more willing to let go of a runner-marathon runner than a young mother
In addition, it is important to understand that career planning - unfortunately, not particularly so far common in Russia - would also help to find a compromise. Since the average life expectancy (and the age to which people are willing to work productively) is growing steadily, the dynamics of a career can also change. It is not necessary to unconditionally follow the principle of “achieve as much as possible in the shortest period of time” - instead, you can periodically engage in project work or consulting.
However, all this will have little effect if the attitude to the question “family - career” does not change. Women had to prove too long that their personal life doesn’t interfere with their professional life in order not to listen to the accusations that they don’t try hard enough - as Slaughter writes, employers are still more willing to let go of a marathon runner than a young mother. So far in Russia, they speak amazingly much about family values and do too little to make them easy to implement. It is equally important to fight with the inner misyginia - to stop despising girls who have made a different choice from the generally accepted one - whether they are mothers of many children, children of the ideology of childfree or in love with their work. After all, each of us sooner or later have to make the same choice.
Photo: Wikipedia Commons, Getty Images
