Let’s Change the Narrative

With our work-life shifted in ways we never could have foreseen, leading Career Psychologist, Sinead Brady, and HR leader Oonagh Kelly, a passionate advocate for gender balance and inclusion in and out of the workplace, take us through how we can change the narrative for women (and men) at work.

Welcome to October 2020. The dystopian future that came true, and has us confined to our homes and neighbourhoods. Cocooned and unable to see family, friends or to casually stand in proximity to people in public places.

Welcome to 2020 - the year in which ‘ you’re on mute’ became so ubiquitous that we all wish for a simpler time with phone calls or maybe a letter.

Welcome to 2020 – apparently, the year in which gender equality not only stalled, but slipped backwards at an alarming rate. So alarming that almost every media outlet, news publication, webinar, article and advice column, both on traditional and social media, are repeating the same thing.

From the BBC, to CNN, to The New York Times, to The Guardian we have headlines suggesting that women’s careers are stepping back in time, that mothers do more home-schooling than fathers, that mothers are burdened exclusively with the mental load of parenting, that fathers are living relatively free of the obligations of parenting and fathering during a pandemic.

It takes a Google search for ‘women’s career coronavirus’ all of 0.48 seconds to record 814,000,000 results. The first three pages of results all support the hypothesis that women’s careers are threatened. Using words like ‘dead’, ‘setback’, ‘at risk’, ‘damage’, ‘scar’ all to describe, exclusively, women’s careers. Another Google search, replacing the words ‘women’s career’ with ‘men’s career coronavirus’ takes 0.58 seconds to return 1,050,000,000. Again, the first three pages, return results referencing women’s careers and the impact of coronavirus on women’s careers, despite the specific change in search terms from ‘woman’s career’ to ‘men’s careers’.

I can’t help but wonder if we’re being hoodwinked on a global scale? Are we reading research that meets the rigour of robust objective evidence? Or are we reading anecdotal ‘evidence’ that triggers an emotional reaction rather than a balanced response?

What if we have fallen for an outdated narrative that suggests men and women, parents and partners, are at odds with one another? What if the age-old gender wars narrative is leading us to believe that we are engaging in battle over home and work, and that this is impacting women’s career progression.

‘What if’

Let’s pause for a second and ask some questions: what if that is not true? What if the gender wars narrative is fallacy, not fact?

What if, 21st-century research, based on fMRI imaging and advanced scanning techniques, has rebutted the findings of this research and the prevailing narrative time and again.

What if women and men are equally capable of caring?
What if men and women are both natural breadwinners?
What if men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus…

What if research is stating, when we separate the notion of gender from biological sex, and where men and women, mothers and fathers define parenting and caring from within the context of their own family unit, mothers have more fulfilling careers and men have more fulfilling family roles.

What if, the longest empirical study of happiness, carried out over 80 years ago by Harvard, found that the greatest dying regret of fathers was their overcommitment to work during their early years as a parent? An overcommitment that stole time from their caring and nurturing role within their family.

What about reality?

Yes, as we sit in the year that is 2020 there are issues.

We have statistic after statistic to show that the Mental Load, Second Shift, Gender Pay Gap and inequality exist. Research suggests that women do between 2 and 10 times more unpaid domestic work than men. The same report says that it is having to do this unpaid work that prevents women from progressing in their careers or having an equal role in workplaces.

Careers, Covid & the Data

We have made changes and we have progressed. We have moved the gender wars narrative forward and we need to remember this. Just as we need to remember, that we, mothers and fathers, men and women, must pull these changes with us as we climb. We must do so to ensure that the change we have brought is not lost.

If we use, understand and explore the data that has emerged from Covid-19, in the context of the experience of the NOW, that data creates a new and different narrative, one fit for the 21st century…and one that reflects a change in how we work and where we work.

In March 2020, we had a global workplace revolution. In that month we proved, on a global scale, that we could all work from home.

We proved that, with trust, we could at scale, make a massive change in, and to our work practices. Outdated practices that saw men and women alike burdened with long commutes, high rates of burnout, and hours spent away from home.

During March 2020, workplaces, leaders in workplaces, and workers learned that smarter ways of working are possible, practical and accessible for ALL. Not just mothers, not just parents, but for every single person in the workplace.

Yes, working from home has its challenges. But what we learned was that working from home during a global pandemic, while living where you work, is possible. It is possible when schools are closed and when all daycare is suspended. Yes, it was damn hard, but we now know that it is possible despite the harsh reality that was forced upon us.

Echo Chambers no longer serve us

What puzzles me is how the narrative that women’s careers have exclusively suffered has emerged.

The fact that working from home, flexible work and remote working have been shown to be possible for ALL workers, how is it that national and international media coverage is suggesting that women’s careers will suffer more than men’s? That mothers are at a disadvantage when compared to fathers?

Are we not missing the point here?

The barriers that were once considered insurmountable to a mother’s career have now been crushed. The conversation must be about the positive impact that this has for all workers and specifically for women’s careers. The conversation must reference the hordes of men, who are also fathers, who take an active part in the caring and parenting that happens in a home.

Yet, still, the arising narrative is one that suggests that women, and specifically women who are mothers and carers, are at threat of retreat to a bygone era of Mad Men and the 1950s.

This narrative is deeply unhelpful, deeply insulting, and does not reflect the experience of a generation of men and women, mothers and fathers, and parents who work tirelessly to love, care for and cherish their family and their careers. Who both attempt to work in ways that afford them the time to be active and engaged at work and in life.

This pandemic created an opportunity for that – men and women at home – sharing parenting and caring responsibilities. Whoever said that when women and men work from home the women must ALSO do the homeschooling? Have we all bought into the status quo? Is now not the greatest time to challenge it, rather than echo it?

Old problems are solved through innovation

Overall, let’s not accept the negative narrative. Let’s look at gains made, while acknowledging but not accepting, that more needs to happen to support the disproportionately affected women and minorities impacted due to the systemic bias that existed pre COVID.

We know we can’t fully empower women and girls without engaging boys and men. We need to get men AND women engaged in this discussion about what this new paradigm means for us all. In 2020, the media is playing into our natural negativity bias – we seem to be consumed by the negative, the fear, the overwhelming sense that everything is being destroyed or halted or going backwards. So why is that not true now?

Research tells us that when men share housework and childcare, their children do better at school, have higher rates of achievement and lower rates of absenteeism.

At the same time, women in relationships are happier, healthier, and report higher levels of marital satisfaction when their partners do their fair share at home. Men are also happier and healthier – they smoke less, drink less, are more likely to have a routine health screening and to look after their mental health better.

If business is to thrive, and if the mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, brothers and sisters that drive the world of work are to thrive, then we must give ourselves permission to challenge the logic of motherhood and fatherhood. Opening a more permissive conversation around what we expect of parents, and specifically what we expect of mothers and fathers who parent and work must happen.

We must face this narrative and refuse to assume and assign work, both paid and unpaid, based on gender. We must instead have hard conversations that renegotiate and reconstruct to meet the needs of mothers and fathers.

We must challenge the status quo and seek deeper, more respectful conversations about how mothers and fathers navigate the private and public worlds that do not put those mothers and fathers at war with one another.

We need a response, not a reaction to the COVID crisis that moves this conversation forward.

Sinead Brady & Oonagh Kelly , October 2020.