In today's guest blog, columnist, author and blogger Gaby Hinsliff spies glimmers of hope for women who are struggling to return to work after taking time off to have children.
Read the post, and do share your own experiences. Did you glide seamlessly back into place after a career break - or was it all a bit of a struggle? If you blog about it, don't forget to leave your URL on the thread - and feel free to share this post far and wide via the social media buttons at the top of the page!
As Gaby mentions, she'll be appearing at Mumsnet Workfest this Saturday. There are still a few tickets left, so if you're struggling with work issues, do come and join us.
"NOTHING kills a career like walking away from it - or so we're always told.
The nice things said at leaving parties soon get forgotten: doors stay ajar for a bit, but after a few months they're inevitably closing. The world moves on, and after four or five years - just when the woman who gave it all up to be with her kids finally gets a second wind - tough, it's too late to come back. But what if it wasn't like that?
For the last week, I've been interviewing women who bounced back after breaks of anything up to 17 years into genuinely stellar careers. The controller of BBC Radio Four, the MP advising David Cameron on family policy, one of the scientists behind that front page story recently about how diet in pregnancy affects the baby's IQ.... The article's finished now and published in today's Times (here, if you're a subscriber) but my inbox is still pinging with emails belatedly suggesting women who took time out and are now apparently running the world (check out this American site for more heartening stories: can we please have something similar here?).
Nobody's pretending this kind of comeback - or as Lily Allen calls it, mumback - is easy. Everyone I interviewed struggled at first and the best advice for exhausted parents tempted to give up work is to try going part-time if you can, and keep your options open. But while that's great advice if you're thinking of leaving, it's rubbish if you've already left: hence the Times article.
Which turns out, frankly, to be the most cheering thing I've written in years: so much so that I want to shove it under the nose of every employer - nevermind every stay-at-home mother who would love to do more now the kids are at school but thinks she'll never get back into a job worth having and there's no way she could do what she did five years ago because she's not the same person and oh god it's all too scary). Because talking to women who'd done it, there are three reasons to hope it might be getting easier.
- Women are having kids later, which means they're established in their fields and have built solid reputations by the time they quit. And that creates the platform for a comeback. You've still got the brain you had before, whatever it's done for the last five years.
- Social media makes it easier to stalk your old boss. All the women I spoke to advised tapping into your old contacts, not just firing off CVs. LinkedIn and Facebook make it quicker to find and reactivate your network.
- Working life is getting longer, which is crucial because women who have taken time out naturally lag a bit behind colleagues who haven't, and are often older than average by the time they're ready for senior positions. One good thing about no longer retiring at 60 is returners are less likely to run out of time to make it.
The only tricky question, of course, is whether this heaps yet more pressure on full-time mothers who are perfectly happy at home to get a job....
PS If any of this strikes a chord, Mumsnet has a big conference this Saturday June 15 on going back to work (or, indeed, changing careers). I'm speaking at it, so please come and say hello."
Gaby Hinsliff is the author of Half a Wife: A working family's guide to getting a life back
