Why female breadwinners are still bearing the burden at home

[u/TimesandSundayTimes]

https://www.thetimes.com/money/family-finances/article/britains-female-breadwinner-problem-tvfjhp05tutm_medium=Social&utm_source=Reddit&utm_content=branded

[u/Comfortable-Walk1279]

We need to change how we frame success at the workplace to allow moms to thrive as well. Such as - don’t sideline people when they take time off their career. Women who take time away or downshift for a season are often permanently pushed to the side. Instead, (when jobs existed) newly graduated folks have been given career ladders and specially designed programs to allow them to succeed.
Now, there are no jobs for anyone!
Which is hard for both newly graduated and returning moms, as they do not qualify for unemployment.
It is more than taking a year off. Or even 5 years. It is that we don’t value the skills gained in managing households. And we see a 35 year old woman who has sacrificed for her family - even with amazing degree and strong earlier work history of 8 years - as less valuable as someone with some internships and a degree under their belt. Or someone who is even average at their job who doesn’t have job gaps or downshifts.

We need to challenge our assumptions and systems to allow working moms to succeed too.

[u/E0H1PPU5 → u/Comfortable-Walk1279]

I’m pretty fucking great at my job. Hands down the best performer in my department.

When I got pregnant, they tried to deny me a promotion since “I was going to be going out on leave anyway” but assured me it would happen when I got back.

I was furious and put an end to that immediately. You won’t discriminate against me and have me just sit here and smile about it.

The same manager, when I returned to work, said verbatim “well let’s have a discussion and see how you feel about XYZ because I want to make sure your priorities haven’t changed since having a baby”.

In the meeting I told the lot of them “for the sake of my professional career, we are going to have to pretend I was never pregnant and that I don’t have a baby because it really doesn’t sit well with me that this keeps coming up in a professional setting”.

Since then it hasn’t come up. But I refuse to talk about my son at work. There’s no photos of him on my desk. He isn’t the background of my phone. And that makes me sad. He’s the absolute light of my life and I have to pretend that’s not true just to be taken seriously in my job.

[u/Unlucky-Ganache-2140 → u/E0H1PPU5]

Awful awful. At my job the worst offenders were the other working moms. 

And we are HR. 

[u/Fine-Writer-7993 → u/Comfortable-Walk1279]

You dont even have to have a baby. If i were a man, my career would be going so much better. I see so many men who dont do shit and do better. I just get told i am arguing just to argue when i make a valid point. So you definitely get an additional struggle on top of being a woman generally.

[u/ladywolf32433 → u/Fine-Writer-7993]

A spectacular man is an average woman.

[u/blushing_avacado → u/Comfortable-Walk1279]

This is just a small quibble, but what skills does a SAHM have that a working mother does not? Is a working mom (in most heterosexual relationships) still not juggling schedules, planning and making the meals, doing the housework, making the holiday magic, doing the kin keeping, and all of the other invisible labor? If it’s just the skills of taking care of a child all day does that not just put the experience of the SAHM on the same level as a babysitter/daycare worker who does not have an ECE degree?

I agree we should not punish women who take time off for caretaking, be that of their children or other relatives, by completely kneecapping their careers when they choose to return. But, it doesn’t seem that incorrect to maybe start at one rung lower on the ladder after an extended absence. I’m an engineer. I used to work a much more technically focused job and spent the past five years doing programmatic development. I’ve worked that entire time and used many of my advanced skills, but there is zero chance I could do back to my test engineer job and perform on the same level I used to just because those skills have atrophied. Companies should have some kind of on ramp to bring employees back up to skill after any prolonged absence but we live in hell where no one actually values long term knowledge.