Stresses and Successes

This chapter explores the events and outcomes after a year of combining motherhood and professional work using part-time and flexible work arrangements for the 30 women interviewed in this study. None of the women were unequivocal about the benefits or otherwise of using flexible work arrangements as a work–life reconciliation strategy. A near universal experience was that the working pattern the women had embarked upon when they were first interviewed was not the pattern they were working a year later. All but 4 of 30 women had made further adjustments to the time, timing, or location of their paid work. What women identify as the drivers of those further adjustments reveals much about the level of support for flexible work arrangements in important jobs at the pivotal stage in careers when women's progress to the top of large organisations slows down.

Choosing Flexibility

This chapter investigates professional women's choices about how much, where and when they work, and unpicks the complex and intersecting factors found to complicate and constrain their capacity for professional work in the context of their motherhood. The influences of dominant cultural ideologies of mothering are central to this discussion about why women work as is the relational frame within which women make decisions about how much and when they will work relative to the practical and temporal requirements of their children, their childcare providers, and in the context of their partners' work patterns and earning power. The chapter begins with the story of a woman named Anna, and then moves to discuss five intersecting economic, social, cultural and personal factors that are material to women's working hours and flexibility choices. Anna's story underscores the complexity and the myriad of influences surrounding the decision to adjust employment in early motherhood.

Making Motherhood, Careers and Flexibility Work

This chapter argues that balance is the seductive and coercive mantra of modern motherhood that draws professional women towards flexible working practices. It is seductive because work forms part of a women's sense of self and few want to give up. It is coercive because mothers feel obliged to comply and make balance the quest of their lives. For many professional women who become mothers, achieving balance has become a career aim in itself. What this study has learned is that balance across work and family life cannot be achieved arithmetically by dividing time evenly across two domains because balance is subjective and cannot be measured in working hours. Almost as soon as equilibrium is sensed things change again, and in that way balance is also a dynamic construct; what it means tomorrow will be different from today.

Compromised Choices

This chapter focuses on the compromise that has come to characterise the experience of combining careers and motherhood. For eight women in this study, compromise defined their part-time and flexible work transition in marked ways. They are highly aware of the constraints that stymie their personal goals. One woman recounts her experience of negotiating access to flexibility in her paid work arrangements with a line manager who was unsupportive. Another explains her success and failures negotiating with her husband to share her domestic workload. Compromised choice intention narratives reflect working-pattern choices that are structured by external circumstances and are made in situations that are not as open or free as they could be in terms of facilitating women's achievement of their ideal ways to combine work with family life.

Seeking Balance

This chapter examines professional women's motivations for part-time and flexible working beyond a ubiquitous balance-seeking goal. Three common motivations form shared intention narratives that express what women hope to achieve with their employment adjustment: resolving work–life conflict, protecting careers, and expanding careers. Close examination of how women explain their motivation for their particular working arrangement reveals the layers of meaning attached to it and the complexity of the practical and ideological settlement it reflects. This particular employment transition holds far greater significance in mothers' lives than a simple adjustment to the contract of employment. The chapter illustrates how mothers' working hours choices are morally potent, socially informed, and internally justified as the right way for them to do things at the time. An important finding is the pursuit of part-time and flexible working arrangements with the express intention to expand career opportunities.

Feeling Flexibility

This chapter explores the hitherto underexplored affective dimensions of the lived experience of ‘doing’ flexible work arrangements for mothers in professional and managerial jobs. It focuses on the effects on mind, body, and spirit. For women navigating the transition simultaneously with a return to work following maternity leave, the maternal body was at the centre of the experience. Tiredness was not exclusive to new and nursing mothers, the physical and emotional impacts of working intensively in largely unadjusted jobs or inhospitable workplace contexts are viscerally present in women's accounts. Hochschild's concept of emotional labour is highly relevant to the professional motherhood project and this analysis shows how the scope and span of women's emotional workload increases when they work outside the home.

Doing Flexibility

This chapter explains how women redesign their jobs, create new workspaces, and how they manage the temporal and spatial boundaries between their professional work and their family work. It deals with the work-related experiences and outcomes of women's transitions under three scenarios: converting a full-time job into a part-time job, job-sharing, and working from home. Time is the central theme in this discussion. Women embarking upon a part-time work pattern ideally seek private, protected time off work: a niche of inaccessibility. However, very few women in professional and managerial jobs in this study feel it is either realistic or advantageous to their career prospects to be completely inaccessible on non-work day.

Women in the Middle

This chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the limits and potential of flexible working arrangements through the lived experience of women in professional and managerial jobs who adjusted their employment because of their motherhood. They include part-time, job-sharing, location-flexible, flexi-time working lawyers, doctors, academics, accountants, civil servants, bankers and senior managers in marketing, human resources, communications, research and technology, and they are all mothers of at least one infant or toddler, school-age child or teenager. The chapter discusses evidence which shows that there is a life and career stage when women tend to get stuck or get out of the pipeline to the top jobs in large organisations, and it corresponds with motherhood. The women whose experiences inform the research explored in this book are at that stage. They are women in the middle.