\u201cWhen is a woman actually considered equally employable?\u201d my friend asked as we attempted to set the world to rights one evening. \u201cWhen you\u2019re younger there\u2019s the fear of what having children will do to your career. And when you\u2019re perimenopausal there\u2019s the fear of being perceived or dismissed as some hormonally unbalanced burden who is \u2018just at that stage of life\u2019,\u201d she continued.<\/p>\n
Maternity leave, menopause leave, parental leave, shorter-working-year schemes. All great and important to have. But how many women availing of them feel they haven\u2019t or won\u2019t impact their career in some way?<\/p>\n
We had already discussed teenagers and the things we had naively sworn ours would definitely never do when we were busy in the toddler trenches. We\u2019d discussed how women had definitely got the short end of the stick in the biology stakes, and how lucky men were to have never had to factor in bad periods to their outfit choice or long commute. (And while we\u2019re at it: curse you, period product ads of old, for gaslighting us women for so many years into thinking rollerskating or parading around the place in all white at that riskiest time of the month was the norm.)<\/p>\n
And we\u2019d discussed Youth, Sharon Horgan\u2019s new comedy series, whose first two episodes we\u2019d just seen. And agreed that no matter what way you look at it, even if that\u2019s through laughter, which much of it was, getting older looks decidedly less craic than people had promised.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0Youth: This might be the best art-imitates-life show Sharon Horgan has attemptedOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n \u201cDo you remember when the only thing you worried about was getting the kids to sleep through the night?\u201d my friend said pensively, acknowledging our innocence in it all. \u201cWe thought everything would be easier once they slept.\u201d<\/p>\n But now, we concurred, it\u2019s a very different type of night-time disruption. For every primary schoolchild who might finally be asleep, there\u2019s a teenager in another room roaring excitedly through gaming headphones. <\/p>\n And let\u2019s not forget the one who figures 3am is optimum omelette cooking time. It\u2019s the storm before the calm when they\u2019ll all move out and we\u2019ll be left crying in the empty bedrooms we were promised. Big heavy trying-to-catch-your-breath sobs caused by the overwhelming emotion of it all – and also, possibly, the pong of a football sock lain undiscovered under the bed since circa 2018.<\/p>\n Except this is 2026, and they\u2019ll probably never be able to afford to move out, so you can skip that last bit and just buy a scented candle instead. The storm may be here to stay.<\/p>\n Still, it\u2019s not just about what future housing issues might look like. Life, parenthood and all that entails looks a bit different from what we might have imagined in our own youth, my friend and I agreed. <\/p>\n Which brings us back to back to my friend\u2019s question at the beginning. And whether we as women feel we are always under a different kind of scrutiny.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t be visible as a mother at work,\u201d a colleague once advised me. I think it\u2019s safe to say, as a parenting columnist, she may have called that one wrong. But I could see where she was coming from. And I thought of the advice I might give to my younger self, if I could, and would give now to my own daughter.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Jen Hogan: You may be questioning the sort of company I keepOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Such as bearing in mind that your career may never recover from motherhood. That\u2019s not to say don\u2019t do it \u2013 my children are the best thing that ever happened to me \u2013 but know that the motherhood penalty is real. A recent study published in the British Journal of Sociology<\/a> found \u201cmotherhood significantly increases downward mobility and limits access to professional occupations\u201d. <\/p>\n