Just Imagine If Dominic Cummings Had Been A Mum?
Image: Times Higher Education
As the emotional floodgates opened, anger rushed over Twitter in the wake of the revelations regarding Dominic Cummings’, erm, ‘cummings’ and goings, one tweet by Sinéad Gleeson jumped out at me:
Image: @sineadgleeson
“Because I was concerned for the welfare of my child and I made the decision as a caring mother,” is not an excuse any woman can get away with in the workplace for a request as simple as, ‘Can I leave 30 minutes early to pick up my kid from school?” let alone a transgression as dire and serious as the one Dominic Cummings has made. For decades, women have been caring and concerned parents and still achieved huge career milestones at enormous personal sacrifice to themselves without being able to use it as an explanation let alone an excuse.
Many women I know have had to hide the fact that they have children, pretend they don’t exist in the workplace to ensure career progression. I know of one who watched her kids’ violin recital sitting in the work loos sobbing as her husband Facetimed throughout and another who, heartbreakingly, had to go through a miscarriage on her own in the toilets only to wash cold water on her face, blow her nose, and return to her desk to finish the working day, in agony. Want some facts? Don’t worry; I’ve got receipts.
A survey of 1,000 UK mothers in March 2019, revealed a continuing lack of support from businesses when it comes to balancing family and work.
Over half (54%) struggle to balance time between childcare and work
52% feel guilty about leaving their child
One-third (33%) struggle financially with the cost of childcare
17% feel marginalised or excluded by colleagues
14% said their colleagues are unsupportive and inflexible
Over one in ten (14%) miss out on promotions because of maternity leave
The survey also discovered (not even remotely shockingly) that women are still considered the primary caregiver for children. This makes sense when newborns and young babies are solely reliant on breastfeeding, but beyond that, why for the love of equality, are we not treating men as full and willing parents in their own right? Sure, there are progressive companies and bosses out there but they are still the exception. We’re still calling them forward-thinking and progressive.
On average, mothers take 12.5 months parental leave after the birth of a child. In comparison, two-thirds of men (67%) took just two weeks or less leave, and one in five (22%) took no leave at all. This means that women are taking an average of 24 times more parental leave than men.
While women are still fighting to be able to have a career and a child without the side-order of a mental breakdown, Dominic Cummings gets to fetishise his role as a father and hold it up as a some sort of glowing character reference in order to preserve his career. He made a conscious and informed choice within the guidelines (guidelines that the rest of us were never told about), to do the best thing for his family and try and continue to do his job. And the women listening? “Choice?” we thought, confused. “When was there ever a choice for us?”
So can we, for a minute, just imagine this scenario: “a female advisor to a world leader [using] her child as an excuse?” Well, first of all, it wouldn’t happen. Not because it shouldn’t but because every woman who’s ever worked a day in their life knows that it simply wouldn’t wash. Just try and imply that we chose the wellbeing over our family over our workplace responsibilities and we would be held up by the press and the corporate white-collared population as the reason why there’s no equality in the work place. Those glass ceilings? They’re still there, they’d say, not because we make it impossible to break them but because, when all is said and done women will always choose family over career. We're not holding you back, they’d say, we’re not trampling on your domesticated shoulders, relying on them to hold us up as we run the world, you’re willingly making the choice to do so. If they’re really progressive, they may even thank us for making their success possible, for holding it all together, for being the knackered woman standing behind the great man.
And to that, we can all roll our eyes, knowing that while Dominic Cummings stays in office not only is lockdown fatally undermined, but so too is the future of women in the workplace. And don’t even get me started on Boris Johnson warbling on about ‘being a good father’. When he can own and name all his children, then and only then, can he talk about fatherhood.