A friend recently said this to me “if you take a break from work to have children you are then penalised and prevented from returning to work at your old level“. Penalised seems a strange word to use. To me penalised means being punished or being put at an unfair disadvantage. Do not get me wrong – I get that stepping away from your job is going to seriously diminish the career prospects for most people but it’s not really unfair is it?
However, it does seem to be a view held by many. I’m not talking about discrimination here (check out this website for some shocking stories) but about articles like this one called The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In.
I have been lucky enough to work flexibly for the past 12 years as I have brought up my children but still this article from the very funny ScarryMommy blog entitled “9 Reasons I Regret Being a Stay at Home Mom” resonates.
The bottom line is nicely articulated here “At no point did I calculate the lifetime impact of diminished earnings and prospects. No part of my brain sat itself down and thought, what is the price both in both this year’s dollars and my lifetime earnings, to leaving the workforce and is it a decision that a decade or two from now I might regret?“. Even if you didn’t think through the consequences, and I suspect most of us don’t, you can’t get your knickers in a twist when employers don’t rate you as highly as candidates who’ve been in the workplace for the past 7 years. can you? Broadly speaking, for anyone, if you take any length of time away from your career you’re going to suffer for being out of the work place. In all industries things change continually and most people need to continue to learn/train whilst still employed. Nobody can expect to return to a career without some updating to their skill set. Yes, it’s crappy and dull and it’s a real problem but you need to rebuild your career; take relevant part time work if necessary, learn about all the new tech which may have passed you by, work your connections, get to industry events and make yourself employable again! Before you know it you’ll be back in the corporate grind and wishing you could jump off the hamster wheel!!
PS if you are interested in the bigger picture to this; equality, women in the workplace, career giving vs bread winning and “having it all” check out Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Ted Talk: Can we all “have it all”?
