One third of mothers forced out of full-time working Jamie Wilson Monday January 24, 2000 A third of working mothers are quitting full-time jobs for part-time positions or giving up work altogether, a survey reveals today, with many women blaming inflexible employers who refuse to allow them time off to look after their children. The research, carried out for the BBC's Panorama programme, undermines government initiatives which are aimed at encouraging women who have had children to return to the workforce. Researchers at the University of Bristol, who analysed the working patterns of 560 mothers, found that they all returned to work full-time after the birth of their first child. But within two years more than a third had given up their full-time positions, with 17% switching to part-time employment and 19% giving up work altogether. The programme makers also commissioned a smaller-scale study of 73 mothers, taken from the ongoing British household panel survey, which examined the reasons why such a high proportion of mothers are leaving full-time work. Susan Harkness of the University of Sussex, who carried out the research, said: "I think we tended to assume that those women who'd come back to work after childbirth stay in the labour market, so the scale of the dropout was really quite surprising. "We found that women who returned to full-time work tended to do so when their children were very young. We also found they worked very long hours - there was no reduction in hours prior to and after the birth of the child - so there was no accommodation within their jobs to account for the fact they now had responsibilities for a very young child." One of the women interviewed was Cathy Schofield, who gave up her job as marketing director for a publishing firm in order to be able to spend more time with her son. "I didn't think I would find myself not exactly being hounded out of work but having my working day made so guilt-ridden that I just couldn't bear to carry on." The publishing company insist they were accommodating, but Ms Schofield says her boss complained when her son was ill, saying he seemed to be ill more often than other children, and when she stayed at home to deal with an emergency her holiday allowance was docked. Penny Gillison, a new mother, has been trying to negotiate flexible working hours with her boss to cope with looking after her child. "You always have this feeling that someone's saying in the background 'oh, you're a terrible mother, how dare you work'... I have no choice at this point in time." While encouraging mothers back into the workplace has become a key plank of government policy, critics say much more needs to be done, including legislation that would impose the legal right for new mothers to demand their old job back on a part-time basis. However, any such move would be fiercely opposed by employers. Ruth Lea, of the Institute of Directors, said: "We did a survey 18 months ago of our members and 45% of them said that they would think twice about taking on women of prime childbearing age because of the maternity legislation." The programme, called Back to the Kitchen Sink, which will be broadcast at 10pm tonight on BBC1, also looks at the latest research into child development, which appears to add weight to the controversial theory that young children whose parents work full time may perform less well at school. Professor Heather Joshi, of the Institute of Education, analysed several aspects of the lives of 9,000 young adults who were born in 1970. The research found there was a link between a mother's employment in the pre-school years and their children's academic success. The differences were small but meant that girls were 10% "less likely to advance one rung of the qualifications ladder, such as the step between GCSE and A-level", while boys were 12% less likely to do so. The results follow the findings of the first part of the study, released three months ago, which reported that children whose mothers worked before they were one year old had slightly worse reading scores later on. "There may be something in the child's early development that equips them better to face these undoubted challenges of doing public exams," Professor Joshi said. However researchers believe of more significance may be the quality of childcare rather than simply the fact of having a working mother. Info balita, http://www.balita-anda.indoglobal.com Kirim bunga untuk handaitaulan & relasi di jakarta http://www.indokado.com Situs sulap pertama di Indonesia http://www.impact.or.id/dmc-sulap/ Etika berinternet, kirim email ke: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Berhenti berlangganan, e-mail ke: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
