We’re in trouble if a woman’s place is WFH

Every change has a price. And even when, like WFH, it looks benign, it’s often women who pay it. Picture: Oliver Rossi/DigitalVision, via Getty Images

Pandemic habits trail on, notably working from home. This was once a rare quirk: I remember interviewing the pioneering Dame Steve Shirley 40 years ago about her F International software company, a homeworking innovation aimed at creating job opportunities for women with dependants.

As businesses grew with the internet, so did screen-at-home employment, and I used it as a subplot in a novel 22 years ago (a kid’s manoeuvre on his mother’s computer impresses the employer). Elsewhere, senior people who could call the shots noted the digital freedom and craftily enabled themselves to escape the office on Fridays.

However, after lockdown, WFH suddenly became, in white-collar circles, seen as almost a human right. Young candidates raise it at interview. This week civil servants at the Office for National Statistics are striking against orders to get back to the office, a union spokesman saying ONS management promised it would carry on after Covid and people even moved house on that basis. There is resistance elsewhere to the wider civil service guidance of 60 per cent in-office time, and similar arguments afflict the business world.

In any change there are effects to note and unpick. One is that the new assumption of WFH widens an old class distinction. Tradesmen, labourers, medics, police, shop and warehouse workers on weary commutes may resent it, or seek promotion into remote admin roles. White-collar employers get anxious for young workers to come into the office to absorb ethos and ideas.

Then there’s the question of women: a study this spring in the United States showed that the more you let employees work remotely, the more women you get. And since all research, notably McKinsey, suggests that a strong female cadre at every level improves business profitability, WFH becomes more attractive again.

It’s a truism that family life means juggling, more for women than men. The American paper speaks of the need for businesses to shrink the “motherhood gap” and adds that if there is a problem “the logistical toll of motherhood may be magnified by school officials’ tendencies to call mothers rather than fathers”. The same applies to nurseries: one suspicious rash and a WFH parent can be summoned more easily than a besuited salaryman 30 kilometres away. Moreover, however ambitious a woman may be, the odds are that in the preschool years she finds comfort in sheer geographical closeness. And there’s freedom in not needing to dress to impress below webcam level.

Live through decades and you notice how deep and rapid have been the social changes around women’s work and parenthood. Hideous housing costs now trap ever more couples into keeping two full-time salaries, and the fragility of globalised jobs makes that feel vital: either of you could be made redundant. So presumptions changed.

When I had babies in the 1980s, few friends were full-time employees in the preschool years. Plenty of us were earning, some had au pairs, family help or part-time childminders (registered but amateur). Infants toddled or crawled under our desks and disastrously answered the phone: my son once picked up a callback from Ted Heath while I was in the bathroom and tried to play him his “Toot-a-floot”. The former prime minister was civil about it. Toddlers were shared for convenient and companionable playdates and had some playgroup mornings: it was normal to fit work around them rather than spend those four or five years clawing up a distant hierarchy.

In simple human terms, that made sense. In a harder-edged world, it often can’t. Read women’s fiction and the transition is reflected. Someone should do a PhD on Joanna Trollope’s oeuvre, and mark how her heroines’ dilettante artistic pin-money supermarket or hospitality jobs mutate gradually in professional seriousness, all the way to City of Friends in 2017 where everyone’s up Canary Wharf in heels.

But even so, fiction about graduate women has hardly caught up with the full “nurseryfication” of infant years. The loose au pair system collapsed after Brexit. Only the most affluent can afford nannies, and only the luckiest enrol grandparents (anyway, the older first-time mothers get, the less physically able are the grannies to wrangle toddlers). Thus, after maternity leave, it is common for a child from the age of one to spend more than 40 hours a week being managed and entertained in a group setting, according to government early-learning guidance.

It may be excellent and suit that particular baby. But not always. Full-time nursery is ruinously expensive, and the fear of slipping off the working ladder means that some women’s pay after tax goes entirely on childcare. Many find a shaky compromise: combine WFH deals with random help, artfully manage phone and Zooms, write strategic papers late at night: get away with it, but sometimes resent both roles, rather than risk the job and the identity it brings.

It will be interesting to see how these changes settle. I suspect a hybrid workforce, WFH and office, will become normal. Companies need to recruit gifted women and keep trained ones, and new mothers won’t commute daily if they can avoid it. But might workplaces revert to being strongly masculine places, dominated by male energy and ambition? Might some start seeing midlife women as useful mummy drones, lesser beings whose ideas and opinions fade when the Zoom screen does? When children are older, will it be harder than ever for them to step back into the culture of water cooler and wine bar when the male and the childless have moved on? Every change has a price. And even when, like WFH, it looks benign, it’s often women who pay it.

The Times