Business English: Am I hostile to working mothers?

A female editor (50) wrote: I edit a magazine on which many of the staff are, like me, working mothers. A sub-editor recently resigned and said in an exit interview that I was “hostile to work life/balance”... von Lucy Kellaway, London

... In fact, this woman worked to rule around her childcare, took time off for every minor ailment of the child and looked very aggrieved when she got no pay rise that year.

I’m not hostile to work/life balance. I just believe that mothers who want to get ahead must work as hard as everyone else. I do it, so I don’t see why they can’t. Is that unreasonable?

Read what Lucy Kellaway, "agony-aunt" of the Financial Times (London), answered:

No, it’s not unreasonable in itself. Working mothers don’t deserve special treatment. If they are always dashing off to sports day and lurching from one childcare disaster to another they ought to progress more slowly as a result.

Lucy Kellaway

Yet there is one sentence in your e-mail that gives me pause. You say: “I do it, so I don’t see why they can’t.” This makes me wonder if you are suffering from a condition I call Tough Woman Syndrome, which affects female bosses with children and makes them excessively intolerant of any deviation by other working mothers. I understand this syndrome as I’m inclined to suffer from it myself. I sometimes catch myself thinking: How come X is making such a meal of having one child when I manage with four perfectly well? These thoughts are hardly ever fair.

You are in a different position

As you are the editor, I imagine that you are in a stronger position than this humble sub-editor both to set your own schedule and to afford more reliable childcare.

And as you are 50, you may have forgotten the hell of working when your children were tiny. Not only is TWS sometimes unfair, it can be slightly sinister, too.

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If I’m honest with myself (which I’m often not in this tricky area) I’d say that in order to succeed at work, I’ve sometimes given my job priority over my children – and I am confident that most senior working women have on occasion done the same. This means that we don’t like it when we come across other women doing it differently. When I see women working to rule around their children I find them annoying as colleagues, but I find them a bit threatening too, as they make me feel bad.

Try to be as flexible as possible

Even if you aren’t suffering from TWS, and even if you were quite right in your dealings with this sub-editor, I wonder if you are still in the wrong with the rest of your staff. If they are mostly women with children, it is in your interests to appear as flexible as possible. You should be trying to make it as easy as you can for them to do what I used to do – and I bet you did too – to make up for taking time off when a childminder has a cold by getting the work done from home at midnight if need be.

Aus der Financial Times, London. www.ft.com