When Sheila Fitzgerald, 50, went back to work last year, she was a full-time mother who had not set foot in an office for 10 years.
“It felt daunting because the workplace had moved on, as well as the technology,” she said. “I was concerned about not fitting in, I was concerned not exactly about being old ... but about not being a new young recruit.”
Fitzgerald is the mother of three daughters, aged between 10 and 15, and her husband Brian Lysaght, 47, works for Bloomberg News. It took her five years in all to find a job similar to the one in corporate communications that she had left a decade before — she is now a manager in a technology company in southwest London.
“It wasn’t an all-out job hunt, but when I saw something, I’d apply, with basically no results. I just got rejections. It did undermine my confidence because I wondered about my age and the gap in employment,” she said.
Three years ago, she read about Women Like Us, a recruitment company in north London, her local area, which specializes in retraining.
“I remember thinking, I’m a professional — I wouldn’t really require that sort of assistance. I know how to write a CV. But then a couple more years went by, I was feeling desperate and questioning my employability. I went to some of their interview workshops, which were incredibly helpful,” she said.
No one really talks about working life after full-time motherhood. It is just assumed that women might eventually drift into badly paid part-time work — if they can land a job at all. But there are growing signs that women are unhappy with this limp status quo and are instead seeking second-chance careers where they can actually use their skills. In the US the trend already has a name: relaunching.
Last year a guide to being a “woman returner” came out called Back on the Career Track, by Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir, two mothers who had six-year career breaks before going back into investment banking and head-hunting. And last month, New York-based novelist Meg Wolitzer, 49 — who has been described as the female Philip Roth — took on the subject. The Ten Year Nap is an addictive examination of the minutiae of the lives of four women friends who find themselves at odds over what to do after 10 years out of the workplace.
Wolitzer herself has two sons, Gabriel, 17, and Charlie, 13, and is married to science writer Richard Panek, 50. She never stopped working — it’s easier for a writer, she admits over the phone — but was fascinated by the lives of the high-flyers turned stay-at-home mums she met at the school gates.
The “nap” of the title has raised hackles. It is not meant to be a dig, Wolitzer says. In fact, one of the recurring jokes in the book is that these full-time mothers live their lives on a tight schedule. Their alarm clocks go off before their husbands’ so that they can get up and make packed lunches, and they are constantly rushing between pick-ups and play dates.
“The rest of the world doesn’t fall away when you have children,” Wolitzer said. “But your priorities are with your family. You’re not exactly asleep, but you’re in the dream of family life. I wanted to ask — what happens when that shifts and the world returns to you?”
Wolitzer had some concerns about writing about a privileged minority — those who can afford not to work.
“I’d been judgmental before I really got to know some of these women,” she said. “They were mostly women who had worked in the corporate world and realized when they had children that the idea of going back to a world that they hadn’t loved — and which hadn’t loved them — made them feel more than reluctant. I’d always felt that everybody would find their passion in life and it was kind of naive to think that was true.”
“I was very moved by some of these women’s lives and their conflicts,” she said.
In the UK, 55 percent of women with a child under the age of five are employed (according to the Office for National Statistics). The figure rises to 79 percent when the youngest child reaches 16. On some level then, re-launching has always happened. But the fact is that we very rarely hear about these women or the obstacles they face, says Kate Grussing, founder of recruitment consultancy, Sapphire Partners.
Grussing, 44, is a former banker with four children aged between seven and 13. She set up her company in 2005 and it specializes in finding people flexible work, job shares and maternity cover, recruiting and headhunting for firms in the City of London, law companies and corporates such as Pepsi and Colgate.
Many of the women on her books have had a “nap” of at least five years — some as many as 10.
“It’s incredibly common here but even more so in the US,” Grussing said. “Over there, maternity leaves are short, vacation time is non-existent and childcare is poor. The factors are different in the UK, but there are thousands of women in the same boat. We see a huge number of women who planned to go back after the second baby, but then moved house or had elder-care issues and suddenly they look up and five, seven, 10 years have passed.”
One of Sapphire Partners’ own recruitment consultants, Alison Downey, 48, has had two eight-year career breaks in between raising her two daughters, now 18 and 21. Originally a solicitor, she has reinvented herself to get back into work.
“I never took a conscious decision to stay out that long. Each time I’ve gone back has been through personal contacts — I’d always kept talking to people and when something came up that I wanted to do, I did it,” she said.
She wishes now that she had kept her hand in a bit more to facilitate the return.
“There are a lot of challenges. Your confidence ebbs when you’re away. You come back and things have changed — for example, this time when I came back I was working in an open-plan office for the first time ever. But there are advantages too. When you’re on a career ladder, it’s difficult to step back and think about what you really want to do,” she said.
There is a downside to all this, said Lynda Gratton, professor of management practice at London Business School.
“It drives me mad that we talk about “on-ramps” and “off-ramps” for women [ways to make leaving and returning easier]. Men want them too. Why should women be the ones who are expected to look after the children? This is the problem in our society — and business colludes with it,” Gratton said.
Career breaks and reinventing yourself are not just for women or for parents, she argues, but for everyone. After all, in the future it’s expected that many more people will take sabbaticals and downtime.
“Most of us will work into our late 60s and careers are becoming more fragmented,” Gratton said. “But anybody who takes a break is always going to find it difficult to get back in. You need to have a strategy — do part-time work, stay in touch with your work community, go on training programs. You can’t take five years off, turn up and say, ‘Now I want to start again.’”
Heather Stork, 38, from Guildford, southern England, is all too aware of this and is putting her strategy in place. The mother of Annabel, five, and Thomas, three, she has not worked for seven years (her husband, Matthew, 39, is managing director of a medical company). Stork was laid off from her job in investment banking at Merrill Lynch during the financial crisis of 2001 and had not found another job by the time she became pregnant with her daughter.
“Once I had my children it was very difficult to think about leaving them to go back to work,” she said. “If you have maternity leave you have something to go back to. Otherwise, you just get used to family life.”
“I was incredibly focused on making sure that my children could get the best care possible ... Now they are on their way to school and I see there is the possibility of relaunching a version of the career I had,” she said.
She doesn’t think it would be possible to get back into investment banking, though, because the hours are so long.
“I would be looking at getting two nannies,” she said.
She started her job search earlier this year, looking for something in financial consulting. She has had three interviews and has not quite found what she is looking for yet
“It’s difficult to read people’s reactions. Two of the companies didn’t focus on my career break at all. But at the other place they were very interested in what I did during the time off. It’s hard to explain without seeming like you’ve been so in charge of the household that you don’t want to leave it,” she said.
She plays up the advantages of her time off.
“In many ways I do feel my skills have increased — I have done fund raising, been involved in my daughter’s school and I have helped friends start small businesses. It’s just a matter of convincing an employer that I have not been completely out of touch with what’s going on in the world. Which I think is a real misconception anyway — there are loads of women who are intelligent and ambitious, but not out there earning money,” she said.
It is these very women that have started to interest big business.
Susie Mullan, human resources director at management consulting company Accenture, explained: “The upside is that you are recruiting people with multiple years of experience before their career break — so you are getting that intellectual capital back. We are looking at ways to connect with women who might have been out of the workplace for longer than a year or two. If we can’t find a way to stay connected to them, we lose the opportunity to retain some key talent.”
But companies are just as keen not to lose these women in the first place.
Mullan said: “We do see a lot of people off-ramping to two or three days a week, working flexibly or taking a less high-profile role. As their children get older, then they start back on the career track.”
Women can’t possibly hope to go back in at the level they were when they left, though, can they?
“Correct,” said Grussing, curtly.
But employers do appreciate the maturity, loyalty and enthusiasm these women have, she said. And they get executive-level skills at a negotiable price (usually as a trade for flexibility).
“I’ll be honest — it’s far easier for us to place a woman who has had a shorter career break. The average is three years. For the women at the 10-year end of the spectrum, their experience is probably not as relevant. But we should give these women help because it’s important for the economy. Plus, we see a lot of women who have taken time out and never plan to go back. And then, guess what? They’re widowed or divorced,” she said.
Often these “napping” women are doing executive-level things anyway.
“One City [of London] woman I know took a career break after her second child and ran the PTA at the largest private school in London for three years,” Grussing said. “She has been managing diverse stakeholder groups and doing a lot of fund raising. And she inherited money where she has a trustee responsibility and so had to get up to speed on charity laws. She has this fantastic experience. Schools, churches and voluntary organizations benefit hugely from this pool of women.”
Relaunching is not just about getting back into the City or Wall Street, though. Nina Goldsack, 42, has three boys under the age of eight. An army wife from Wiltshire, southwest England, she left her career in risk-management consultancy because her husband was posted abroad. Now back in the UK after nine years not working, she is re-training to be a maths teacher.
“The whole ‘going back to work’ thing is a big deal,” she said. “When I applied for the course, I found myself saying, ‘Well, I did a maths degree 20 years ago and I can provide you with a reference from someone I worked with 18 years ago’ ... You start to wonder if you are bringing anything valuable to them. But it seems a lot of people are in this situation. Some of the teachers I have been with so far are people who have come to it mid-life as a second career, so that helps.”
It took Goldsack years to reach the decision to go back to work at all.
“It became a massive soul-searching exercise,” she said. “Did I want to go back to what I did before, but in a compromised way? You realize that you will have to retrain, be at a lower level and give up a lot of what you’ve had with the children. I thought I didn’t want that enough. You think: ‘How much am I prepared to give up? Do I have to spend thousands of pounds on courses, take five years to qualify and then find I have a new career where I will not be there for the children at all?’”
She is currently studying for a teaching qualification.
“It has definitely worked out for me — it is so stimulating and I do want to go out and do something. But I talk to other mothers and they don’t necessarily agree. Having come this far and compromised a lot, they feel they don’t want to compromise anything at all. I know other people who tried to go back and said to me: ‘It’s really difficult. The sooner the better.’ It’s mainly to do with the experience you had being worth virtually nothing because it’s too long ago. But I know a lot of people who are retraining. It has been a huge shock for me to realize that most of my friends have not let themselves get into this position. They have kept something going that is rewarding — they have not taken several steps down the ladder,” she said.
At the end of The Ten Year Nap the message is deliberately ambiguous. It is a novel, after all.
“This wasn’t going to be a polemic or a handbook about how you should live your life,” Wolitzer said.
Two of the women — including Amy, the main character — go back to work full-time. Two decide to remain full-time mothers. But none of them really achieve what they had imagined for themselves 10 years previously. That, Wolitzer, suggests, is life — none of us get what we want.
But she is obviously partisan, concluding in the book that, when it comes to a career: “One day you just woke up and knew there was somewhere you needed to be.”
Wolitzer suspects the culture may have moved on since she finished writing the book anyway.
“I wanted to mark this moment in time, but I think it is changing. I did a radio show recently and fathers were calling in and saying things like: ‘I have an equal partnership with my wife.’ This hasn’t happened for the men I know in their forties, but I can see it happening with younger guys. Men are finding great pleasure in being home with their children,” she said.
Maybe in the future we’ll all be taking 10-year naps.
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