Secret parenthood
Aus Angst vor beruflichen Nachteilen, verschweigen manche Frauen, dass sie Kinder haben. Wenn Sie aber Beruf und Familie vereinbaren wollen, müssen sie sich zunächst einmal zu ihrer Elternschaft bekennen.
The term “secret parenting” was coined by the US academic and economist Emily Oster. It describes how employees hide or downplay the fact that they have children. Very often, secret parenting is driven not by any explicit anti-family sentiment, but by a subtle undercurrent that makes parents uncomfortable about mentioning their children — even in organizations with progressive parental leave policies.
Secret parenting often begins when a woman is pregnant. She dreads her boss’s reaction and hides her condition. When she returns after the birth, she never mentions the baby. She has no photos of her children in her office and, if she has to leave early, she offers a personal excuse such as a dental appointment instead.
“The general sense is that everyone should adopt the polite fiction that after the first several months of leave, the child disappears into a void from which he or she emerges for viewing and discussing only during non-working hours,” Oster says. “These pressures aren’t just bad for parents; they’re bad for employers. Inflexibility around childcare is, quite simply, going to cost firms valuable workers.”
Parenting does not treat both sexes equally. Women often experience “motherhood bias”, whereas parenthood is more likely to enhance a man’s status, career prospects and earnings. Ireland-based accountant Karen O’reilly experienced motherhood bias first-hand. This led her to establish Employmum (now Employflex), a recruitment consultancy that matches mothers who have childcare responsibilities with family-friendly jobs. “At least one in five women flag the ‘motherhood penalty’ as an issue,” O’reilly says. “At the recruitment stage, particularly in the private sector, most women will still avoid mentioning they have children or are planning on having them.”
Many highly capable women give up paid work when they become parents because the odds are stacked against them. Who wants to work for an organization that treats a woman differently just because she is a mum? “Mothers and fathers ought to come clean about the nature of their lives,” Emily Oster says. “We can’t fix problems that we pretend don’t exist; we can’t improve the lot of parents at work if we pretend we aren’t parents.”