To be a working parent with pre-schoolers is a challenge. I write this as the mother of two girls – a four-year-old and a two-year-old. They were recently at home sick for more than a week. The dreaded lurgy has hit our household hard this winter.
My husband and I have been desperately juggling our schedules so we can get our jobs done, while simultaneously being good parents to our sick babies.
I worked from home and between the nappy changes and requests for snacks, I didn’t have much capacity for creative thinking. So it became a day of responding to emails, taking calls, formatting documents, and monitoring the news cycle.
I did endless loads of washing, followed a trail of Cruskits around the house, and built towers to a background of Sesame Street and The Wiggles.
I jumped between my business brain and my mum brain. I can do it because I mastered the art during Covid lockdowns, but it’s exhausting.
It’s made even harder because our ‘village’ is 400km away We don’t have family here in Canberra, so it’s just the two of us trying to juggle full-time jobs and full-time parenting.
When things like this happen, something has to give – and usually, it’s work. The problem is, usually it’s my work.
I’m a policy wonk and I work in an office. My husband is a tradie and even though I’m the higher salary earner, the caring responsibilities usually fall to me when our kids come a cropper. Not because he isn’t a hands-on or capable father, but because the building and construction industry is inherently inflexible.
If I don’t go to the office for a few days, I can still keep on top of things from afar. But his clients worry when their toilet isn’t plumbed in, or their renovation project timeline blows out. So the caring falls to me.
I also work in the building and construction industry and one of my jobs is to advocate for ways to get more women into trades. But as I sit here, with my two-year-old darling talking about Elmo and trying to get her to keep some Hydralyte down, I imagine what it would be like if both my husband and I worked in inflexible jobs. If I were a tradie too, what would we do then?
Most women in the building and construction industry come to it late in life. A lot of them are wives of tradies who have been around the traps so long they figure they might as well dive right in.
They’re women like me. But you’d never find me willingly starting an apprenticeship in a trade. Leave aside the fact that even after watching countless YouTube videos I still couldn’t build a pallet mud kitchen, I couldn’t make an apprenticeship work for my family.
People are talking a lot about making the industry more flexible for women – but what about for men? I’m a staunch feminist, but hear me out.
If the industry can offer flexibility for women to be able to do school drop-offs, take time away from the tools for maternity leave, and care for sick children, then that’s great. But that puts the onus squarely back on us to take time away from work for child caring. It perpetuates the expectation that no matter how much we earn, or how senior we are in the workforce, we will still be the ones to down tools for the sake of our little ones.
Perhaps, flexibility is better injected into the industry as a whole – allowing our male counterparts the same options that are being offered to women.
From my point of view, if my husband could access the same flexibility to be able to do daycare drop off in the morning, go to pre-school assembly, make it to 5 pm swimming lessons, and stay home when the girls are sick, then I inherit that same flexibility via proxy. It means I can catch the early flight to Melbourne for meetings, I can finish a task without having to rush off for pick up, and I can share the sick day responsibilities.
My husband started a new job recently. He told them he’d like to work a four-day week (to spend Fridays with our girls) and start on site at 8.30 so he could do daycare drop off. The boss said ‘no problem’.
Then he started the job. The first day was an 8.30 am start, the second was 7.30. Third was 6.45. Our daycare opens at 7.30.
He was then told the four-day working week was just for the probationary period. After that, it would have to be five days.
My 8 am start got pushed out as I scrambled to get the girls out the door in the morning. My transition to a five-day working week turned back to four. My job suffered because his is inflexible.
The building and construction industry needs to do much better. If it can’t offer more flexibility, it will never entice people into its ranks, especially not parents. Especially not women.
If my job didn’t allow me the option to change my hours, work from home, take carers’ leave, bring my kids into the office, work part-time, and generally just be a mum, our family would suffer. I’m lucky to have a workplace that affords me these privileges. But if my husband had them too, I wouldn’t need to lean on them quite so heavily or quite so often.
I hope for the sake of my daughters, who one day might want to do a plumbing apprenticeship, or become a carpenter or an electrician, that the industry can change.
Yes, flexibility for women in building is great, but how about just flexibility for everyone?
