Women can avoid downgrading if they could reduce their hours with their current employers.
For decades mothers of young children have complained about not being taken seriously in the workplace, but research published today reveals for the first time the extent to which professional women are forced to slide down the career ladder to find jobs that allow them to spend time with their family.
Women managers wanting to work part-time after a baby are seeing their talents and qualifications wasted because they can only find employment well below their skill levels, according to the most comprehensive UK study of the impact of motherhood on careers.
Almost half of women professionals who downgrade to lower skilled part-time roles move to jobs where the average employee does not have A-levels, leaving three years or more of higher level education and training underused, according to academics at Oxford University and University of East Anglia.
The study, published in the Economic Journal, is the first to quantify the extent of the so-called “hidden brain drain” for professional and managerial women who become mothers. It found that a third of female corporate managers moved down the career ladder after having a child. Two-thirds of that number took clerical positions and the rest moved into other lower skill jobs.
Teaching and nursing were the most favourable careers for supporting moves to part-time hours while continuing within the same profession, the study found, but even there, nearly one in 10 quit for lower skill jobs.
The study highlighted the continuing problem of the frequently lowly status of part-time work, which is linked to lower pay and, because part-time work is female-dominated, a big contributor to the UK’s entrenched gender pay gap. It showed that despite government moves to allow parents of children under six to request flexible working, highly-qualified women still traded job status and responsibility for the hours many felt their family needed.
Six million women — 40 per cent of those in work — are in part-time jobs, a number that includes the majority of mothers. Occupational downgrading is not happening because mothers want less demanding jobs, but because part-time opportunities in higher-level jobs are restricted.
Researchers found women were most able to avoid downgrading if they could reduce their hours with their current employer.
The study said the findings placed a question mark over part-time work as a solution for professional women seeking to juggle career and motherhood. The government should make flexible working a right for parents of young children unless an employer could prove a case against it.
Another study in the Economic Journal revealed how close the link is between motherhood and part-time work.
The research by Gillian Paull of the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed the birth of the first child was the single most important event in women moving to part-time work.
Before having children, more than four-fifths of working women are in full-time employment, but once they become mothers only a third of those who have pre-school children and work were employed full time. For fathers, the pattern went the other way, with 91 per cent of working men employed full time prior to having children, while 96 per cent of working fathers with a pre-school child are full time.
Part-time working is also entrenching a pay divide between different groups of women. Women working part-time have hourly earnings that are on average 26 per cent lower than women working full time.
