This isn't a book that hammers you with its feminist credentials, but there is an unavoidably gendered aspect to our ideas of what constitutes "real work", even though you'd be hard-pressed to argue that a screaming toddler is the easy option compared with piddling round on Microsoft Excel.īut even as an increasing number of women work full-time outside the home, our attachment to traditional gender roles is hard to shake. It took decades for researchers to realise this, because they initially regarded childcare and housework as leisure time (most were men). That is Schulte's diagnosis, too: by far the most leisure-time-starved group in society are mothers (particularly single mothers). "With work, if it had been all or nothing, I would have chosen nothing," one said. They were proof you couldn't "have it all", if that meant working 60 hours a week while raising a young family. The answer, again and again: working part-time when their children were young, and in one case, having a stay-at-home husband. It is a common sentiment, particularly among working mothers I recently sat in a room full of high-profile women in the media, discussing how they made it to the top.
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