Social stigma of dads who take on the family role has to change

JOANNA Gray says she would not have achieved all that she has so far in her career if her husband hadn’t given up his job when their daughter was born.

Mrs Gray, who is business services director at Armstrong Watson, heads up the accountancy firm’s Northallerton office with Peter Molyneux.

While Mrs Gray is at work, her husband, who previously worked in insurance, looks after their two children, aged eight and four.

Mrs Gray, who is in her early 30s, said: “I don’t think there are any barriers to women progressing that I’ve come across anywhere where gender has stopped you getting a promotion.

“I think it’s purely down to personal reasons where women have chosen to have a family and go down that route.”

Armstrong Watson currently has 11 partners in Yorkshire, none of which are female.

Mrs Gray said it is attitudes towards men taking on the “family role” which need to change. There is a social stigma attached to the arrangement, she said.

When Karen French, a property partner in the Leeds office of law firm Squire Sanders, had her first child, she was offered the opportunity to job share.

At the time, she was working for Hammonds, which would later become Squire Sanders.

“That gave me a work-life balance”, said Mrs French, who is in her early 50s and whose sons are now 19 and 20.

“I was very much a hands-on mum and now I’m a partner in a global law firm.”

But she stressed: “You just can’t have everything all of the time.”

Mrs French became a partner in 2008. But ten years ago, promotion to partner while in a job share just would not have happened, she said.

In Squire Sanders’ Leeds office, nine of a total of 28 partners are women.

Meanwhile, Madeleine Thomson, a consulting partner at PwC, is one of only two female partners in the Big Four accountancy firm’s Leeds office.

She said her perception is it is more challenging as a woman operating at the top level than as a man.

“I haven’t had children and I haven’t had a career break, but at various points in my career I’ve been told I am too aggressive and I’m too hard whereas I don’t think they would have said the same of a man.”

Ms Thomson said that there is “a very old adage around the slightly old boys’ network”, adding that there is “still promotion of people of their own image”.

The higher up the organisation you go, the fewer female role models exist, she said.

Ms Thomson, who is in her mid-40s, said that if women having children was the only factor in their under-representation at a top level then they would simply be partners later, as many return to work.

She suggested that quotas may be necessary to ensure the pace of change quickens.

At law firm Raworths in Harrogate there is a 50:50 gender split across its partnership of 10. Zoe Robinson, managing partner at Raworths in Harrogate, now in her early 50s, had two children when she became a partner.

“It was a struggle to juggle salaried partner and looking after two young children,” said Mrs Robinson.

But she said Raworths was flexible. She took shorter lunch hours in order to leave earlier and could work from home if necessary.

She later became equity partner and then managing partner last year.

But Mrs Robinson, who is against the idea of quotas, said that the expectation in society is still that, in a couple, the man’s career will take precedence over the woman’s.