Mansfield's Minefields

Mum’s the word

Amy Mansfield talks to working lawyer mothers about what their firms are doing for working mums, how they’re experiencing it, and why the way forward for firms is to bend over backwards for mums

For professionals working with the currency of the six-minute unit, time is at a premium. For working mums dividing their time between two equally demanding roles, it’s exponentially higher. Says Sarah Armstrong, partner at Russell McVeagh, being a working mum is “hard work”. “You feel like you’ve lived an entire day before you get to work.”

With a laptop, a briefcase, and all manner of baby-related paraphernalia to carry, just getting from day care to work to day care again can be a mission, even if the day care centre is located nearby. For the most part, it isn’t. Buildings like the Vero and Lumley Centres in Auckland’s Shortland Street are crawling with working mums, but while they may come equipped with gyms, they lack childcare facilities.

The kind and extent of facilities and services firms themselves provide for working parents will differ depending on the size of the firm and its material commitment to the cause, as it were. Russell McVeagh, for example, provides a dedicated parents’ room in both its Auckland and Wellington offices and a nanny service, amongst other things. Sharpe Tudhope in Tauranga provides a carpark for one of its working mothers, associate Hayley Eustace, so she doesn’t have to “fight for a public carpark”.

Such provisions can be a matter of policy, or they might be ad hoc. The women I interviewed from smaller firms commented that their firms did not have a policy with respect to maternity leave and accommodating working parents. Said one, who is now helping her firm develop a policy from scratch, “It’s all quite new to them … we’re just working it out as we go, to be honest.” Another acknowledged she was reliant on the firm’s partners being “nice people who are trying to do the right thing”.

All well and good. But wouldn’t it look so much better in a policy or even, shock horror, a contract? The fact is people don’t always know what the right thing is.

Example. You might think that in this day and age working on a remote basis via a firm-provided laptop would be largely uncontroversial. Not so. One woman I spoke with referred to her “unbelievably bad” experience at a large law firm (which she, like some of the other interviewees, did not want to identify), where the supervising partner was simply unwilling to make the arrangement work. After returning from maternity leave, she noticed the work she was getting was only “the real dregs” and that the stream of work basically stopped. Raising it with the partner and HR, the response from the partner was, “The problem is I can’t see you”.

Part-time reality
Coping with their own invisibility is an ongoing challenge for those who choose to work part-time. While intellectually most would acknowledge that there is nothing intrinsically good about the 40-hour week (or the 60-hour week, for that matter), it is a convention from which some firms find it difficult to depart.

Mothers trying to execute that departure can end up feeling in a constant state of panic. One mother I spoke to, on coming back to work after maternity leave, initially worked two full days and two half-days – significantly, mornings. On the half-days, she said, there were invariably difficulties just getting out the door to pick her son up, with one last minute query after another, such that she would wind up having to take a taxi to the day care centre on the other side of the city.

If you looked at the hours stipulated in her contract, you’d say she only needed part-time day care for her son. However, based on her experience to date, where her workload involved innumerable last-minute scrambles to get grandparents to babysit, she has now booked her child into full-time day care and is paying an extra $80 per week “for the privilege of coming into work” on her “day off” if they need her.

A serial concern for part-time working mothers is the disconnect between the hours worked and the hours paid for. If your salary has been reduced pro rata to reflect the theory of part-time but you’re working “normal” hours anyway (which, at some firms, might well mean a 60-hour week), the discontent any overworked lawyer might feel is experienced even more intensely. While systems might be in place to claim the additional hours (capped at 37.5 hours), they come with a proviso: said the HR adviser to one part-time working mum, reportedly, “You can claim [the hours] back using your discretion.” Some mothers at large firms report guilt about invoking this discretion where it’s a given that solicitors work beyond the hours they are paid for.
In this context, there may be arguments against reimbursing mothers for their time, but what about their expenses? Theoretically, it’s as simple as filling out a form. But in practice, there’s more to it, mums aren’t doing it, and they are effectively subsidising their firms. Part of this, says one, is due to the administrative burden of claiming “when you’re so freakin’ busy”.

Guilt is, in fact, the characterising emotion for many working mums, says Galia Barhava-Monteith of Professionelle (a networking organisation for professional women – www.professionelle.co.nz). In the words of one mother: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re at home or at work – you always feel like you should be somewhere else.”

When working lawyer mums are diligent and driven, as many, if not most, are, it can be difficult to identify whether the source of the pressure they feel and the resultant guilt is internal or external. The issue is illustrated by two interviewees’ approach to voicemail. One says she originally set out her hours of work on her voicemail message, but then changed it so that it did not reflect that she worked part-time, though she admits nobody ever told her to. Unavailability is “just not the impression you give [at this firm]”, she says. Another, who works at a small firm, said she also doesn’t include her hours in her voicemail, even though the partner she works for doesn’t try and hide the fact to clients that she is part-time.

Promotion
One senior solicitor at a large firm muses that dealing with maternity leave and early motherhood is most difficult at the extremes of the hierarchy, ie at junior and partner level, because “the buck stops with you, [albeit] in different ways”. Another agrees, saying her experience “was particularly bad because I was at quite a junior level – you’d get those looks when you left before 5.30pm; you know, it’s bad to leave before 6pm at those firms…”

The flip side of this is the phenomenon affecting many senior solicitors/associates of stalling before partnership, remaining forever the meat in the proverbial sandwich. “I do feel very much stuck,” says one.

Interestingly, however, most of the women I spoke with did not perceive their chances at or speed of promotion had been affected by having taken maternity leave and had children, at least up to senior associate level. Far from being out of sight, out of mind, two Russell McVeagh lawyers I spoke with, for example, were promoted to senior solicitor status while on maternity leave, and one, Armstrong, to associate level shortly before her second maternity leave. (Armstrong was then promoted to partner in the same year).

It seems, however, that there is a negative relationship between part-time work and promotion to and beyond senior associate level. A lawyer at one large firm said she raised this issue with her firm’s HR adviser recently and was told, “There has never been a part-time associate and it’s unlikely there ever will be.”

As for part-time partners, seen increasingly in the UK according to Armstrong, they do not exactly abound in this country. That said, they are not unheard of, at least in smaller firms, and one large firm solicitor says she thinks there is more scope to absorb part-time partners in large firms. It is a scope that remains to be explored, with many working mothers at partner level opting rather to work on a consultancy arrangement.

Give and take
It would be wrong to paint an entirely gloomy picture of the current state of affairs for working mums in the variety of firms I spoke with. Despite the issues mentioned above, the women interviewed were largely positive and enthusiastic about their own “frantic yet rewarding” experiences and the outlook for the future of working women lawyers.

Says Melissa Allan of Patterson Hopkins, for example, “The firm I’m at is great; it just couldn’t be any better. I don’t feel any disadvantage.” Central to her positive experience is the “complete, total flexibility” the firm provides. “I have a workload that I’m expected to do… no one keeps tabs on me… they don’t care whether I do work at home, at work, [or] at night.”

Louise Quinn, partner at Glaister Ennor, has a similar experience: “There’s a basic acceptance that as long as you’re doing your job, it’s not so much the hours that you put in and where you put them in, it’s just making it all work – there is an element of trust there.”

Armstrong agrees, saying there needs to be a “genuineness to the flexibility options that you’re promoting and advertising – that’s the key”. She adds that, in her experience, flexibility with respect to her working hours when she was part-time at Russell McVeagh allowed her “to hold on to quality work”. “It only works if there is a level of commitment with the people you work with most immediately, and there certainly was that [for me].”

Allan points out that the “give and take” goes both ways: if you’re going to be able to leave work at short notice to tend to your child’s freshly bitten nose, as she recently did, you have to expect your ‘home time’ will never be entirely sacred.

Along with trust, says Barhava-Monteith, flexibility is far and away the most important factor in facilitating acceptable conditions for working mothers. (With that in mind, Professionelle has made T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase, “Flexibility is not an F-word”!)

Those working mothers reporting positive experiences with their firms all highlight the importance of communication in achieving the requisite balance. Says Eustace, “Often in firms, if you want something, you have to ask for it, make it known.” She was, she says, “quite strict from the beginning” about her days/hours of work. Quinn goes further, saying women need to “tell people what [they]’re doing rather than ask”.

Partners 
Without exception, the working mums I spoke to mentioned how critical a supportive partner is to making their work/parenting combination succeed. Support here means much more than warm fuzzies and hot chocolates at the appropriate junctures, however. Contrary to my expectations, more than half of them were the main breadwinners in their relationships, and all of them had partners who worked part-time and/or worked from home, and for regular or flexible hours. As one said, her partner’s flexible hours mean she “can stay late, which always happens”.

This pattern in itself is surprising, and many will view it as welcome. After all, there was a time not that long ago when the scenario described was beyond contemplation. However, the pattern does rather make it look as though the roles have been reversed, but the problem remains. The structures within, and demands of, the profession are equally oppressive as in times past – they’re just distributed in different ways now.
As to the possibility of managing it all as a solo mother, said one, “I just honestly don’t know how you could.” This subject warrants separate treatment and will be the subject of a future article.

The untapped market
At the end of the day, law firms will adopt more flexible working conditions for parents, as indeed for any of their staff, where they see there is a strong business case for it.

Where the employment market is tight, especially in the provinces, it should not be difficult to see the strength of the case, and those suffering from the offending myopia have too much time in the half-light of the old boys’ club to blame for it. Says Barhava-Monteith, “Part-time working mums don’t have time for politics; they just get the work done.” Says Armstrong, the upshot of working mothers’ high levels of organisation, “ruthlessness with time”, focus, and efficiency is that “they make for very fine lawyers as a result”, a competitive advantage in her view.

The case is strengthened by the savings on recruitment and client relationship benefits resulting from accommodating working mums. Says Allan, “I think firms who cater for staff with family responsibilities well end up with incredibly loyal employees, which must put them at an advantage long term. Our firm, for instance, has had zero staff turnover since it started in April 2003… Clients get complete continuity because their files don’t get handed on to new people all the time.”

In a service industry such as law, the needs and wants of ‘The Client’ are often put forward as justifying all kinds of weird and unwonderful demands. An investigation into those needs might reveal the clients too are only human, and there is demand for a lawyer that reveals her own humanity. Allan says she has visited clients and brought her kids, and “Clients actually quite like that”. Says one lawyer at a large firm, “The people that we deal with are facing the same issues”, a case in point being the major litigation on which she is currently working, where two of the three people she is working with in the client organisation are part-time working mums.

Barhava-Monteith puts it more bluntly: “Clients don’t care; you could do the job from the bath as far as they are concerned, as long as it gets done.”

Of course, the point can legitimately be made that trust and flexibility should be extended to all employees, male or female, parent or not – why should mothers be positively discriminated against? Wouldn’t we all like to come and go and bathe as we please? 

Sure. But arguably the issue is more likely to make or break organisations where the flexibility is not just desired, but required. And make or break a firm it will, according to Barhava-Monteith. For organisations which are not even dabbling in providing adequately for their working mums, nothing less than a “paradigm shift” is required to avoid being left far, far behind.

NZLawyer, 7 March 2008