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Soaring unemployment rates during and since the recent recession have changed the way we think about a lot of things. For one, our attitude to job seeking has changed. Career planning has taken over from the old approach of distributing CVs broadcast to a list of recruiters in the back of a newspaper. We have come to understand the power of networking, and social media is the new key tool in a job seeker's arsenal.
Organisations like the New Economic Foundation have launched revolutionary ideas off the back of the downturn. They want to see a dramatic cut made to working hours, ensuring that family, personal welfare and the environment become priorities.
Another, less constructive change is also emerging, however. Sexism is making a comeback. By no means are we facing a return to the days of a woman's place being exclusively in the home, but it does seem that fierce competition for jobs is legitimising a degree of gender stereotyping. Yesterday, America's CNS News ran an article entitled 'Advice for Women Lawyers: Get a Supportive Husband'. Such advice is one thing, but the UK's Daily Telegraph has gone a step further and suggested that, unless women resist the draw of the workplace, there may be no husband at all. Alasdair Palmer's article observes that economic pressures mean that the highest - or only - earner in a household must logically adopt the role of breadwinner. But, he says, when this role is filled by a woman, her husband can feel "emasculated". It is by no means unusual to feel frustrated when unemployment prevents you providing for your family. Indeed, such exasperation is entirely normal. But Palmer pursues the point to a troubling end. He argues that in areas of high unemployment - where women find it easier to find part-time work - rather than seeing a rise in househusbands, a rise in single-parent families is occurring. The conclusion he draws from this?
It does not suggest that as women's earnings continue to rise, the result will be lots of happy families with men simply taking on the domestic role that their wives used to: rather, we are almost certain to see many more single-parent families.
Such an attitude is astonishing a decade into the 21st century, and flies in the face of all that has been achieved to ensure equal rights for women in the workplace. It suggests that there is still a huge price to pay for equality, and that the cost is now domestic happiness. To underline the point, Palmer reminds us that children raised by lone parents have "a higher chance of being involved with crime and having health problems" and, with that, the connection is made: women who step up to the role of breadwinner face crushing their children's prospects.
The recession has inflicted lasting damage on the labour market and it is something we must all weather out. But is such archaic thinking really the legacy we want it to leave?
I find it utterly depressing that after all the work women (e.g The Suffragettes) have done for us in the past: chained themselves to railings, formed pressure groups, protested, demonstrated and demanded that women should have the right to vote (therefore demanding equal rights in all other aspects of life), that there still continues such an attitude, particularly among men in the workplace. If women opt to be home makers and look after the children, they have that right to choose. If women opt to become 'career women' that is also their right. It is also a man's right to. He should not be sneered at if he prefers to be the home maker and play a key role in looking after the children. I don't believe in this society, any one has any right to cast dispersions about how one family chose to live their life: what is right for one family will not be right for another. In some families it works better that the husband or partner stays at home while the mother works. Why should that cause such gender snobbery? What difference does it make if the partner being the stay-at-home partner happens to be male? In addition, I do not believe a woman should have to 'choose' whether to be a home maker or have a career. Millions of women are doing both and doing it well. After all, multi-tasking is what we're famed for ;) I for one cannot wait for a time when 'women in the workplace' ceases to be an issue. The fact that it continues to raise a few eyebrows implies we have still a long, long way to go. But it will come, of that I have no doubt.
I find it ironic that I have been able to stay at home for some time as an unemployed woman (without husband or children) whilst married mothers work long hours without opportunty to spend quality time with their families in their often lovely houses. If I were a married mother, i would wish to be at home supporting my family in mainly unremunerated ways. However, employers seem much happier about paying married or partnered women, thereby contributing to their household wealth, than to facilitate single women to support ourselves and our charitable interests. It is as though, with a wife, they are getting a man's mind for both half the trouble and half the price. She is unlikely to ask awkward questions and introduce the unpredictable, because her concerns and priorities will be elsewhere. Perhaps the professional commitment and dedication that a single female employee can offer would create too challenging a yardstick for the performance of Directors and other employees. Or perhaps we are just too far out of touch with the dominant male culture for those who make the employment decisions to feel comfortable with. I have, reluctantly, had much time to reflect on the extravagantly 'charitable' nature of being offered a job and then being permitted to keep it for a useful length of time, and the deeply entrenched distrust and dislike within our Society of we (less-high-status) women who live independently. Perhaps children of working mothers also fare less well, at least partly, because they have more time to think individually about the way the world "really is" too?
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