I am a scientist. When I was at university 25 years ago studying Chemistry, there were probably twice as many male students as female. That has evened out somewhat in the intervening years, but the industry (particularly the mining industry) skews male. This is particularly noticeable at the higher levels – General Manager and above.
There are a
lot of reasons for this. Predominant
amongst them is what happens when a person starts a family, and how it tends to
be the mother whose time at work is most affected. Many women will take at least one maternity
leave break during their career. Some
will take more than one. Some will
return to work part time for a period (or forever). And there are many aspects of work in the
mining industry that are not especially conducive with being the primary
parent.
My husband
and I worked for the same large mining company for many years. We both flew in and out of mining sites,
sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for a few weeks. At times, we managed to coordinate our trips
to go together; other times one of us might fly in on Saturday morning from a
week on-site, the other would fly out Sunday afternoon for a week on a
different site. We even did a couple of
secondments – one a three-month stint at a refinery in northern Australia, the
other a three-year transfer to a refinery in Canada. Sometimes, we worked ten or twelve hour days,
both on-site and in the lab. There were
days when we needed to come into the lab at midnight to take samples. Some shifts were night shift. At other times, there might be a
teleconference with people overseas that had to happen at 5am or 10pm, or an
experiment ran over and we didn’t get home till 8pm, even though we’d arrived
in the lab at 6am. Travel to and from site often happened on the weekend or
late in the day. This was all just part
of the job.
For the
first seven or so years of our employment, this worked well. If someone asked, “Can you be there
tomorrow?” we could both easily say yes.
While living in Canada, I was once asked on a Wednesday evening to be in
Australia by Sunday (and I was). If a
colleague needed an assistant for the midnight sampling run, one of us could
help out. If something ran late, one
(usually both) of us could stay to ensure the work was completed properly. We were a useful team – we came to work
together, so we’d leave together, which meant that any chemical handling (which
requires two people to be present for safety reasons) could easily be managed
by the two of us together.
The reason
for this? We didn’t have children. We weren’t constrained to an arrival or
departure time that worked with daycare drop off and pick up. We weren’t juggling a cranky baby or toddler
who didn’t want to go to bed when we were doing teleconferences at weird
hours. If one of us was away for work,
there was no school run, after school activities or friends’ birthday parties
to manage alone.
Seven years
into my employment with the company, I told my boss I was pregnant. After the initial flurry of congratulations
were done, I started hearing the same questions from everyone. “So, what are
your plans?” “What are you going to do
once the baby’s here?” “How much time will you take off?” “Are you planning to
come back to work?” “How will you manage
work and kids when you come back?” These questions were pretty much all just
out of interest, friends and colleagues wanting to know what I thought I might
do. The interesting part was the
questions that my husband got. “What is
Meg planning to do?” “How long is she planning to be off work?” “Do you think
she’ll come back?” Not a single person
asked him what he planned to do now that he would be a father. No one asked him how he’d manage to do his
job while being a dad. The assumption
was that his (work) life could continue exactly as it always had, without being
affected by his new “fatherhood” status.
Over the
eight years that followed, his work didn’t really change. He would still work long hours as necessary –
while we continued working in the same lab, it was always me who reminded him
that we needed to leave work to pick up the children from daycare. He would still go to site, sometimes at very
short notice, for a week or three. If he
flew out on a Sunday and back on Saturday morning, I’d organise everything to
do with the kids, and then do all of the above myself. On the occasions where he called to say that
he had to stay an extra few days, I continued to manage it. If he had a teleconference from home, I’d
make sure the children weren’t interrupting. If there was an after-work event,
or a special training course that we both needed to attend, I’d organise the
babysitter or arrange for the children to be taken to and from their
activities.
Over that
eight years, I had three lots of maternity leave. I transitioned to permanent part time (three
days a week) work. When requested, I
modified the three days per week that I worked to suit the needs of the group I
worked for. If a meeting or a training
workshop was scheduled on a day I didn’t work (which happened more frequently
than you’d think), I would attend if required. I would check emails and attend to urgent
matters on my non-work days. The first time a public holiday fell on one of the
days that I worked, my boss asked me what day I was planning to work to “make
up” for the public holiday. I asked him
what day he planned to work to make up for his public holiday. He never asked that question again.
I was asked
to travel for work a few times during those eight years. Once was while I was breastfeeding. Another time was for an hour-long meeting in
town to the north, that would have required me to leave home at 5am and not get
home until after 7pm. I said no and
dialled in to the meeting. My absence at
the meeting was commented upon several times, “Why couldn’t you make it,
Meg? It’s not that big a deal.” The part
where my husband was on-site somewhere else, I had a toddler (whose daycare
opened at 7am and closed at 6pm) and I was five or six months pregnant did not
factor into any of my (male) co-workers’ ideas of a “big deal”. The only time I did travel was for an
induction course that my boss insisted I take, mostly to meet some of his own objectives;
“100% of senior staff inducted at the refinery”. Because of the timing of the course, I had to
leave home on Sunday at lunchtime to be on-site for a 7am start the next
morning, and then not get home until 7pm on Monday. I completed the induction as required, but
never needed to visit the site, so it seemed a waste of time and money to me.
In the seven
years that I worked pre-children, I was promoted twice. In the eight years post-children, promotion
was never mentioned. All of my “career
progression” discussions started with my boss saying, “Well, I know you work
part time . . .”
My husband
started work with the company a few months before I did. He had a Bachelors degree and three years of
experience working in the field; I had no field experience but an honours
degree and a PhD. His starting salary
was slightly more than mine, and my salary never caught up to his. In all the years he’s worked for the company,
he’s always received an “above expectations” rating in his performance reviews,
even in years when he’d received a promotion (he’s had five of those in time
he’s worked for the company). I worked
for the same company for sixteen years, and I received only one “above
expectations” rating – all my others were “meeting expectations”. In one particular year, having gone above and
beyond in my work, travelling extensively, getting excellent reviews from the
third-party clients that I’d done work for, I pushed especially hard to be
assessed as “above expectations”. My
boss (and his boss, when I took it further) told me that because I’d got a
promotion that year, it wasn’t appropriate that I also got a higher performance
grading. When I pointed out that my
husband had got a high performance review and a promotion in the same year,
they told me their decision was final.
My husband,
it must be said, is an exceptional worker. He deserves those high performance
ratings. He deserves the bonuses and the
pay rises that he gets. It just always
seemed that there was less need for him to push for things, whereas I always
had to make my case far more thoroughly than he did, or deal with issues that simply never came up for him.
