Mission impossible? A working mother in advertising

Isobel Kerr-Newell has shared her story about being a new mother in advertising. Photo / Supplied

COMMENT:

Returning to work as a new mother is always daunting. Advertising, notorious for its long hours and lack of female leadership, is no different.

How will I be able to leave on time for the daycare pick-ups? How do I manage the extra demands of a pitch? Will I even have a job when I come back?

Allies can also be difficult to find. There are only a handful of female business leaders at an MD level, just one female CEO and only a few women leading our creative departments.

So why do women still fare so badly on position, and pay for that matter? It's clear that the talent exists, so why aren't they getting through?

Children and our biological uniqueness to bear them, remains one of the key sticking points. Research by Auckland University last year shows that having a child increases the gender pay gap for women and sets them on a permanent course for lower lifetime earnings than men. The research also found that the "motherhood penalty" was greater for women who started on higher incomes and that women of all income groups are less likely to be employed after becoming parents. Men, however, continue to enjoy a smooth upwards trend in earnings and opportunities after becoming fathers, often being viewed more favourably by their employers as a result.

As much as women have been repeatedly told we can "have it all", managing the demands of a career in our industry with young kids is incredibly hard. Many women do it, of course, and do it well, but often behind them is a supportive partner who has deprioritised their own career, a strong family support network or at the very least, a full-time nanny. And remember, the woman still has to make the difficult choice of putting work first.

I feel fortunate to be at an agency that offers a generous paid parental leave programme, phased return to work and flexible hours. We also conduct regular pay audits, to ensure that our people are equally rewarded on merit, position and contribution and have a 50/50 gender split in our leadership team. All this means that I didn't have to choose. It hasn't been a case of work or family.

For most women in our business, though, the balance is harder to find. A number of talented mothers I've crossed paths with over the years have been steadily departing the industry – following better parental leave and working conditions in other industries, freelancing to allow them the flexibility to parent in the way they want to, or just leaving altogether.

Having completely devoted myself to growing my career in my 20s, I entered the boardroom early and often found myself to be the only woman at the table. While I was fortunate to be seated alongside supportive men who valued my voice, I often wondered how I would ever manage to keep my career and have kids. Almost every man in the room had a wife at home and was financially comfortable enough to live on one income. How was I, as the main breadwinner, ever going to be able to have a baby and make sure we could still pay the mortgage?

Eventually my maternal desires overrode these concerns, but by then, I was very lucky it wasn't too late, as I faced a number of challenges around conception and pregnancy.

Friends and former colleagues have also found themselves in similar positions, some having later success with IVF or surrogacy (for those who could afford it), and some, sadly not. Again, I count myself lucky to have had the chance to have a child when I know there are so many women who cannot.

But even if we don't end up having children, women are still negatively impacted for the mere chance that we might. Our ovaries have been quietly contributing the underlying unconscious bias women of a child-bearing age have to contend with for years.

Champions for Change, a collective of New Zealand's top businesses we're proud to be part of, is currently examining this subtler, but still impactful form of discrimination. Research just released by Global Women and Champions for Change, confirms that having a family can be a potential derailer for women's careers, through both overt and subtle bias.

And it's all too present in our industry. I've heard of many women not being put forward for promotions because they're suspected to be "getting on the baby train". One mum recalled a time when a well-meaning female manager, thinking she was being supportive, openly told her she wouldn't be put forward for a promotion because "you've got kids now" and another being told she wouldn't be considered to work on a new client because they'd hear she was doing IVF. A recruitment contact also spoke of selected clients they know who would prefer not to see female candidates of a certain age, based on the possibility of them taking a "baby break" soon after joining.

Ovaries remain a threat to women's careers. Photo / Getty Images

So what can the industry do to ensure we don't continue to lose some of our best talent and provide better pathways to the CEO or ECD's office?

Employer paid parental leave schemes are a great start. A recent UNICEF report ranked New Zealand as the third worst among OECD and EU countries for paid parental leave. It's clear that in the interim at least, employers need to help bridge the gap between the government allowance if we want to keep women on an equally footed and remunerated career track.

For women, paid parental leave provides precious time at home to care for their child completely, free from the pressure to return to work too soon for financial reasons. For employers, it ensures their working mums are returning at a point when they're physically and emotionally strong enough to cope with the gruelling demands of working parenthood in ad-land and ultimately helps keep this talent in the industry. Pre-negotiated phased returns are also key, allowing mothers the opportunity to come back in to the workforce in a supported and sustainable way.

It's critical that the leave extends to dads too, because the more we can normalise primary care-giving by fathers, the more we will strengthen gender equality and the position of women in the workplace, especially with regard to the gender pay gap. Not to mention, we'll also allow dads the chance to experience the incredible closeness that comes from being a primary care-giver, something most fathers, as much as they might like to, are currently missing out on. Our parent company, Publicis Groupe, has just announced it will be increasing the parental leave allowance for our dads in New Zealand and Australia, allowing them the option to take on the primary carer role and obtain the financial support to do this.

Kerr-Newell argues that we need to normalise the idea of dads as primary caregivers. Photo / Getty Images

Policies are wonderful, but they mean nothing if a company's actual behaviours don't align.

While proclaiming you offer a phased return or reduced hours for working mothers, unless management actually supports women through their own behaviours, then it's meaningless. Saying a returning mother has flexibility to manage the end-of-day pick-ups and then continuously scheduling key meetings at 5pm, is not walking the talk. Westpac has a great "leave loudly" directive in their flexible working policy that ensures its staff are genuinely empowered to adopt this progressive ideal.

For many women, the arrival of children signals the decline or at least the stalling of their careers. For the advancement of all women, not just around this moment in time, employers need to be having more career conversations more often. Where do you want to get to? What's the next step for you? How do we help you get there? These discussions need to be happening all the time, at every stage of the career ladder, so that when women do depart for their biological sabbatical, they can slot back into a pathway that has already been clearly marked.

It's also important not to assume that having a child means a woman is happy to go into a career plateau. While it might be a little more complicated to manage the how, we need to recognise that many mothers will still have the same aspirations to progress as they did before having children. On the flipside, it's completely okay to not want to go after a promotion during the hectic first few years with kids, but employers should be consciously opening up advancement opportunities to working mums, to ensure the option is there if women do want to take it.

With regard to addressing the gender pay gap, perhaps it's time to reframe how we think about the contributions of returning mothers (and all employees in general for that matter). Many returning mothers opt for part-time work and the career deceleration that comes with it, in order to find a workable balance. But while they reduce their hours and pay, they often end up maintaining their overall output. They apply their newly acquired laser-like working-mummy focus to the tasks they would normally perform, just in less time and for less money. In a client service, time-based business like advertising, this can be particularly tricky, but as our talent increasingly demands greater flexibility across the board, we need to start thinking more about how value is measured, with more focus on outputs and less on hours at a desk.

Flexibility as a means of retaining talent is certainly not exclusive to working mothers, we should also be thinking about how this extends across our entire workforces. Indeed, if women are to be successfully supported through their return to the work, then it's critical their teams are on board with it too and feel the flexibility will extend to them as well. Beyond parenting, we need to recognise the many pulls our people have on their time if we're going to keep our talent tanks full.

We ask a huge amount of our staff in this business, so in return, providing the flexibility to care for an ageing parent, a sick partner, or just go to the gym to help manage stress, is critical if we want to ensure our people are able to bring their best, whole-selves to work each day. And if we had an industry that truly embraced that, then maybe everyone – women, employers and all the rest of us - might really be able to have it all.

- Isobel Kerr-Newell is Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand's head of PR & social and mother to her 1-year-old daughter. She is also the implementation lead for Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand's 'Champions for Change'.