HOW ENTREPRENEURIAL MOTHERS IN SET BALANCE CAREERS WITH MOTHERHOOD

Geraldine Rodgers: I know there are these great superwomen who hold down fantastic jobs and have five children, but I haven't got a clue how they do it, I couldn't do it (laughs). You know I've had one child and I've worked full time pretty well all the way through his growing up, but it was damned hard, you know, and I chose jobs that were compatible with having to look after him, and again I don't know how you get away from that – you know you can't ask men to have children (laughs), and you know society still tends to feel that it's women's job to look after children - and it's nice doing it, there's nothing wrong doing it, you should have the choice. So I suppose it comes down to the old problem really. Women have choices in theory, but how do you free them up to be able to exercise those choices?

Cobi Smith: Hello and welcome to the SETwomen podcast, I'm Cobi Smith. And that was Geraldine Rodgers from Cambridge Enterprise, who started off talking about superwomen. Where are these superwomen? How do they balance having a family, running a business, and still managing to look fresh at meetings? Do they exist?

Rosie Smith: I think you do have to, I don't know, have a certain personality or a certain outlook on life, and you have to reprioritise everything I suppose, so housework is bottom priority (laughs), children are always first priority, and then the work is next. Because of the set up I have I can be very flexible though about when I see people, whereas if you go to work and you're expected to be there 9 'til 5 or 9 'til 1 everything else has to work around that. But I can, barring the odd emergency; I can arrange appointments to fit in when the children are at school or at childcare.

Cobi Smith: So can you tell me about how you normally structure your day?

Rosie Smith: Normally I get all the children off to school and then I go out and do calls in the morning, I try and get most of the calls done in the morning. Sometimes they go to their dad's in the afternoon, or at the weekend, and then I do calls then as well. But also, working from home, if I've got half an hour I can do some filing or write some letters or do some paperwork or do all the other bits associated with the business and they just slot in, in the odd free bits of time I've got, which is very useful as well.

Cobi Smith: That was Rosie Smith, who's based in Norfolk, talking about the practical, day-to-day experience of balancing her mobile veterinary practice with raising children. Entrepreneurial engineer Elena Punskaya juggles working at Cambridge University and leading a start-up company with raising a daughter.

Elena Punskaya: I think with difficulties (laughs), well, I want to say that I'm trying, I'm trying to have some quality time with her, but it's, in reality what happens is that I'm just, whenever I'm available I'm trying to something that's fun with her. But all the other time I feel guilty because I'm not there, because she has a school play and I'm not there and there's nothing that I can do. But, well at least at the moment, it's quite good for her that her mum does something interesting rather than just sit at home, which helps. So I, kind of right now, do have lots of support from her.

Cobi Smith: And so you feel that you, you're setting a good example?

Elena Punskaya: Yeah I think so. And also, yeah, I think it's important to have something else that's your own, not just your child, because then you get, well it's very easy to get involved in the problems and there are always problems, and you can't see anything else. Whereas I hope I can kind of give her some kind of fresh view of things because I'm not so much involved in what's happened.

Cobi Smith: And you were talking briefly about how you can't really just leave for three years and then go back, you know, and have a break, and then just go back, if you're at a high enough level and you're doing all these different things.

Elena Punskaya: I think you just lose experience and at the same time everyone else grows. But can you really stay at home for three years then come back and say okay, well, I want my position back, if it's a high level position? No, probably not. Saying that, it doesn't mean that it's not, it's completely impossible, because you could probably at the time, I don't know, do some kind of consultancy and stay in touch, but it's challenging.

Cobi Smith: Doing some kind of consultancy, as Elena mentioned, is exactly what a lot of women in science, engineering and technology do when they go on maternity leave.

Suzy Lynch: I think going on maternity leave definitely gave me the breathing space to work out what I wanted to do. I think when you're in employment, especially manufacturing employment, the daily pressures of fulfilling the demands from the customer and what your employees want and what the sales team are demanding of you means that you get very caught up in it, and actually you don't have a lot of headspace to step back and say hang on, where am I going? What should I be doing? So the maternity leave was actually a really good opportunity for me to think about, what did I want to do? And how was I going to get there? And really I think everybody should have a six month gap, I think men should get it as well (laughs), so that they have an opportunity to step back from the whole rat race, going round the hamster wheel again and again, and decide actually where they want to be. But no, I think without that break, that I would still be in employment. And at the time I thought I had the best manufacturing job in Cambridge. But now I know better.

Cobi Smith: That was engineering and manufacturing consultant Suzy Lynch, on how maternity leave helped her career, by giving her the chance to reflect on what she wanted to do – which turned out to be set up her own consultancy. But settling down and having a family isn't something most people think of as a good career move – especially in academic science, where people are expected to be mobile, as Berenice Mann discovered.

Berenice Mann: I was offered a postdoc in Spain and two in Australia, but it's just not really a time that you want to be postdoc-ing around the universe, it's a time when you want to sort of make a home for yourself basically at that sort of age, which is you know half the problem, they're all sort of human mobility postdocs and things and you don't actually want to be a mobile human at that point if you're setting down.

Corinne Frydman: I come from a generation of women who probably got married to a generation of men not used to women working for themselves. Especially if you have a family, managing a family and starting a business, it is hard work. You read it everywhere but you don't realise until you're actually into it, and if you really want to succeed in what you're doing, there is no other secret than hard work.

Cobi Smith: That was Corinne Frydman of Webwide Translations, talking about the difficulties women face when trying to combine running a business with motherhood. She also touched on another big consideration in many women's decisions to combine parenthood with enterprise – that is, how their partner fits in the scheme of things. Jeannette Milbourn shares her experience.

Jeannette Milbourn: With all the help in the world, unless your husband is prepared to put his career in equal balance with you then, then it's not going to happen. It does, I mean I'm lucky, my husband's job in the early days was more flexible, so if I couldn't get back because I was caught on the M25, which frequently happens, he was able to get home by six o'clock. And now he's a bit less flexible but in an emergency he can leave the office. But I know there are people whose partners aren't able to do that, depending on what type of work they're doing, so it does need to be a family decision in the sense that you need, if you have a partner, their support for you, psychologically and emotionally, if not financially.

Jenny Koenig: I have been in the situation where I was lucky that I didn't absolutely have to earn a certain amount. I did my business plan and worked out that I knew I could earn a certain amount of money, which wasn't an enormous amount, but that would be enough so that we didn't have to lower our living standards. And I could do that because my partner had a, a high paying job. Having said that though, if he hadn't had such a demanding high paid job then I probably wouldn't have gone down this route. If he'd had a less well paid, more flexible job, he would have been able to pick up the kids from school enough days a week that I wouldn't have needed to have done this. So it's swings and roundabouts I think.

Cobi Smith: Jenny Koenig there, talking about her partner's role in how she juggles her business and her family. Despite all of the challenges, one feeling united all of the women I interviewed who were balancing motherhood with professional work. They all felt lucky about some things.

Corinne Frydman: I was lucky.

Jenny Koenig: I was lucky.

Kate Mingay: We are lucky.

Cobi Smith: Despite the stress and problems juggling priorities caused, these women are appreciative of their family, their friends, their opportunities and the people they work with. Perhaps they are particularly lucky… or perhaps their optimistic, flexible attitudes are an important part of their success.

Kate Mingay: You have to be focused in what's important to you. And if it means, we are lucky because we can work from home, so if it means you have to sit up until 11 o'clock at night sending your emails and finishing your work so that at three o'clock that afternoon you could be at your kid's sports day then that's what you do. And as long as you're prepared to be flexible in your own life in, in what you're doing, then it's certainly manageable. But you, sometimes I guess you just have to pick the times that are important, you know, you have to judge if the children are asking you to do all these things you have, they understand. In the early days when we didn't have anybody in the office the laptop would come on holiday with us so that we could check our emails every day and things like that. So having people here, that are based here when we're not here, when we can have our, you know we've always had our holidays, we've never said no, we can't go on holiday as a family because of the business. We just take the business with us and work around it, which we're lucky we've been able to do.

Cobi Smith: But luck is not enough – these women demonstrate that hard work and a can-do attitude are important, as well as support. Suzy Lynch discovered this when she approached her employer about going on maternity leave, as the first engineer in the company to do so. She reflects on what support would have helped.

Suzy Lynch: Well companies need to understand the law, and they need to know where they sit, and they need to have a policy, and they need to have a process that you can go through, and they need to have at least one person in the business who knows what they're talking about. I think that's the bare minimum (laughs), anything on top of that would be a bonus. I think pregnant women, it would be good to have access to other people going through similar type of things, because I know at the time I did feel very isolated, because as I said there was nobody in the business – and it was a big, well-respected company, and it would have been nice to be able to speak to somebody in a similar position in another company who perhaps did have a policy, and did understand what had to happen.

Cobi Smith: Of course a lot of employers do understand their responsibilities towards women on maternity leave these days, but that doesn't necessarily make it easy to deal with. Anne Swietlik manages another engineering company.

Anne Swietlik: Our biggest problem would be that we would support them and then they would move away to somebody else, it costs a lot of money to train people, and that's our biggest fear. But you don't buy people either, there's this awful balance where you feel it's not an emotional commitment you've made to people, you've put them in a situation where you hope they're going to upskill and do their best for you, but at the end, if people need to move they need to move, and unfortunately for women I think the hardest part is you have no idea how you're going to feel when you start your family. A lot of people will go through, a lot of women will go through and they'll take their year and then they will come back into the workplace and hopefully be in a situation where they could manage it. We don't do part-time working. But I can't see, maybe five years down the road, why if somebody knows the work that we do, that it's actually better to try and accommodate that than it is to upskill somebody else. Even though we'd have to do that as well, wouldn't we? And that's the hard thing from the employer's point of view. Very often we fell that we're the ones that are actually having to find the ways around to make this work.

Cobi Smith: Of course, not all women who start business have children - this is certainly true of highly educated women working in science, engineering and technology – like zoologist Kate Jackson.

Kate Jackson: In some ways I actually run an ideal mother's business in that, you know, I could if I wanted to take bookings around a school day, I actually could do that quite easily and you know, get kids off to school and go and work in another school for the day and you know, it actually, you could fit it around. And at the moment I'm not in that position, and, you know, but it's, I don't know what the future holds, I'm not against having children and you know (laughs) we'll see what happens.

Cobi Smith: Assumptions about motherhood can impact the careers of women choosing not to have children as well, which demonstrates how important it is to discuss raising families as an issue for society, not just for women.

Kath Maguire: If people are taking time off work to be able to spend time with their children, they should likewise be able to take time off work to be able to spend time with their pets or their hobbies or whatever else it is that they do. I think that women having an entitlement to having children, or a right to have children, which I've heard in the news recently, I don't think that's the best way of looking at it. I think if women want to have children and if men want to have children as well then they should be encouraged to do that, that's a good thing, but the people who decide not to shouldn't be disadvantaged as a result. So I think the world of work needs to change dramatically, and that's to help encourage all of these sorts of life choices.

Cobi Smith: That's Kath Maguire, an entrepreneurial mathematician, sharing her thoughts. We're going to delve deeper into the wider implications of motherhood on science, technology, engineering – and society – in another episode. This has been the SETwomen podcast, funded by the East of England Development Agency and YTKO. I'm Cobi Smith, thanks for listening.

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