It was all because of an article I read in the print version of today’s Sydney Morning Herald. I’ve been trying to find the online version to link for you but I’ve not been able to find it this morning. Anyway, it’s on the top of page eight and has the following headline: ‘Salary gap opens up as life and family get in the way’. The article describes the findings of a longitudinal research project conducted by the University of Sydney Business School. The subjects were the university’s law graduate class of 1987 and the aim was to follow the career paths of the graduates over time.

The graduates were first featured in the SMH in 1989, smiling up at the camera as they embarked on careers on equal salaries in Sydney’s most respected law firms. I was in year nine at the time and shared their optimism about career trajectories and equality. It was late twentieth century Australia after all, we weren’t being naive, we were believing what we’d been taught and thought we were seeing around us.

You know how you don’t come to this blog for journal club or critical reviews of statistical methods and selection bias? Good. Because all I have to go on today are the key findings as discussed in the newspaper article and a few of my thoughts.

First, the key findings from the study:

• At the end of the study’s follow up period, the men were generally earning higher salaries than the women
• The ‘tipping point’ for women (presumably between staying at their jobs or leaving them) was three children. Any number less than three seems to be the magic number for staying in the workforce, albeit in a part time position.
• With regards to workplace discrimination, women reported being subject to it on the basis of family responsibilities and gender whilst for men it was more commonly on the basis of disability or ethnicity.
• 25 years after both men and women mostly beginning their careers in large law firms, 29 percent of men and 11 percent of women were still working in them. Two thirds of the men versus a quarter of the women are now on salaries of greater than $300 000.

I don’t think it’s too hard to extrapolate these findings to other professions (except modelling perhaps) and as sobering as they are, they don’t actually come as too much of a surprise to me now that I’m a mother of one who’s 15 years into my own career. I can relate to the study’s findings of how mothers often have to pass up promotions, forgo seniority and put hard limits to the number of hours they can devote to their working roles. I understand the direct relationship between hours worked and take home pay. But perhaps it’s not so much discrimination but rather ‘biology and circumstance’ as one member of the cohort noted.

As wide as the gap still looks on paper between men and women in white collar professions perhaps a short coming of the stated findings of the study was a lack of reference to how fulfilled each graduate is now compared to how they were back in the early days of their professional lives. After all, for most of us, our careers are just one part of our lives and those lives become bother more complex and precious as we get older.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have had full time work in the profession I trained for since I graduated from university. I’ve achieved the goals I set for myself in my career. Motherhood came relatively late to me and has made me re-evaluate where I’m heading with work. But we all have turning points in our careers, don’t we? Illness, a desire to follow our hearts for a change, a yearning for a different life, fractured relationships and other major life changing events. Life happens to all of us, regardless of our gender, and we just have to make the decision to see the good that each stage of our lives offer us.

And yes, I couldn’t discuss being a working mum without at least referencing all those cliches. Prepare to be nauseated. Motherhood came to me when I needed it most. It forced me to change my priorities, to know my self worth and to do what it takes to give that beautiful little life the future he deserves.

One day on and my retinas are still burned….

I can hark back to that unsettling shopping trip yesterday when I happened upon the ugg thongs and thereafter lost my will to dart through the spendy boutiques in search of a new something to covet. Being a mother has broken that hollow cycle of needing to buy more and be more simply because me was all I had to devote my time, resources and energy toward. Life for me now is real. It is good and it is bad, it is joyous and it is painful. It also has a purpose outside of myself that that can’t be rated on a scale or quantified purely in dollars and cents.