Out Of Office

Women returning to work after a career break are wiser, more efficient and better at multitasking, says ALLISON PEARSON. So why are the odds stacked against them?

- Allison Pearson

Isabel was one of those mothers at the school gate you pretend to despise but secretly envy. She looked like a forty-something Sienna Miller. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the wretched woman was kind, and her organisational ability legendary. If you’d forgotten it was Viking or Tudor Day (pretty much weekly in my case), Isabel would somehow magic up a velvet waistcoat or a helmet with horns to save the day. “Just something I had in the dressing-up basket, you know,” she’d say.

No, I didn’t know. I was a harassed working mother who had taken a few months off after the births of my two children. Spare Viking attire was out of my league. Bitterly, I used to think that women like Isabel, who had given up a high-flying job to look after three children, had too much time on their hands.

The mutual suspicion of the working and non-working mother prevented us becoming friends, until, one afternoon, I bumped into a tearful Isabel. She had just raced across the country from where her father was in a nursing home after breaking his hip. Isabel was scared to leave him, but she had to get back in time to take her son to his grade-five theory exam. “We are the carers now, Allison,” she said. That stayed with me. So did the fact that, with her husband’s business in trouble, she urgently needed to find a job. “You’ll be snapped up,” I told her. The reality turned out to be shockingly different. A headhunter explained that, while she had an exemplary CV, in the seven years since Isabel left work, she had done “nothing that would be of any interest to my clients”. Besides, he added, as she was in her late forties, she was, ahem, “fast approaching that cohort parameter” beyond which recruitment was unlikely.