Childless is not a synonym for weird

By Ruth Sunderland for The Observer

Sunday 24 May 2009

Helen Alexander, the first female president of the CBI, lost no time when she was appointed a couple of days ago in declaring she wants to see more women in the boardroom. She will have her work cut out: new research has found that not only are working mothers subjected to discrimination in the office, so are childless women who singlemindedly devote themselves to their career. A new book by Dr Caroline Gatrell, based on several years of research on women in employment, found some bosses consider those who choose not to have kids to be cold and odd, and refuse to promote them, since their deficiency of maternal instinct is seen as tantamount to a lack of "essential humanity". Quite right too, according to one female columnist, who argued that non-mothers in the workplace are selfish, hungover, predatory bitches vying for the attention of male executives. Women who did not choose their childless state don't fare much better - these unfortunates are dismissed as "the unwilling barren". Tricky, then, to choose between professional personae: pitiable, wrung-out victim or materialistic, unnatural hag.

I hope these sentiments are not widely held, but one national newspaper editor is on record as saying that he didn't think anyone could do his job unless they were married with children, as they "wouldn't understand the human condition". He backtracked and apologised to gay men - but not to childless women. The research, first reported in this newspaper, did spark a lively defence of the childless woman at work: parents were reminded that non-breeding females, along with gay men, will be manning many of the desks this week while the fecund swan off for half term. True, but beside the point, which is that it is outrageous for women's careers to be hobbled by intrusive and ill-founded inferences about their character, based purely on their fertility status. Even supposing those hollow husks of women who prefer their BlackBerry and their Blahniks to babies actually are inferior workers, what makes employers so sure they can distinguish them from the "unwilling barren", who presumably deserve slightly better treatment? I know plenty of women in their late thirties and forties who don't have kids, but only one who took a deliberate decision to be child-free and she's not even a careerist - dogs and gardening are her thing. The others haven't reproduced for a variety of messy, muddled reasons: they got divorced before they got pregnant; they didn't meet the right man in time; they tried but nothing happened. Which among them should be branded childless by choice? Hard to say. Given a totally free choice, I'd guess most of them would have plumped for a decent partner, a couple of adorable children and a good job, but that wasn't what was on offer. They made the best decision they could from the options available.

Women without kids are a sizable minority: a fifth of those born after 1975 are predicted to remain childless. They can't neatly be divided into ball-breakers and victims, because they are real, ambivalent human beings, not cartoon figures. The reasons women don't have kids can be complex and sensitive, involving deeply private medical and emotional issues. Tricky to explain it all to a judgmental, sceptical employer and no one should ever have to. Whatever we do at work, it seems we will still get it wrong: if you're under 40 and childless, they won't promote you because they think you'll get pregnant, but if you're over 40 and childless, you're not going to get promoted either, because they think you won't - they reckon you're going to morph into Cruella De Vil instead. After decades of feminism, it's unbelievably depressing to see that childless women are still viewed as threatening, selfish and verging on the subhuman. It seems we have barely moved on from the spiteful polemicists who attacked the "surplus women" left single and childless after the Great War. In her book on that generation, Singled Out, Virginia Nicholson quotes one male writer, Anthony M Ludovici, who labelled them as "malign... deficient... wretched". His insults did nothing to stop a pioneering generation of professional women from making their mark, including Richmal Crompton, whose William books are testament that a woman can be childless and still have a profound understanding of human nature. Motherhood is a huge part of female identity and any woman who doesn't experience it, for whatever reason, has to find meaning and self-definition in different ways. Work is one important area for childless women to find fulfilment and to contribute to society, and employers should recognise what they have to offer, not seek to punish them for being outside the maternal mainstream. Being childless means what it says: a lack of children, not a lack of ability, a lack of empathy or a lack of humanity.

[It does surprise me that even in these days of global recession and global warming exacerbated by an ever growing population there is still a less than subtle societal pressure to produce children. Those of us – for various reasons – who have refused that particular siren call are seen as odd or, rather strangely, selfish. As if having money in the bank and the ability to take several foreign holidays a year is a sign of selfishness! Anyway, it’s about time we moved on from the archaic notion that the ability or desire to produce children gives the parents some kind of special kudos. It doesn’t. Indeed bringing yet another hungry mouth into the world, rather than choosing not to, can be seen as the height of irresponsibility. Maybe in the not too distant future it will be seen as such.]