Capsule catches up with Ellen Joan Ford, who launched the #workschoolhours movement to help workplaces support working parents. On the release of her new book, she talks about why this movement benefits everyone – with children, and child-free – and how it can help parents who constantly feel like they’re drowning under child-care and workplace expectations.
It’s been a big week for Ellen Joan Ford, who we first spoke to 2022. Ellen, who lives rurally in Feilding, flew to Auckland to launch her book #WorkSchoolHours: A Revolution for Parents, Workplaces And The World, and to accept one of eight national BLAKE Awards for leadership – in her case, for #WorkSchoolHours, the movement she created and is driving, including helping organisations see its potential and implement steps. This week she also launched two online #WorkSchoolHours courses: an edition for people leaders in organisations, and an edition for parents.
Ellen, whose sons are three and six, has a PhD on the experiences of women in the workforce (among other high-level research), including a research project where she listened to the stories of 500 parents. She’s also a speaker, a facilitator and a consultant to businesses on leadership, gender, wellbeing, workplace culture and the future of work.
A former engineering officer in the NZ Defence Force, Ellen had served with the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan. After the Taliban seized the country, Ellen led an effort (alongside three other dedicated volunteers) to take the many time-consuming, difficult steps needed to evacuate to New Zealand people who had worked alongside NZ agencies in Afghanistan and their families – 563 people in total. For this, she won the 2023 KiwiBank New Zealand Local Hero of the Year Award.
Putting that incredible achievement to one side, we asked Ellen about what’s happening with #WorkSchoolHours – including how it could benefit women in ways we may never have imagined.
PART ONE: THE CASE FOR CHANGE
Congrats on the book! This isn’t a self-help book whatsoever – as in, it doesn’t provide tips or ‘hacks’ to help us cope within the status quo of the working world.
That’s right. It’s a change-the-frigging world book. My goal is that people read this and think ‘I can implement this in my organisation’ or ‘I could talk about this with my boss’. The book is the culmination of everything I’ve done to date, but it’s also just the starting point of the #WorkSchoolHours movement.
You argue that it’s ‘bonkers’ that work hours don’t align with school hours, not to mention school holidays!
It’s absolutely bonkers! So many of the challenges and tensions we experience as working parents come down to the fact that the work schedule – often 9am to 5pm [or later] – doesn’t align to the typical school schedule, usually 9am to 3pm. It worked 100 years ago, based on the ‘male breadwinner’ model, when women stayed home, responsible for domestic duties and caring for children. But this outmoded construct isn’t fit for purpose now.
Because we’ve always experienced this mis-scheduling, we generally accept the status quo?
Yes. It takes a lot to push back. I’m an eternal optimist, so I say ‘here’s a problem, this is dumb and how can we fix it?’.
You say our society is structured as though workers and parents are ‘two different people’?
Yes, there’s the impossible bind that working parents face of feeling pressure to work as though they don’t have children, and parent as though they don’t have a job.
Tell me about how you combine paid work with motherhood.
Fridays are dedicated to my boys. Since Toby is at school, Fridays are for Monty and me until school finishes. Most other afternoons, I pick up Toby from school. I realise this isn’t feasible in everyone’s job.
I know you travel for your work nationally and internationally, and often bring one or both of your kids. You write about how, the first time you did so, you felt the need to justify bringing your baby and your client said ‘we just assumed you were going to be bringing Monty with you, Ellen. What do you need? We’ll take care of it’.
Yes! Here I was literally championing this idea about how being a parent doesn’t mean you’re less capable as a professional, and yet here I was succumbing to the same ingrained idea: that they probably won’t let me bring a baby. And they did. I felt so welcomed and valued as a whole person.
You write that missing school-related events, like a child’s cross-country, can be guilt-inducing, even tortuous.
Like when I missed Toby’s swimming sports. It’s not just ‘that sucks’. You feel shit about yourself. And your child’s like ‘why weren’t you there?’.
Parents who work full-time and have their children in childcare [including after-school care and nannies] – many of them miss their kids and wish they could spend more time with them. They’re disappointed that they don’t get to collect their children from school, that they’re not able to attend school sporting activities, and that they have limited opportunities to spend time with their children during the school holidays. This isn’t a minor, fleeting ‘oh well, I didn’t get to do that’. This is a heart-wrenchingly sad reality.
Some parents have told you they’re just ‘surviving’ or even ‘drowning’ under the current system?
Absolutely! Many people have said ‘I feel like I’m failing as a parent’.
I know women who feel like they’re failing at parenting and work.
That’s a pretty common sentiment. That upsets me. It’s like, here are these parents busting their gut, but questioning themselves and feeling shit about themselves.
When you mentioned that 80% of adults are parents, I thought ‘we have the numbers for a revolution!’
Absolutely!
But you also say #WorkSchoolHours isn’t just for parents.
This most definitely isn’t ‘let’s make life awesome for parents and shaft everybody who doesn’t have kids’. Yes, the genesis was parents. But #WorkSchoolHours should benefit everyone. Everyone’s got stuff they care about outside of work, whether that’s helping with elderly parents or pursuing a passion project. So we need to normalise a varied range of times that people enter and leave their workplaces.
I wrote recently about how mothers who leave work ‘early’ to do school pick-up often make up the hours, are more efficient when they’re at work, or are paid less. Yet when they leave, they get subtle and not-so-subtle digs from colleagues like ‘nice for some’, or ‘lucky for some!’.
Yep. Parents talk about how these comments, sideways glances and disapproving looks make them feel guilty and vulnerable. Also, when parents work part-time, there’s not usually a corresponding reduction in workload, key performance indicators or responsibilities. Yet lots of them have told me how ‘lucky’ they are to leave early. It’s a societal gaslighting. Like, what the f**k? Feeling fortunate for the privilege of getting a pay cut?
They’re penalised in other ways too. Part-time workers often face limitations with career progression or moving into leadership positions. Some of our most efficient, effective people are basically marginalised as ‘less dedicated’ workers or not the ‘ideal worker’.
This affects women more than men, right?
Yes. I’ve spoken with some really good men who’ve told me ‘we’ve offered a woman a senior position but she didn’t take it, so she just doesn’t want it’. And I said, politely, ‘no, it’s usually not that a woman doesn’t want it’. And it’s not that we’re not ambitious. It’s that promotions to some positions come with consequences for mums: there are often limits on the flexibility to also spend time with their children.
Also, we often make assumptions that leaders must work full-time and probably even longer hours. I’ve developed a leadership model called #BelongingAutonomyPurpose. A leader’s job is to create an environment where their team can thrive – and nothing in there says ‘a leader must work long hours’.
We’ve often heard the idea that ‘women can have it all, just not all at the same time’.I call bullshit. It should be entirely possible to both have a successful career and a healthy, thriving family life.
You mention a striking statistic: that the Women’s Household Labour Force Survey found the under-utilisation for women in New Zealand is 14.5% – representing over 47,000 women who actively want to work, or would like to work more.
Yeah. This is not a little, insignificant problem!
You explain how some women either can’t enter, or end up leaving, the paid workforce: like the solo mum who can’t make it work financially or logistically, and the lawyer who hasn’t returned to work because of the long hours expected. A friend of mine is a nurse but the local hospital won’t accommodate school hours. What a waste of people who could be making contributions!
Yep! We have mums doing a job way beneath their qualifications or experience, because it’s the only place they can get part-time work. We have mums who can’t find jobs that work for them so they’re not in the workforce, though they want to be. Of course some want to be full-time with their kids. But I’m big on people having a real choice.
Quite aside from doing the right thing as a society, it actually costs us financially if someone who wants to be in paid work has to go on a benefit, right?
Yes. Also they’re not contributing tax, so that’s a huge loss to the economy.
You also write about the pressure women feel to time childbearing around their careers.
Yes, I’ve heard from many women who’ve delayed having children until they feel that they’re ‘senior enough’. But pregnancy doesn’t always happen when you want it to. Many women are not childless by choice, but because they left it too late in service of their careers. So our current construct of work is limiting the opportunity for mums to progress their careers as well as limiting the opportunity for women to become mums.
We talked about how some women leaving work ‘early’ get snide comments. I know a few instances of dads doing this being told ‘you’re such a great dad!’ or ‘oh, you’re helping your wife out!’.
I know! How many f**king times is a woman told ‘gosh you’re a great mum for being so involved with your children’? That said, there’s actually a barrier for dads to even feel able to request different work structures to spend more time with their children, let alone whether the request gets approved. But, man or woman, there’s an assumption that you’re asking for special treatment.
Might #WorkSchoolHours have a ripple effect of enabling women and men to better share the domestic load?
My goal certainly isn’t to make a mum’s hours flexible so she can do everything at home! When this way of working is normalised for everybody, it means not just more women entering the workforce, but also men contributing more in the ‘home-force’.
Click here for Part 2 on ‘how can we make change happen’?
www.ellenjoanford.com includes information about the book, and online courses for parents & for people leaders
