blog 32

Many of the women in chapter eight spoke about stunning colleagues or being nervous about announcing their pregnancy one women spoke about how another female in the firm was disappointed that she asked for a flexible schedule after giving birth. I never took into consideration how other females viewed female co workers which is shocking to me, I have viewed female co workers that have done less then respectable things with a sadness thinking it’s going to make it that much more difficult and that was at a college get by job. The stresses of being a lawyer and then a mother are over whelming and you can put your child on the back burner, its sexist that many women have to pull out of work and their husbands don’t but that is the normal way of doing things. Many mothers even envy the women who quit when they have children. The women who do stay on or opt out of family life must feel disappointed, let down, and worried when they see more of their female co workers drop out or ask for part time. Even though they are not the same they are all lumped into the category of female and it is harder to break out of that mold when your co workers aren’t there or are living up to the negative expectations of the boys club that can be a law firm. Similarly women with children who work full time are looked at negatively, for instance when I was in 2nd grade I told my teacher how much my mother loved her job, child services was at our door a week later. Im not kidding about this, a women from child services knocked on the door talked to my parents, my grandmother and myself asking if my mother was a fit parent because she worked full time. It was horrifying for my mother and I never understood why until reading this because it was making her out to be a monster when all she was doing was putting food on the table and keeping her and I secure. Women get penalized on both side if they work and if they don’t, instead of focusing on how to make jobs more flexible and how to make sure women get the same benefit men do (vice versa on paternity leave) they are focusing on how a women and her unborn child could affect the bottom line in the black and white structure it is now.