This week, UK singer songwriter Lily Allen made headlines when she admitted on the Radio Times podcast that having children “ruined her career”. The 38-year-old mum to Ethel Mary, 11, and Marnie Rose, 9, with ex-husband Sam Cooper said:
“I never really had a strategy when it comes to career, but yes, my children ruined my career. I love them and they complete me, but in terms of pop-stardom, they totally ruined it.”
“It really annoys me when people say you can have it all because, quite frankly, you can’t,” she added.
So, is she right?
As I sat down this morning to write this piece, I wanted to be brutally honest with myself.
I am the mum of two (a four year old boy and 21-month old girl) and I’m so insanely proud of the little humans they’re becoming. I love them fiercely and I try to demonstrate that to them each day. But truthfully? I am in a perpetual state of trying to do my best while ultimately falling short. Balance, as a concept, is pretty foreign to me.
But what I’ve also realised as I get older, is how big a crock of crap the notion of “balance” for working women truly is. It’s a word designed to send guilt coursing through our veins. It’s impossible for us to achieve balance while the systems and structures we live within remain as they do.
During the week of International Women’s Day, I gave a talk about the “motherhood penalty” and engaged in a roundtable discussion with other mums hosted by Elke Pascoe, the founder of LittleOak.
The motherhood penalty, for anyone in the dark, is essentially the price women pay for growing their families while they’re in the workforce, and the layers are thick and multifaceted.
According to a 2022 Treasury analysis mums’ earnings fall by an average of 55 per cent in the first five years of parenthood in Australia. This penalty primarily stems from women taking time out of the workforce or working fewer hours after having a child.
One of the most staggering aspects of the analysis is that it showed that even when women were the family breadwinners and earning significantly more prior to motherhood than their partners or husbands, the penalty remained the same. Fathers on the other hand? Well, they stayed golden. Their earnings stayed right where they were.
While we may not voice it so much anymore, there is still this wildly unattainable expectation on women to be able to “do it all”. To manage a big career, most of the domestic and family load, as well as keep every other ball high in the air. It’s something that’s having diabolical impacts on our physical and mental wellbeing. And the worst part is that it’s still not leading us anywhere close to a level playing field.
So much needs to be done to address the systemic barriers that continue to hold women back in nearly every aspect of life. And until we address that, women will continue to flounder. Some women, like Lily Allen, will lose their careers. The rest of us will be left in a guilt spiral of doom for not doing enough to be there for our kids when they need us.
There are, of course, a handful of policies/cultural shifts that will have a marked impact on changing the status quo.
The first is ensuring we’re game enough to make childcare truly universal. The Albanese government has confirmed their intention to do this, but there’s no real timeline in place. They did encouragingly lift the childcare subsidy last year but of course that leads to other issues like largely privatised childcare centres hiking up their prices as well as a serious limitation of centres.
Universal childcare is a no brainer. The economic modelling is there. A 90 per cent universal subsidy would cost about $10 billion a year, and boost GDP by a whopping $24 billion a year according to the Grattan Institute. It will ensure that women aren’t left behind and deterred from working because of the prohibitive cost of care. For kids, there are well-established benefits of early education too, such as achieving better grades, better high school completion rates and better incomes later in life.
It’s a clear pathway to an economic game changer for women and a better social framework all round.
The second policy area that’s key to overturning the motherhood penalty, is paid parental leave. We need to dramatically increase the PPL offered to new parents and to ensure the terms around it are flexible so that men feel compelled to take the offer up and share the load. Currently, women account for 88% of all primary carer’s leave.
Lifting PPL to 26 weeks minimum wage by 2026 up from a previous 18 weeks isn’t going to cut it. Compared to countries like Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway, which have comprehensive and truly inclusive leave entitlements, Australia still lags.
And finally, we need to start talking more about the excessive mental load that all women, but especially mothers, carry. And most of all we need to make men aware of what this means.
Ultimately, we need to redistribute not just the work but the worry.
Picking up groceries isn’t just picking up groceries, after all. It’s the consideration of what snacks our kids like most, which meals will be made throughout the week (taking into account everyone’s truly insane dietary preferences), the mental strain of remembering whether we’ve run out of baby wipes, toilet paper or butter.
And the increased mental load on women has real consequences for most companies and organisations, as it prohibits women from maximising their career output. In effect, it’s impacting our ability to make money and it’s hindering Australia’s overall economic output.
But it’s also having huge impacts on our health and wellbeing. In their lifetime, women are more likely to experience depression and anxiety than men, with around 1 in 6 women having depression and 1 in 3 women having anxiety. Women also experience post-traumatic stress disorder and eating disorders at higher rates. In a 2023 Women’s Agenda survey, results showed 77 per cent of women believe they may have experienced burnout and 64 per cent of women reported they don’t believe they are getting enough sleep.
The sleep gap is even greater for mums.
If we continue to operate in this way, it’s going to have profound impacts on our futures. We might not even be aware of how bad it could get. Doing it all under the current framework and with current cultural expectations isn’t possible. Women need better policies and support in place so we’re not just surviving but seriously thriving in life.
And women, like Lily Allen, shouldn’t be losing their careers just to be a mum.