No. Women Can’t Do It All!
Tahlia • Sep 06, 2017

I recently finished a book written by an anonymous female CEO and one part of the book in particular really stood out to me. That was the expectations that are placed on women to do everything successfully. When I say everything, I mean be the boss babe, climb the corporate ladder and bring in the dollars, AND be the home maker too (which is a full-time job in itself).



I am not a mother (yet), I have a full-time job and a passion project I pursue on the side. I am an aunt, and a friend of mothers, and I have many clients who are also working mothers. As family approaches for myself I do consider the expectations that will be placed on myself as it has on many other women already.


I want to spend a little bit of time talking about being the amazing home maker. By definition, a homemaker is a person who manages the household and the family as a primary occupation. This means the shopping, the cooking (three meals + snacks every day for everyone in the household.) Cleaning which includes but is not limited to washing all your clothes, vacuuming, mopping, scrubbing the bathroom, doing the dishes, and if you have young children you are probably following them from room to room cleaning up the chaos the leave in their tracks. That’s right, a house doesn’t keep itself clean, the fridge doesn’t stock itself, breakfast lunch and dinner doesn’t magically appear on the table and your dirty clothes don’t mysteriously appear clean again in your closet, and I am only scratching the surface.


Are you picking up what I am putting down?


So it had me asking myself, how am I going to have a successful career, and be just as successful at home? How do mothers do this? And I think the truth is, they can’t, and this is what makes these expectations so troubling to me.


That was also the opinion of this anonymous female CEO, who talked about her career being a top priority without being neglectful of her family. Her advice was pick 2 things that are of the highest priority, and know the first on your list is what you will be the MOST successful at, followed by the second, and anything after that don’t expect to excel like you do on the first or second. For everything else, she outsourced (she had to!). The cleaning went to cleaners, the cooking, school pick-ups and drop offs went to the au pair. If she couldn’t make school carnivals the grandparents stepped in, and so on and so forth.


Now I know there are ladies that will relate to what I am saying. The fact is, the vast majority of us aren’t CEO’s or making over $500K per year. In an economy where smashed avo prevents us from even buying a house, how can we possibly outsource? We can’t! But what we can do is change the expectations for men.


Last year, the World Economic Forum reported that women work on average 39 more days than men. Not only do we receive 34% less pay than men, we also work 39 days longer than they do. Maybe it’s time we start distributing the work load at home more evenly. Perhaps organisations could be more flexible when it comes to men’s parental obligations at home, or even offer longer than 2 weeks parental leave.


One other piece of advice I read from this book, which is titled Mrs. Moneypenny’s Careers Advice for Ambitious Women, was we need to raise our boys a little bit differently. Typically, in the household mothers do a lot of extra work for boys (because they’re boys) while also setting different expectations for girls. Boys aren’t always expected to clean up after themselves. Perhaps if we instil some of those “homemaking” responsibilities in our boys from a young age, women in generations to come will have it a little bit easier.

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