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It would be hard to disagree in theory with today’s news piece by the Campaign Against Longer Working Hours – and the fact that they are urging us to head home on time for once and enjoy a good old home cooked family meal (the fact that the campaign is sponsored by Bisto may have something to do with the last bit…).

http://news.uk.msn.com/uk/campaign-against-long-working-hours-1

But in practice, how easy is it to be the one that leaves a meeting first? That stands up and dons their coat as the rest of the team are still huddled over their screens, typing furiously. Can you honestly say that if you turned access to your work emails off at 6pm at night, it wouldn’t reflect badly on your career? And let’s flip it, too. How would you feel if it were your child’s teacher that didn’t work 14 hours a day, but instead refused to see parents after school, keep up with their marking, or spend time ordering essential equipment and planning the next day’s lessons? What would you think of a social worker responsible for your elderly mother who regularly spent the evening out with her husband rather than updating that week’s case notes…? 

The harsh reality is that a day’s work no longer fits into the standard hours of a working day.

In truth, not many of us are workaholics (although lingering over the most satisfying parts of one’s work can be deliciously seductive) – it’s simply that many more of us are ‘good girls’, loathe to let the side down, anxious not to do anything to rock the boat, terrified to turn down a freelance assignment where in reality the day rate you’re charging will never cover the hours you’ll spend on it… 

So whilst it’s ever so tempting to encourage one and all to cast their work aside today and spend quality time with loved ones, adding to the guilt load is certainly not the aim of this site. It’s certainly worth keeping an eye on how much time that is rightfully ‘ours’ we spend giving our time ‘for free’ to work and work-related tasks, and how much time we actually spend free from the ties of work life, even when at home or out with friends.

In the past week a friend who works in Japan talked about being the first one, every night, who leaves the office, and how that makes him feel as the only ex-pat at work. It’s simply not the culture in his Tokyo firm to be seen to leave and spend any time in the evening with our family, but if he wants to see his children at all, he has no choice but to go against the cultural grain. Another friend has told how her boss puts the team under unbearable pressure by always saying yes to unrealistic deadlines.

Until we get over the heroics of ‘having to be at work’ ‘pulling a late one’ or ‘bringing it in against the odds’ and the glamour (and associated need and perceived popularity) of always being busy, it’s unlikely that the working culture of long hours and can-do will shift much.

But for those of you that can bear it, it’s worth asking – what’s the worst that can happen if you did just get up and leave on time today…?

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Posted on September 26, 2012

Miss Representation alive and well in London, 2012

Posted on February 6, 2012 | 6 Comments

So, Saturday should have been fun. After years of failing to get a ballot place, or failing in our quest for a gold bond place, myself and Charlotte, an exceptional teacher who runs role model projects for teenage girls, have finally both got a place in the 2012 London Marathon. Remembering our unfit schoolgirl selves as we used to run to the newsagents in our stilettos and (non regulation) pencil skirts to buy 10 JPS, rather than run even half a mile of the school playing field, it seems slightly hilarious that it is us two out of all of our school friends, who have become obsessed with marathon running. ‘Look at us, we’ve come so far’ we thought, as we met at the Institute of Education on Saturday for the Virgin London Marathon ‘Meet the Experts’ day of seminars.

Come so far? Within 20 minutes I felt like an enraged, powerless schoolgirl, as I became increasingly uncomfortable with the utterly offensive sexist nonsense that was being spouted on stage, all in the name of ‘light humour’ to amuse us marathon charity runners.

I’m not usually affected by this sort of thing. I’m not overly sensitive. Or perhaps I just live in an equality bubble where I really don’t encounter casual everyday sexism. But it was utterly horrendous.

Under the guise of a Harry Potter theme, this was more Hogwash than Hogwarts, as first we were subjected to a section that should have made us all extremely proud – a slideshow on the elite runners (so far so good) was followed by one on the celebrity runners (which is where it all went horribly wrong).

What these enlightened folk at Virgin London Marathon thought would be ‘inspirational’ at this point was to show only a tiny handful of celebrities, one of which was Katie Price, who was shown three times in various states of undress. This was meant to be a big, inclusive joke. We were all meant to find this as pfnarringly funny as the dusty old geezer giving us the presentation. We were meant to be sniggering at pictures of a woman getting undressed and posing provocatively, all in the name of an inspirational talk about marathon running and charity fund raising.

I’m so unused to this kind of thing that I can’t even work out what was meant to be funny. Was it the fact that Katie Price was seen by him as a figure of fun? The fact that naked women are just something to snigger at? I sure as hell know that he wasn’t trying to make a point about how hard she trained or how much money she has raised for charity, because there weren’t any images of her as a successful marathon runner. Or of many other successful female celebrity marathon runners…

We left the marathon day soon afterwards. But I feel bad that we didn’t say more, stand up and make our voice heard. We’re educated, strong women who work within the field of empowering other women. And yet at that moment, we both, it seemed, felt too powerless to stand up against discrimination.

In a week when all talk is of Miss Representation, it seems singularly inappropriate that what should have been a hugely positive, empowering day was ruined by such blatantly reductive attitudes towards women.

So to redress the balance, I’m not only taking the MissRepresentation.org pledge, I’m also pledging that next time I hear anything that makes me and the women I’m with feel worthless, I’ll say something. What surprised me was how hard I found it at the weekend.

Kath

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Presence not presents

Posted on December 23, 2011 | 1 Comment

Gifts are great – who doesn’t love a gift? A carefully chosen, wonderfully relevant, beautifully wrapped, given with love knock-em-dead gift? But when the need to give or receive gifts overshadows everything that the very act of gift giving is meant to be about, and the whole meaning behind the gift gets forgotten, the physical thing of the gift loses all meaning.

Remove the love, the care and the thoughtfulness from a gift, and you’re pretty much left with rampant consumerism and marketing forces made real. Add in the opportunity cost of what it took to get the gift (an afternoon spent pushing through the crowds shopping instead of spent with friends; a day’s extra work when you could have spent it on me-time, or with your children or partner; exceeding your overdraft limit or maxing out your credit card – and it all becomes a little bit more crazed, when you sit back and look at it. 

And presents can never be a substitute for presence, whatever the admen may like us to believe. 

With two days to go, and the last piece of paid work delivered, and a mound of Christmas prep still to do, I’m going to give myself a gift – to put a halt to any self-influcted mission creep madness and do the things that really matter. That means cancelling the extra shopping to have Christmas Eve kids lunch with friends; it means not worrying if the wrapping is a little wonky; it means letting go of usual rules re bedtime, healthy eating and tidying the house – which all adds up to presence – just being with each other, and not doing things in the same space as each other.

Happy hang out Christmas, here’s to doing a lot less and enjoying it a lot more!

Kath

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A celebration of female friendship

Posted on October 3, 2011 | 4 Comments

This is a post about female friendship, and the value of true friends both old and new.

There are times in life when we need new friends to help us evolve and progress. A change in job or circumstance, a shift into marriage or motherhood – it’s amazing how at times of real change, it can often be newer friends who identify with our emotions, and support without judging.

And there are times when the endurance of decades-old friendships reminds you of who you really are and allows you to look back in laughter, and to make sense of what’s ahead.

Last Sunday one of us had lunch with old schoolfriends (pictured above, lunch and pic courtesy of @talktoteens Charlotte Berry, centre) and one of us dined with someone new who extended the hand of friendship and invited her over for lunch.

Both were exciting, entertaining and enriching experiences, and it meant we spent a lot of our non-work time together this week debating the significance of female friends.

So much tripe is written about female friendship that it’s almost difficult to put the negative connotations to one side – and focus unashamedly on the fact that, to our minds, female friendship is one of the great and enduring joys in life. Reading and watching certain forms of media may almost lead you to believe that female friendship is either i) a hotbed of backstabbing, bad-mouthing and betrayal or ii) an endless cocktail-infused light dialogue about shoes, sex and suntans – but we all know that these comprise the outer, rare, peripheral moments. True female friendship is more than this – although we’re as happy as the rest to indulge in the light, that’s not the stuff that binds us. And, as we move further through our 40s, and life’s less fluffy side is increasingly prone to jump up and bite us on the bum (near-death experiences, legal battles and other such high points), it’s the unwavering support of old friends, and the kindness of new ones, that we are eternally grateful for.

So with one of us spending more time than ever with oldest and dearest friends and rediscovering what we love about each other, and the other having moved to a completely new area and busy forging ahead with a new female friendship group, we’re experiencing the best of both the old and the new.

It’s made us think about how and why we’re friends with our friends, what we give and what we offer in return. And this reflection was brought even further into focus last week when I went to see the BRILLIANT new play Di and Viv and Rose at the Hampstead Theatre.

More than any trite chick lit novel or overblown movie plot, this was a deeply moving and poignant exploration of female friendship through the decades – the initial flirtations and hesitant approaches, the giddiness of getting to know each other, the euphoric first experiences that cement your relationships – and the many, many subsequent years of high points and low ones that inextricably bind you with certain people and ensure that you measure out your life in their company.

It’s the sort of play that makes you think deeply about friendship, and whose themes remain with you long after you’ve left the theatre, because they ring so true. It made one of my friends leave the theatre in a sombre mood “I’m just a shit friend, I never pick up the phone and call”) It made me send an ‘I love you’ message to a friend as soon as I got home (although on reflection I really should have called her instead.)

But the point here is not guilt, but celebration. Female friends touch your life in a way that’s totally different to partners, families, children and any of life’s other most enjoyable things. And yet some days, thinking about the amazing women in my life, and how complex ‘real life’ can be, it seems as if the comfort and company of female friends is almost the most enjoyable thing there is…

Posted by Kath

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Posted in Culture, Lifestyle

Women the worst drivers? No, probably just the busiest…

Posted on June 27, 2011 | 1 Comment

Lives have got ridiculously busy recently – we know it’s a modern curse to talk about busyness, but it did get stupid busy for us both for a while there. And believe us, it’s not for want of trying to calm down and smell the roses more often than just now and again…

Which is why this recent report into middle aged women being the worst driving offenders by a country mile really caught our eye…

Police and Network Rail monitored level crossings across London and the South East because near misses were up 15%. They were extremely surprised when it emerged that women aged 50-65 accounted for a massive 46% of offences – they were still expecting to be able to blame it on errant yoofs.

But it came as no surprise to us that middle-aged women were caught time and time again hurrying around, driving recklessly, whereas males aged 17-25 only accounted for a paltry 8% of offences. Let’s face it, we’ve hoiked car insurance for young men to literally £1,000s a year; we’ve saddled them with huge graduate debts and we’ve all but erased any hope of a secure and well-paying job – so we can’t actually bring to mind many young blokes who even if they had the means to afford a car, would be in such a hurry to get anywhere that they’d hare across a level crossing on a red light.

It’s probably rose tinted nostalgia, but when I was young, being out in the car was pretty much all about the journey itself – windows down, mates laughing, music blaring and silk cuts blazing – and why would you want to hurry through that?

Now though, it seems as if life is one big hurry-through. As if hurrying through tasks had somehow become the way to live life. And no-one knows this more than the 50-something woman. Working harder and longer hours than ever before. Working harder on her relationships, parenting, promotion, health and looks, and self improvement at every level. And, as the squeezed middle of the sandwich generation, doing this while also, increasingly, supporting elderly parents with ever-increasing needs and ever-decreasing support from society, and 20-something offspring who find it impossible to get a job, let alone a mortgage.

It’s hard to justify jumping a red light on a level crossing – but it’s easy to see that if you’re busy to the point of brain freeze, where you face each day just hoping you can get through everything quickly enough to get it all done, you start to take ill-thought risks, quick fixes and short cuts.

Putting it in print makes it sound awful, but we’re as guilty as the next of being an amber gambler at the traffic lights, rushing across as the green man turns to red, running through the tube doors as they’re about to shut – and we’ve seen countless other women doing it (one that we know recently sped a red light on her bicycle with her two children on board, and the back child nearly got squashed by a bus).

It’s madness when you stop to think that the very children that you care so much about that you don’t want them to be late to school, may not make it at all due to your reckless road sense. Put like this, no-one in their right minds would take these risks. So why do we all do it?

Perhaps reframing rush as risk would help – perhaps it would help even more if we thought that even if our rush is not putting anyone else at risk, constantly living on an adrenalin edge is extremely wearing on the mind, body and soul. Perhaps for some it would be enough to think about the risk to others that our rushing could be creating.

Either way, this report made us think – we may not get there on time, but rushing/taking risks may mean that we never get there at all. Either way, the days of women merely multi-tasking by putting lipstick on at the lights is a thing of the past. These days, she’s probably on her Blackberry, eating her breakfast and doing her pelvic floor exercises while the lights change – if she’s even waiting for the lights to change in the first place…

Posted by Kath

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Because we’re worth more than this

Posted on March 29, 2011 | 4 Comments

Shock news this week of yet another beauty brand being taken to task by the ASA, this time for claims that their tummy tuck product doesn’t, it seems (brace yourselves here) give the effect of an actual tummy tuck.

I could name names but frankly, that’s not really the point. That particular ad may have been canned, but we won’t be surprised or shocked when another few spring up to replace it, especially as we approach the summer holiday season, when even the most intellectually ample among us have been known to stockpile any product with a transformational claim, in the hope that it will work a little bit of magic.

And it’s the size of the gap between fact and fiction that’s crucial here – as well as the price we’re paying. We’re all willing to involve ourselves in a little suspension of disbelief (I’m unlikely to lose sleep over the fact that my prawn cocktail-flavoured crisps don’t taste much like that much-maligned 70s starter, for example). I’m happy to buy a cream that hints at relaxing or moisturising properties, or a fragrance that classes itself as fresh and youthful. But it does rankle when products are only bought (and for an inflated price) on the basis of a statement that’s misleading, unsubstantiated, or falsely represented by an image that has nothing to do with the stuff that it’s advertising.

It also rankles that expressions such as ‘tummy tuck’ are becoming normalised, as if we should simply accept cosmetic procedures as a natural part of our maintenance and grooming. Don’t get me wrong; it’s up to each and every one of us where we draw the line, and I’d fight until my last breath for any women to choose to do anything she wants as long as it does no harm to others. But in my magazine Editor days, I was very careful not to blur the boundaries by featuring surgical procedures on our ‘beauty’ pages, and making women feel as if it was the next logical step.

Wouldn’t it be better to promote a product by pinpointing exactly what it is that we want to know about it, and then sharing it with us? If you’ve spent years in a laboratory creating the perfect conditioner for frizzy hair, or a great waterproof mascara that actually did the job, wouldn’t it be an idea to tell us about it, and show us how best to use it – with real language, using real women or real body parts? Instead, though, we’re served up hair extensions and false eyelashes to seduce us into buying haircare and mascara. Don’t brands want us to truly understand the benefits of their products? Or is it that many are not even listening hard enough to develop the products that we actually want?

More and more, it seems as if the genuinely engaging and enlightening brand conversations are happening outside of the old-school advertising budgets. If Lauren Luke and her many imitators can show us how to put on mascara, why have the mascara brands been so slow to cotton on? If TV production companies understand the power of a makeover, why isn’t this reflected in many advertising concepts aimed at women.

The truth is, it’s easy to get women to bond over shared experiences and the pooling of knowledge. There’s nothing we like better than passing on information, tips and recommendations (and we’re also quick to do the opposite if something doesn’t live up to expectations or promises). So why do we see so few facts – and so many half-baked truths, in advertising that’s aimed squarely at us?

And don’t try telling us that buying a new shampoo is a form of escape, and that we don’t really expect to look as glossy-haired as the gal in the ads after using it. We want results, not spin. We welcome information and knowledge, not disclaimers in the small print (if that). Frankly, we reckon we’re worth a bit more thought.
Kath

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Posted in Culture, Lifestyle

Marketing to women – can it really be this hard?

Posted on February 18, 2011 | 4 Comments

We started this blogsite and survey to find out where all of the bright, cool women that blazed a trail in their teens and 20s ended up in their 30s and 40s. Because if there’s one thing that we knew for sure, it was that they certainly didn’t end up running the world (in the shape of running huge organisations) in the way that they might have thought, or the way that they were led to believe when at school.

We started this because we ended up as two very rare beasts – working mums at director level in media agencies. We didn’t think this was unusual, it’s what we’d always thought we’d be able to do. We never thought that we’d be a minority, but we most definitely were. We didn’t truly understand that this was only possible because we had fantastic bosses who understood that effectiveness is not dependent on presence or set hours, but let us work how and when we wanted, as long as we continued to deliver and grow business. We didn’t know how rare that was until we started this site and survey.

Those who’ve been with us for a while will know how shocked we were to discover that, despite legislation, feminism and supposed equality, women still make up a measly 13% of board positions in the advertising industry – an almost unbelievable 3% drop from the 1970s.

Of course, this will come as no surprise to any of you who’ve had the misfortune to view a TV ad aimed squarely at ‘us women’ – because let’s face it, they’re not exactly hitting us between the eyes with extraordinary insight into the way we live our lives. Not exactly capturing the essence of our hopes and dreams in those precious few seconds of airtime. Even when viewed at x8 speed with the sound muted, the women we see rapidly acting out a brand’s dream don’t seem to have much to do with our everyday life.

And the truth is, we don’t know any women that like these ads. We’re not sure who connects with them, or feels even a spark of recognition for the women characters portrayed. None of the words that they say or the things that they tell us make us scream ‘yes, that’s me, that’s exactly me and my life’ in the way that say, reading an Allison Pearson or a Marion Keyes or even, hell yes, a David Nicholls makes us feel.

We’ve sunk a long way down since the days when Fay Weldon was creating ad straplines (working in advertising, in the ’60s, with one of our mothers – believe it or not). We’ll bet you can’t find one advert today that makes you want to buy the product because you connect with the model or the messaging. Which means that we’re buying these products in spite of the ads. The very ads that are meant to make us buy them. Crazy when you think about it.

Infuriating for us, as we’ve spent our working lives with brands – striving to create strategies that do connect with women (mainly busy mums who have literally seconds to decide whether to interact or not). It’s a received wisdom that that 85% of brand decisions are made by women – so we care passionately about trying to make sure that this smart, interesting, active majority are finding things to believe and love.

But really, why is it so hard to sell us breakfast cereal or shampoo in a way that we can relate to? Why are the women so unreal, the children as unrecognisable as any we’ve encountered – and the men so unfailingly complicit in this stereotype?

The campaigns get even worse when let lose in the wild west that many regard as social media. Just because we’re online doesn’t mean that we want to play a game, sign up to a trite campaign or endure endless ads in our social streams (yes Facebook, we’re talking to you).

We love the stuff that inspires, educates and informs in any other medium – books, films, tweets, blog posts, TED talks, galleries, theatre and beyond. And we fail to understand why an ad, with a massive budget backing it, can’t do any of these things. It should, at the very least, entertain and resonate. We’re too ready to find and enjoy the good things for brands to be doing us the disservice of serving up bad stuff.

And we can’t help thinking that in all honesty, if there were more women on the boards of advertising agencies, they wouldn’t let half this stuff out of the door…

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