Aid Worker and Mother: The Women and Work Question
Women working in the international aid and development sector frequently face a starkly binary choice: physical motherhood or a career fueled by (maternal?) compassion. To understand this binary, one must add to the usual dynamics of the motherhood penalty the unpredictability, nomadism, and fluidity that characterize working in this sector. If international development agencies purport to pursue true human flourishing, surely they should be primary places to examine how (we think) we flourish best vis-a-vis motherhood and work? Unfortunately, they haven’t really done so.
If women working in the international aid and development sector want a family, they’re best to try to get their foot into the United Nations or another major international NGO, and not just as a consultant paid in cash without benefits. This also assumes they have found a suitable mate and manage to maintain a healthy, long term relationship. That is already a lot to assume. They will probably also have to shift towards the long term development end of the ‘emergency-development’ spectrum in a bid to reign in that unpredictability, nomadism, and fluidity. Of course, that’s in an ideal world, once again assuming that their experience lends itself to that kind of transition.
Even if they have made every effort in that direction, they will still run up against a rather impermeable logistical barrier: the importance of getting to “the field.” The field is king. Or should I say, queen? Having first-hand knowledge and relationships is at the heart of how we do what we do. Yet the thought of leaving our little ones for days, perhaps weeks, at a time is a pretty daunting dilemma.
A breastfeeding friend recently shared, “I don’t think my boss has thought through the logistics of sending me on mission to Vietnam next week. I’d have to take my baby and bring the nanny—I don’t think I could leave her five days without breastfeeding. But I don’t want to bring it up because I’m worried they’ll stop considering me for mission if I make it difficult. If I make it difficult? Does anyone else sense the irony there?
Or as another friend, employed in a Western government donor agency explained with respect to her professional commitment after having children, “it doesn’t mean I want to be written off. It doesn’t mean I want to take my career any less seriously over the longer term, but it does mean that right now I need a little slack.”
The Barriers
Whether we’ve stepped out of the workplace or we’re staying in it, being unable to travel at the drop of a hat seriously puts us down for the count in the long run, regardless how much experience and expertise we have. Such barriers give those of us who aren’t yet mothers further impetus to kick the family can down the road. With only the idea of motherhood at our disposal, we might try to strategize how to get further up the organizational food chain where maternity leave, breastfeeding hours, and other family friendly policies reside.
Then, once we do become mothers, blindsided as we all are by the incredible earthquake of motherhood, all that strategizing and calculation seems to get muddled in a beautiful and befuddling mess of hormones. In a back-handed way, Sheryl Sandberg was right when she challenged women that they need to love their job before they have kids, otherwise they’ll never go back (willingly, that is).
Ironically, sometimes the effort to get ourselves far enough up the food chain precisely hinders our efforts to nourish the kind of relationships that can lead to a lifetime of love and family. How so? There are the usual suspects: Workaholism: frequent travel, and poor means of communication. There’s nothing quite like the frustration of load shedding cutting off your Skype call just as you’re about to share something truly important with your loved one.
But then there’s the less obvious. The lack of roots. The pathological side of nomadism. The “what goes on tour, stays on tour” mentality. The lack of exposure to families, children, the elderly, parents. In this environment, the idea of having children becomes the exception, not the norm, amidst what can easily become quite a hedonistic, unmoored “work hard, play hard” lifestyle. And the result is self-reinforcing.
But how many people really want to bring their kids to disaster and conflict zones anyway? That’s a good question. I would say more than are generally permitted, based on my experience working with those who do have families. Security policies can often be overly restrictive, and I say this as someone married to a security professional.
Family friendly policies are also costly, employers might argue. That depends how you finance them and how much benefit you derive from employees having their family with them. These, in turn, depend upon whether you consider children as simply a lifestyle choice or a contribution to the common good. This starts to hit the core of our challenge as mothers in the sector.
Self-Realization as the Gift of Self
Neither our choice of career nor our desire for motherhood is likely to have been a lifestyle choice but a desire to contribute to the common good. Many—not all—of us go into aid work with a sense of humanistic personalism, as John Paul II would call it. We sense that our self-realization comes most eminently from our gift of self, from our putting ourselves at the service of others, even if few would articulate it as such. I would dare to say that overall women tend to be more conscious of this than men, a pillar of the notion of the ‘feminine genius.’
With the advent of motherhood, our work becomes both more and less important—more, because we now understand the suffering of those around us in a whole new light; less, because suddenly this child or children truly take priority. It is a catch-22 of sorts.
When we as women struggle with the idea of taking a step back professionally to enter the realm of motherhood, it can mean a significant loss of a sense of self, but not in a selfish way. We know that parenthood is a great and noble calling, we feel it in our bones once we have children, but we grieve the thought that somehow we have to turn off one tap of self-giving, in order to turn on another, greater tap.
We wish frequently to somehow do both, not just for the sake of having it all but because we are often burning with passion and energy—despite the sleep deprivation. In fact, we are much like many women who I have met while working in the field: mothers, female breadwinners, and women in low and middle income countries who are determined to build a better future for their families, to contribute to that common good.
Getting Our Own House in Order
Yet, if the aid and development industry can’t figure out how to make it possible for those it employs to truly integrate the familial and the professional, how can we hope to assist those women in low and middle income countries to do this in their own communities?
If, for example, as I experienced and know is not the exception, we can’t even make sure we have breastfeeding rooms for our own nursing staff, how can we expect to encourage sweatshop factories, let alone the informal economy, to make it possible for women to, say, nourish their babies and work?
If aid and development employers, on average, have a very poor capacity to assist staff in building ‘sustainable’ career paths (i.e. a ‘lifespan’ approach that account for the ebbs and flows—children, elderly parents, spouses’ careers—and the often inverse relationship between time available and experience/expertise), how much do they really know about ‘sustainable development’ as a whole? Somehow, as a sector, we need to get our own house in order first.
A Mirror of the Wider Picture
The dysfunctional choices we face as women contemplating both aid work and motherhood are a reflection of a wider dysfunction in the paradigm of international aid and development assistance. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, aid and development unsurprisingly remain shackled by the realities of human frailty, most especially the will to power and intractable and stubborn presence of male dominance.
This industry—for it is in many ways an industry—is not exempt from original sin. Success, when looked at from a bird’s eye view, is still measured by the economic and material, and rarely by the relational and creational. The fact that two of the four measures of gender equality within the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were the presence of women in politics and in the workplace, is indicative of just how much the will to power and the material remains the proxy for ‘human development’.
Yet, such measures fail to capture the whole picture. In Thailand where I live, thanks to the vast economic migration of women, roughly a quarter of all Thai children do not live with their mothers. She returns to the workplace soon after giving birth, while the children remain in the care of grandparents or relatives—despite government policy that mandates three months paid leave, half by the government, half by the employer. A pathetic percentage of women manage to continue breastfeeding.
There are some rare but incredible stories of working mothers cold-packing their pumped breast milk and putting it on a bus to be sent upcountry to the grandparents and baby. But, by and large, there is next to no support for working mothers, making motherhood a fast track to poverty. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? No one asks how many of these women want to return to work, let alone whether their working environment supports their role as mothers or how it impacts upon their children. Perhaps we’re too scared to ask. Yet failing to account for the needs of mothers in the workplace means failing to account for the needs of families.
Looking Forward
While there has been discourse in the formulation of the forthcoming Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on the importance of the family, it will take a paradigm shift to ensure this does not simply remain rhetoric. The paradigm shifts needed for authentic social change can only come from authentic conversion of heart and growth of virtue in individuals. When we’re looking for solutions—which are never straightforward or simple—we can’t forget that there are no shortcuts in this regard.
St. Catherine of Siena famously said, “If you are what the Holy Spirit calls you to be, you will set the world ablaze.” While we need to caution against unrealism when it comes to what is physically possible, I think it’s time to dig deeper on the motherhood and work question. How are the current structures preventing women from setting the world ablaze in a way that is truly an authentic outpouring, overflow, of their maternity—both physical and otherwise? How much ‘development’ is the world missing out on in the meantime?
