Should Career Women Have To LIE About Their Children?

Working at a parenting and lifestyle website like SAHM, I hear some crazy things.

We’re on the cusp of everything from parenting crazes and trending news stories, and I was starting to think I’d seen pretty much everything.

Wrong.

My comfortable familiarity was shattered when this morning, I read about Claire Donnelly story in an article she wrote for the Daily Mail. Who is Claire? Well she’s a pretty average business woman. A career go-getter with big dreams and ambitious plans, Claire is a source of workplace envy who puts her success down to one simple thing: She lied about having children.

While her employers think she’s a forty-something, career-focused woman with nothing better to do in the evenings than lounge with her husband and drink wine, she’s actually a sometimes-frazzled mum of two young boys: nine-year-old Frank and eight-year-old Stanley. For the last ten years or so, she has either flat out lied, or lied by omission, about the true nature of her home life, believing that if she did not, her career would be in jeopardy.

Even crazier is, she’s not alone.

Claire’s Reasoning

Claire’s career was on track in her early 20s when she secured a dream job as a trainee reporter in a national newspaper. At the time, she felt the playing field was perfectly level, and that she had all the same opportunities as her male colleagues. Then, a few years down the line, she married her husband John, a teacher. When they had two children in very quick succession, things rapidly started to change.

First, Claire decided to go freelance, with PR and marketing consultancy work. She was able to do this with full-time childcare a few days a week, but began to notice “a definite chill in the air” when she mentioned she’d recently become a mum. Claire describes the situation:

“Despite having a childminder and a husband who is always home at 5pm, jobs that involved travelling further than a few miles seemed to go to other people. More than once I was told, ‘We had an evening job, but didn’t think you’d be able to do it because of the kids,’ or asked: ‘Are you going to give up work now you’ve had another baby?'”

Claire began to realise that she needed to make a change, and create a “child-free persona”.

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