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Part-time workers need some good press

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Lucy Phillips

6 Feb 2009 | 15:44

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Having recently interviewed an HR manager who said that by making a choice to work part-time she knew she would never make it to the top of the tree career-wise, I felt a bit despondent. I’m definitely one of those Generation Y 20-somethings who wants it all (successful career, husband, children, nice house and garden etc), so I was really pleased to hear about new mum Natasha Kaplinsky’s decision to return to Channel Five on a part-time basis. As far as I’m concerned she’s done pretty well so far (she has a salary of over £1 million at least) and is hopefully capable of climbing the career ladder even further.

But, reading between the lines, there is a complete contradiction between what some members of the national press are saying: they’re happy that this means she will take a pay cut and be at home to put her son to bed, but there’s also an undertone that she is all of a sudden both lazy and less of a professional – as the Daily Mail’s headline ‘part- time Kaplinsky’ would suggest. Give her a break and let her get on with being a career mum I say. We certainly need a few more role models.

Interestingly there’s a new dynamic to the issues of gender inequality and part-time working that is currently being realised in this recession. The CIPD’s John Philpott will give you more of a technical analysis but surely the fact that more men are being forced to work part-time to avoid redundancy can only bring about change in the long-term, or at the very least a partial shift in attitudes. As the author and work-life balance champion (aka ‘superwoman’) Shirley Conran said to me in an interview earlier this week: “Once that situation is in place it will be very difficult to take it away from people.”

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