There are interesting assumptions made about caring as a woman; that you do have children or that you will now have ageing parents and I don’t have those either as my parents both died when I was young. I’m … now getting another set of assumptions, but I do feel that within the sector still. Talking to colleagues who work here, the assumption is made that it will be you as a woman who will have to deal with those issues. I think the whole issue of woman as carer, be it as mother or be it as dutiful daughter at different ends of the career are still things that are issues.

I don’t think people recognise the pressure on the female for the childcare. I think that’s at all levels actually. But if you had to be back for six o’clock every night, you know what it’s like, it’s in your mind, and I think that people who haven’t had children, or men often, didn’t understand that. Some of the men did because they had to share the childcare, but that is a huge stress.

But in my experience … most of the women in that group have got a partner and many of them have got children. Some, believe it or not, still have children at school, which I find incredible. I honestly don’t think that I could’ve done this job when I had children at school. In fact, I took it on when my youngest went to university, which suited me perfectly. I mean, you could cope with a 16-year-old perhaps, one fairly sensible 16-year-old … I don’t know how you do it even with a supportive husband. I spend all my time in the week working. My kids say to me, ‘oh nice of you to phone this week!’

I think I’ve changed, I think, if you start with my care role which is tough, very tough and has been for a number of years before [my parents] came to live with me. I have – this sounds really pious – but I have learned so much, I have gained so much from it. I think I do my job better, I think I’m more accessible, I think I understand people’s commitments better. Perhaps if I’d had kids earlier on, but I’ve always tried to be supportive of people with kids but I don’t know quite what it’s like to balance. I now know what that balance is like. I feel in touch with a kind of reality that I’ve always been quite rooted in, but I’m really, really rooted in. I think perhaps I’m more centred, more contented, and happier in a sense, even though it’s a tough and sometimes very sad and sometimes funny kind of life.

If I look at my sister … who has equally been a carer and all the rest of it, I think it does make a huge difference. One of the reasons why I made the decision not to go for the Director’s job was that actually [my daughter is] 16. I’ve got two more years and I want to be able to make sure I put the time that she needs into her. That’s a positive choice: it’s not feeling trapped by it; it’s actually a positive choice. My uncle and my mother are 82 and 78 and they’re OK but they’re frail and you do think, it is the old cliché isn’t it, you don’t want ‘all the time you spent at the office’ on your gravestone. So it’s always a factor for me. I would never say I’d just do something without thinking about where this fits in the context of other stuff that’s important to me … which might explain my somewhat erratic career path!

I work with a male dean who’s … a wonderful example of someone who, you know we understand life’s issues but we do draw a line sometimes. So if we’ve had a secretary who has her, what do you call it annual leave that you can take off – we do it by hours not by days – so if three times in one week she’s using two hours of annual leave to come in at ten o’ clock in the morning instead of eight you know we’ll have to talk to her about that. But if somebody has real serious issues we work with them. And I think we would do that whether it was a male or a female …

We spend a lot of time in France … but … the system in France has always been very different and there’s always been really good childcare. [My friend]’s got three children. She was a teacher, so she went back to work as soon as the children were born virtually because the childcare was so fantastic. And she’s actually retired early because she gets pension credits for having three children so she could retire at 50. But I never get a sense that she felt uncomfortable about being successful in France. So I think there’s something about the generational thing and there’s something about when the children were small. The culture, certainly in a rural environment, was that you didn’t work or if you did you didn’t really put your kids into care. Whereas when I had [my daughter] because I was 40 by then … and I thought, ‘well if I stop off now, I will not get back on’. So I put her into a nursery at three months old … I did all the stuff about breast feeding her in the lunch hour and everything, all that sort of stuff, but actually I would say she’s probably more balanced than the other two. So that’s interesting. I remember thinking when she was about six, ‘why didn’t I do that when the boys were small?’ Then, what was interesting for me when she went to school [was] all the environment had changed – there was a breakfast club, there was an after-school club. There was all this stuff that made it much easier to bring up small children and actually have an interesting job in rural environments. It was a huge change … which just, when the boys were small, wasn’t there.

I’m not very far away sometimes from thinking I could just ditch the whole lot and just spend time with the children and be a domestic creature … It wouldn’t take very much actually … I’m the main breadwinner … So I think that has to be a factor in it. It probably wouldn’t take very much, I don’t know, I could still do it. I think if one of the children did go off the rails – I mean at the moment they’re doing fine just about – I think that would make me stop … I have worked incredibly hard rather consistently for a very long time; it just does get very tiring. I might just suddenly feel I’m exhausted by it all … I’m really enjoying … my current role. I think it’s a great job but in five years’ time I have absolutely no idea where I’m going to end up next.

I did actually take parental leave once for three months from [my former employment] … I never took much time off for maternity leave for either of my two children and I thought this is absurd I’ve got to do it. And that was quite an interesting taster as to the reality of it because I was not very good with it. I had loads of work to do I wasn’t able to cut myself off very successfully and it’s made me think a bit more carefully about this thing of really do I genuinely want to ditch all this and give it up, but having said that … I do think, I mean it’s always on my mind that I could now do it and actually [my partner has] just got a reasonably well paid job so it is a bit more a possibility now. What it would take I don’t know.

I think the risk … is that they sit back and they go ‘oh I won’t bother really’ and … ‘let someone else do it’. And that’s fine, you can move back into the traditional female role, but I think we could easily forget how much of a loss of who we are as a person that then results in, and there are a lot of other cultures which are prevalent in the world at the moment for whom the female is not an equivalent to the male in any way, shape or form. They are some kind of an ‘other’ where ‘other’ is childlike and to be controlled.

I think, looking back – my daughter and I chat about this – that there are things that you think, well, I could have spent more time with my daughter, I could’ve been at home more, I could’ve been a better mother. She’s an only child. I think probably one of the decisions not to have any more children was, in those days, childcare. The arrangements for working and being a mother weren’t as beneficial. You had very strict periods of maternity leave. There was no nursery provision as such, so I think having more children was certainly a trade off. Not that I’m very motherly anyway, I can’t say I’m very domestic, so it’s not as though I would’ve stayed home baking bread.

Why do I feel so guilty about [not being at home with the children]? I think it’s because there’s all these headlines … I’m always meeting, well [name] is a good example, she’s never worked and I get on extremely well with her but there’s always a slight edge in our conversations that I think she feels slightly defensive, not that I’m remotely critical of her, but I think she feels she did do the right thing for her children and this big unwritten question is ‘and maybe you haven’t’ or maybe that’s how I perceive it. I don’t know, but often it’s coming from the outside, that feeling of guilt; mothers particularly generate it.

If there’s any feeling, it’s of loss, in the sense that when they were younger and demanding, it was always ‘where can I park them so I can get on with my work?’ rather than revelling in spending time with them, which most mothers would, which I think was a pity … We’ve got this enormous house too that we were doing up with no money and so there was the house and all those other commitments. I was school governor and all those kinds of things, and the children and the job; it’s a common story. But no, I don’t feel guilty because they’ve turned out really well.

I get to walk him to school in the morning and we laugh and we chat and hold hands. I pick him up every evening, which I never got the chance to do … When I pick him up early, we all have time. Sometimes we go for walks; we go for a drive; we go to the shops. I never did that when he was younger. So the quality time that I spend with him is that I’m a mum for him, to share him, to share his sorrows and to share his joy … But … it does mean I have to work extremely hard to juggle. Basically it means that to give him that time, until he goes to bed, it means that five days a week I work from 8 o’clock to 11 o’clock every night. But I don’t resent it because it’s for me, it’s for my family

You know you’ve got to provide for your child and since in my case I wasn’t getting child support payments that whatever I could do to bring more money into my home I needed to do … Having my daughter and being … the wage earner, administration was the way I needed to do it. I could work all summer and make additional money. Some of my decisions to be in administration did centre on my daughter … I could just work all day and go home and be home to have a dinner meal with my daughter. So family did impact on me … there was a correlation between wanting to stay in administration and having a child at home for me.

Well, he’s not supportive in doing the housework I have to say … which is really where I’d like some support. But in terms of saying ‘go for things’, yes, and I think that’s made a huge difference. I think if I’d been partnered up with someone who wasn’t particularly driven themselves and was happy just to lie around and have an easy life, I would probably have slipped in that direction too … I think that is quite a powerful factor whether you like it or not.

There have been many, many troughs – more than peaks I would say – in my career. But … my partner … has a huge belief in me and is my best friend and my best critic. Without that support I am still unsure whether I would’ve been driven enough to do it on my own.

I’ve got a very, very supportive husband. I don’t think I could’ve done it without him. He had a big job himself … but we shared so when I went to business school for a mini MBA he looked after our daughter for two or three weeks. Not many men would do that. We had the nanny come in during the day but he was home each evening and put her to bed and all that sort of stuff. I think you have to juggle things. Did I have a good work-life balance? No. Did I have a good life-work balance? I reckon so.

Are we going to mention the supportive husband in this narrative? … We couldn’t afford for me to have a career break. My husband’s a [profession] … We decided we wanted to move down to this part of the world and whoever got the job first would go. So he’s arguably sacrificed quite a bit of his career for me, although perhaps it didn’t feel like that at the time. We’ve also made a decision a long time ago that we wouldn’t live apart so we wouldn’t have a two career … which has also constrained both of our careers a bit. I was at [institution] for a very long time because of that. But, instead of being anxious about my success, he celebrates it and revels in it so if he didn’t and if he wasn’t prepared to increasingly support me in the practical sense I wouldn’t be where I am … I wouldn’t say it was a two-person job but I think if you had an unsupportive husband who said ‘why aren’t you here warming my slippers by the fire?’ then you couldn’t do it.

My husband … he’s a star. I mean up until me moving here … he worked full-time, but he retired when I came here … He’s been around the system long enough to know that this is a two-person job, which is why I think women don’t do it or there are very few women doing some of these jobs, because behind it, there is an assumption – it’s not so explicit now, it used to be very explicit – that there is a wife running round managing everything else, so that the husband can just focus on the career … And he was cute enough to know that, and even though we have no dependents or whatever that he saw his job as being my support. And he actually quite enjoys it. I mean he wasn’t so wedded to his work. He was quite happy to give it up and he can pursue other interests. He does a lot of voluntary work now and he quite likes that, but he is hugely supportive.

The two men who have been my long-term partners in the course of my career have both worked in similar fields and so you bounce ideas off people, you learn to support people … In both relationships, career has initially come first. In my current relationship, I’ve learnt that career isn’t the be all and end all – in a good way – it’s really important to me. I would say my first longterm partner was someone who was very, very supportive and also had a fantastic sense of what higher education could do to change people. So in the sense of bouncing ideas off, in the sense of similar life views, that’s been important.

I would say that I’ve been particularly fortunate in that my partner is very flexible and a number of people, [when] the crunch comes, you know: ‘shall we move to place X or place Y?’ We won’t move to place Y because you know the partner won’t do so and actually has a set of expectations – ‘yes you can have this career, but these are the expectations I have of you as a mother, as a home maker’ … and I haven’t experienced this and this is where I think I’ve been particularly lucky. I mean I don’t do machinery with buttons, I don’t iron, I don’t cook, I don’t do the car, I don’t do the gardening, I don’t do the washing machine, I don’t do the tumble drier etc. – I’m being silly but – [my partner] does a huge amount of all of those things so I am free to spend two hours writing a report on the Sunday morning. For a lot of people they do all of that domestic work as well as, and it’s that, maintaining both quantities of work that’s important and therefore the extent to which that is shared properly as against partially because sometimes things are shared down the ‘well I’ll do the car and you do the cooking’ or, you know, lots of men are interested in cooking but there’s a whole different set of skills looking after the children.

Who controls the money is very significant … the economic dependence then reflecting in the psychological dependence and the capacity to then make your own choices … you can’t choose because actually you don’t have any control over that. And the consequence of that later if that emotional integration unpicks itself.

You can see the advantage of being single, obviously, but equally, if you’re single you’ve got to go out there and make yourself a life; you’ve got to find friends and spend time with them. You can’t just work so you’ve still got to find the time for all the other parts of life.

You either are very lucky with the partner you have or you have to decide at some point that your career is taking precedence over that. I have had both supportive partners and at other times the relationship has come to an end, and although ostensibly it’s not to do with that, I would be lying if I said it hadn’t had some bearing on the situation.

I do think two-career families put huge pressures on. There are opportunities to support each other though; childcare provisions are much better, there is a much more accepting environment at work. But I think in some ways it takes away choices as well; the ‘I am going to do something entirely different’. I was talking to somebody this morning that’s just come back from America and he was telling me that because he supported his wife for a year they’ve agreed that she will support him for a year. She’s pretty high earning, so he can look around. But I think they’re quite lucky. I think the opportunities my sister had when she was off school, off work looking after children, which turned into the most wonderful change of career, are less likely, which is a pity.

I talk with [people] and hear how they talk about their relationships. I was talking to someone … recently who said, ‘I’m not going to marry until I’m 30’. I was married at 23, going on 13 you know, far too young, far, far, far too young and inexperienced … And I’m just much more centred and I have got friends, not many, female friends who are centred in a relationship like that, but that’s never really happened for me. My relationships have always been about striving. I suppose, never really thought about it, but I suppose because partners could see what was happening. I was desperately trying to prove that I’m still domestic; and I am, I’m very domestic, I’m very ordinary, don’t worry I’m not a threat to you. So, because of the kinds of guys I always picked they both wanted somebody on their arm who looked good and eventually always went for a younger version or a more glamorous version or whatever, as happens in all of that. They didn’t want to be threatened by where I was going. I did, certainly in my marriage, try really, really hard to stop myself from going on. I wanted the marriage to last and I did try to hold myself back. But actually, I couldn’t. I didn’t sort of get the jobs but I did write the papers; I did get involved in research groups. I couldn’t help it, that’s who I am. And eventually that was one of the tensions … My husband … didn’t like his career, which was … in the same business. Couldn’t see what it was all about. So I think it’s where we started in a sense, although my ego’s not in my job my soul is, my life is, because I care about it, it’s all intertwined. And the ability to balance what I do here with what’s important in my personal life is not a conflict now but was a conflict earlier. It’s partly about growing up and partly about different circumstances.

I think this is absolutely critical … that you either have a partner that’s supportive completely and not threatened by you, or you have a partner, a man, who can’t cope with your success and feels his own ego is suffering. And that would be absolutely fatal … I think particularly in validating ‘you’ and giving you opportunities to do things to show what you can do.

My husband’s got a child, but he’s now married, he’s in his late 20s. I’ve never had any children and have never really had the inclination … I think it’s probably the same with anybody who’s been married more than once, is that you learn a lot from your first marriage. In hindsight I was quite young when I got married first time round and I think that as you get older, and I was just short of 40 when I got married the second time, you kind of know what you want much more than I did when I was 25. I think I’m much more able to have a conversation about things that you want and I think that’s a maturity and confidence thing … I was on my own for probably three years, and during that time I did what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it and I knew what I wanted to do. So, from a social perspective … I think you are your own person more if you’ve lived on your own when you’re older. Then if you go into a relationship, you’re clearer about what you want from the relationship, what you bring to the party. I think on those things it then makes it a more work-life balance when he’s around than when he’s not around.

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