A friend of mine is a Speech Therapist. She works 2 days a week. Of the 6 women she works with none of them work fulltime. The vast majority of Speech Therapists are women. We have a chronic shortage of Speech therapists.
Women make up the majority of medical graduates. This is more pronounced in child and adolescent services such as Psychiatry of Learning Disability and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry where they make up more than two thirds of newly qualified specialists.
Female doctors are far more likely to cite work-life balance as a priority and, on average, work significantly shorter hours than their male counterparts.
I'm not criticising the choices women make and I certainly don't want to get into a debate about the very real legacy of sexism which reinforces some of those choices.
My question is should we look again at how we structure these jobs and how we train people who work in these areas as we are not producing/filling one job for each person we train. The cost of training someone who chooses to work part time is the same as the cost of training someone who chooses to work fulltime. How do we get better bang for our buck? We are critically short of people to help very vulnerable children because the people we have trained to work in those areas are far more likely to choose to work part time.
Women make up the majority of medical graduates. This is more pronounced in child and adolescent services such as Psychiatry of Learning Disability and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry where they make up more than two thirds of newly qualified specialists.
Female doctors are far more likely to cite work-life balance as a priority and, on average, work significantly shorter hours than their male counterparts.
I'm not criticising the choices women make and I certainly don't want to get into a debate about the very real legacy of sexism which reinforces some of those choices.
My question is should we look again at how we structure these jobs and how we train people who work in these areas as we are not producing/filling one job for each person we train. The cost of training someone who chooses to work part time is the same as the cost of training someone who chooses to work fulltime. How do we get better bang for our buck? We are critically short of people to help very vulnerable children because the people we have trained to work in those areas are far more likely to choose to work part time.