My poor Mam, who died last year, was terribly bitter and scarred by the loss of her job and career in a bank under the marriage ban. I thought about helping her sue as it was a terrible rule that impacted her life, career and mental health.
The attitude of some posters here demonstrates that the attitude to women and their careers remains problematic. I’d like to see their reaction if they’d been forced out of their jobs with no viable alternative into the family home . Would they say as sure it’s grand became I had a few kids then and my pension got paid out.
As a women who is successful in my career I get asked a lot for career advice, including about how to deal with discrimination by other women. Only yesterday I met with a younger woman who was passed over for partnership last year on the basis of her gender in a law firm. We’d met last year at her request to discuss her options. She took me to lunch yesterday to say thanks. I hadn’t seen her since our conversation last year. I’d spotted in LinkedIn that she’d gone in-house and assumed that, like many others, she’d just give up and left.
Yesterday she told me that she’d taken them to the WRC and had settled with them for a six figure sum. She’s subject to a NDA and cannot speak about the situation with anyone except those that she had spoken to about it prior to settling. We were not celebrating her win or the pay off. She is still off track on her career path now. She left the big five law firm and is currently trying to get back on track.
Getting back to my poor mother, I could not see an action to take on the marriage ban. The constitution still has women in the home with the grubby fingerprints of Catholic suppression of women all over it. Membership of the EU brought with it mandatory laws on discrimination thankfully. I shudder to think about what my own career would look like if we’d had the successive governments we’ve had since 1973 without those requirements to implement EU worker rights. Ostensibly I am as senior as I can get in my professional life but I know I have not earned many thousands that my male peers have. There is still so much discrimination in Irish business life, and professions. You can’t change a society or culture quickly, and men continue to hold much more power in professions.Many just don’t see the discrimination as such. I have a daughter 9 and depressingly I think she will encounter it also. I have told my kids about the marriage ban, it is a scandal that should not be forgotten. We also have discussed the gender pay gap, why the girls in the GAA and soccer teams don’t get the same quality of training as the boys, the lack of technical skills challenges in girls pink toy vs those marketed to boys. Start children seeing the world around them early.
Thanks Gordon for bringing up this topic. Made me think about poor Mam.