Focus: It's not fair!

“It’s one thing for a mother to demand the morning off to take little Samuel to the doctor, but if I ask for time off because I’m expecting a furniture delivery I know what the answer will be,” she wails. “Nobody cares about me!” But her real ire is reserved for parental leave, an issue on which Tony Blair cranked up her resentment even further last week.

Among Labour’s “pledges” for a third term were promises to give mothers an even better deal. Gordon Brown, the chancellor, has talked about extending paid maternity leave to nine months, and Labour has proposed that fathers should be given the option to share the mother’s leave.

“Management rarely provides adequate replacement cover for maternity leave. The net effect is that those of us who don’t have children are expected to pick up the slack,” said O’Brien. “I’d love six months off with pay! Perhaps then I’d find time to meet a husband.

“But I can’t possibly say what I think in the office. People would accuse me of being bitter. I have to express my feelings in secret to other non-mothers. We’re like the freemasons, a secret office club.”

It is a simmering resentment that threatens to divide the workforce across battle lines that transcend gender and class — parents versus non-parents. Inevitably, within those groups, it is the conflict between mothers and non-mothers that is most intense.

“Parents, particularly mothers, are rewarded for putting their families first. That is their priority outside of work,” said Manda Rigby, 42 and childless, who is a company managing director from Windsor.

“My priority outside of work is my friends, followed by Bolton Wanderers. But I can’t very well say I’m leaving early because Bolton are playing at Arsenal. Yet those with families play the ‘kid card’ all the time. Companies will accept coming second to children, but not much else.”

Are such hard-working singletons really martyrs? In the eyes of many parents, struggling to balance work and families, the “child-free” should be grateful not angry. Without children, they say, everyone’s future would be bleak.

It’s not difficult to see why envy and angst are bubbling over. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that 20 years ago just one in 10 women over the age of 40 did not have children; now the figure is one in five.

The figures also indicate that women with university degrees are 55% more likely to remain childless than their non-graduate counterparts.

“More people are choosing not to have children for a variety of reasons,” said Sue Crofton, a therapist who runs weekend workshops for childless women. “The sheer cost of having a child can make people think twice, particularly if they have delayed parenthood and become used to a certain standard of living.”

One recent study put the cost of raising a child to the age of 21 at more than £150,000.

THIS is not a purely female battleground. “Child-free” men are also venting grievances that were previously unmentionable. Mike Greenfield is a 37-year-old telecoms executive from Cardiff who has been with the same company for 10 years. “I recently asked my boss if I could take an unpaid sabbatical of six months to travel round the world and write a book,” said Greenfield. “He more or less laughed in my face.

“Yet just two weeks later one of my team went off on maternity leave and won’t be back for nine months. We do the same job for the same pay, yet she has been with the company for a much shorter time. It feels very unfair.”

In addition to maternity leave, companies should now be willing to discuss flexible working for parents of children under the age of six.

“Our employer is oh so family-friendly,” said David Gannon, 36, who works in east London. “We have people working from home doing all sorts of ‘time management’ deals. In reality they’re with their children in the park and I’m doing their work.

“I’ve always known I did not want kids, so it’s really galling when colleagues turn round to me when I complain about lack of staffing and say ‘you’ll feel different when you’re a father’.”

Matters have reached the point that an internet pressure group, Kidding Aside, has been set up to lobby for “child-free” singles, some of whom claim they should pay less tax because, living alone without children, they use fewer public services than families.

WHAT do parents make of such complaints? Stop whining, they retort. For one thing, the child-free present their own problems at work, for another, children are a good thing for society as a whole.

“The trouble with most of these singletons is they are stuck in the me-me-me mindset,” said Alice Prior, an architect and mother of two. “They don’t appreciate that mothers like me are producing the next generation of workers who will provide the investment to pay for pensions and care for the elderly.

“Without us the human race would die out. Who do they think will be wiping the dribble from their chins when they’re 90. Our children!” Jane Lock, a senior manager in London, is exasperated by the complaints of single workers. “I’ve heard it all. We are supposed to spend our time taking our children to the doctor or nipping off at 4pm for sports day, leaving our single colleagues to pick up the slack. Well, we’re not the only ones with form in this area.

“I had a girl who worked with me, she was beautiful, sociable and in her late twenties. A real career girl, you’d think, with no commitments to distract her.

“That was the theory. But every Monday was a write-off as she’d been to so many parties over the weekend she could hardly string a sentence together. And she had an endless round of therapists — aroma, crystal, psycho — who also had to be accommodated. Not to mention all those personal grooming appointments.”

Lock believes that going out to work is such a commitment for mothers — a nanny can cost as much as £2,000 a month in London — that they are the most reliable members of the workforce.

“Responsibility is a mother’s middle name. While self-obsessed single colleagues may forget meetings or crucial deadlines in an alcoholic or love-induced haze, working mums will be on it.

“They are super-conscientious because they feel guilty.”

THOUGH feelings already run high on both sides of the divide, it may get worse, according to Catherine Hakim, a sociologist at the London School of Economics.

“In the future there is going to be conflict in the workplace between two groups,” said Hakim, the author of Childlessness in Europe, a report examining the impact of family-friendly policies on the lives of the voluntarily childless. “On one side are the adaptive types who choose to have balance between paid work and family. On the other are careerists who value competitive achievement in the workplace. Women are more likely to belong to the adaptive group, but not all do and not all careerists are non-parents. The two groups will conflict and it’s not a gender issue, it’s about value systems.” Individualists versus more collective, family-oriented people.

Some signs of a solution are, however, emerging. Take the issue of caring for elderly or sick parents. One vexing issue for singletons in the workplace is watching colleagues take time off to look after children if they are sick. They feel they should have similar flexibility.

“My flatmate took an overdose a few months ago,” says Sarah Hill, a teacher in further education. “He really needed my support, but it was out of the question that I could get any time off. If it had been a child it would have been different. I think employers should allow leave for a whole range of emotional considerations.”

Hugh Cairns, a marketing director originally from Edinburgh but now in London, has an ageing father who suffers from clinical depression and lives 400 miles away. He needs a great deal of support, yet Cairns does not feel his employer would be sympathetic towards any requests for extended leave.

“With children there’s this idea that you’re doing something saintly for the next generation,” he said. “But elderly parents are not accorded the same degree of interest.”

With rising numbers of elderly people and singletons, that may have to change. Companies may decide to embrace flexibility on a wider range of personal issues. This is beginning to happen in America. Large corporations such as Motorola, Xerox and Hewlett-Packard offer a “menu” of benefits where employees can choose between maternity or paternity leave, a paid sabbatical, further education courses or leave of absence for family matters. The idea is that everyone gets a similar fixed sum allocated to them for benefits — and there is less scope for an embittered office culture of baby-haves and have-nots to develop. But before everyone rushes for the exit, leaving only the work-experience student to cover the phones and fax, consider this. In America, paid maternity leave at an enlightened company is typically six weeks; others offer a maximum of three months, unpaid. Workers also get only two or three weeks’ holiday a year. In Britain, “child-free” singletons may moan about not getting maternity leave and working parents may castigate singletons for being selfish. But from some perspectives they are lucky to have the time to argue about it.

Some names have been changed