by Phillip Ellis

Created on: April 15, 2008

Not only do women want to be crumpet they want to be able to bake it!

Apparently, home and family are back in fashion among younger women as the lure of a glittering career appears to be losing its shine. According to a survey by 'Red Magazine', just 1% of the 2,488 women who replied said work was the most important thing in life. Just one percent? I'm not a big fan of the magazine, created some ten years ago for the" middle youth" market, the high spending single female thirtysomething binge drinkers and weekend away crowd that were 'identified' in the nineties. Ten years on and only 5% of that crowd said they would chose to work full-time after having children. Indeed the main reason why women earn 18% less in the work place for doing the same kinds of jobs over a lifetime as men is because they just don't commit to work like men do-and there's nothing wrong with that. They know full well they are not a good long term investment to employers but fail to actually have the guts to say that. Women have kids. It's a fact! The top 50 male and female bosses in the country would give you the same reasons why they prefer to employ men over women for the same important jobs. Alan Sugar is the most notable to come out against women in the workplace when they can't commit.

The same survey also found 59% of women would rather work part-time (if they could afford to) and 36% would like to be a full-time mum. It's noticeable that some of our most educated and talented female writers on dooyoo over the years have gone away for a bit and then come back with babies, proudly displayed in their member pics. It's great to see, and for me, I like to know there are women out there that do see that having kids is more important than having materialistic careers. Alas, 80% of these educated career women that do return to work after having kids usually go into lesser paid and lower qualified part-time jobs, be it through choice or demand. 77% off part-time jobs are now done by women.

The same Red Magazine women (clearly not representative of you lot) list chose Nigella Lawson as the women they most envied the lifestyle of. The message seemed to be that they wanted to control work over work controlling them. Maybe women have realized that its better all around if guys are the providers when it comes to a family scenario and this is the way it was meant to be, if they can afford to cut back third work commitments. Maybe the female demand on work-life balance just doesn't work, seriously

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