In need of flexibility

Motherhood: Puts career at risk
Motherhood: Puts career at risk

The Marketing Week Salary Survey (MW last week) raises two important points. First, your feature only tells part of the story regarding women’s average salaries in marketing. One of the real issues for women with children who work in this sector is that many would like more flexibility from their employer through working part-time or in a job share.

But many employers, and our industry as a whole, fail to support women (or men for that matter) who want flexible working arrangements. It is very rare to see a part-time or job share marketing position advertised and when such a role does crop up it is usually at a relatively junior level.

Anyone wanting to achieve a better work-life balance usually ends up having to leave a good career behind in the industry and take a job at around minimum wage level.

I see so much talent going to waste because the industry is not flexible enough in offering job share or part-time roles. Marketing is a great industry and it should be able to do so much better than this.

I would like to see Marketing Week champion this issue and challenge company leaders and senior marketers as to why they cannot be more flexible in their roles and recruitment. If you encounter employers who say they are, challenge them to stand by that and include it pro-actively in their external recruitment.

If the industry does become more flexible, some of the issues raised in your article will gradually improve.

The second point raised by your cover story is that salaries for new recruits have fallen much further than the survey suggests. Marketers have been able to reasonably maintain their salary if they have stayed in the same job during the recession, but new vacancies are being advertised at drastically lower rates.

Anonymous

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