Money Matters Festival: Flexible Work with Mother Pukka & Emilie Bellet
💸 Anna has been advocating for flexible working since 2015 with her campaign 'Flex Appeal', and has a goal to make it the norm. Emilie talks to Anna about the journey, how to become an activist, what she would ask our new PM and what her manifesto is all about.
*This is the recording of Money Matters Festival held on Oct 9th, 2022 at The NED in London.*
Speakers:
Anna Whitehouse (Mother Pukka)
Emilie Bellet (Vestpod)
The flex appeal campaign
Flexible working isn't sort of nice to have. It's not some sort of ping pong table in reception. It is a fundamental shift in the very kind of fabric of our working world.
In fact, it shouldn’t be called flexible working — it's inclusive working. If you have 30% or more women at the top, you make more money.
If you have a disabled person at the table, they can say, that won't work for us. If you have more women at the table, they say, actually, do you know what? We're not interested in that. But if you just have this archaic Lord Sugar lead layer at the top, ultimately it's going to affect the bottom line.
The optics for young women simply weren’t there for young women looking to work in a business world dominated by ‘secret handshakes’, but the optics absolutely have to be there.
At the time that Anna was working at L’Oreal group, when they didn’t allow her to leave 15 minutes early for the job, she began doing more research. She found that 540,000 women every single year were made redundant or pushed out of work for simply having a baby.
It was clear, however, that productivity was up whenever somebody implemented flexible working within their company, thus it was clearly good for business. So why couldn’t businesses ‘open the floodgates’ to flexible working?
Working culture is set around male biology
It’s important that we acknowledge women’s physiology like menopause, PMS and PMT, miscarriage and a host of other issues that a lot of companies still don’t take seriously.
We need to focus on bridging that gap between what companies are saying versus what they're actually doing.
We also need transparency and we absolutely need the gender pay gap to be reported on.
When we talk about activism, it needs to start within your own home. Having open and honest conversation with your partner and what matters to you.
A generation of women who lost out on independence
We have often been absorbed by what society needs women to do. We are finally at the stage where we are fighting against that.
The money is the centre of independence. It is not about success, it is not about red soul shoes and glass walled offices. It is about having the autonomy to leave that partner. It is about having the autonomy to walk down the road and go, I will buy that sandwich, instead of going, please, sir, can I have some more?
We all advocate so much better for everyone but ourselves. We need to get over it and begin to be more fearless about advocating for ourselves.
We do not value women's work. Even for a stay at home mum, the amount of work that is done, it's about £220,000 a year.
Learning isn't from solely academia, it isn't solely from the person with the loudest voice in the room. It can be from anywhere. And it is not just knowing your worth, but it’s about not changing yourself to fit in with the loudest person in the room.
Some 86% of people who earn money online, whether on Instagram or elsewhere, are women.
You can look at social media and it can be easily demonised, but actually, women have a voice there. Instagram is a free marketing tool, so don’t be ashamed to use it to your advantage.
