Sooooo…..today I got my P45. It’s not as bad as it sounds, but also worse than it sounds at the same time. Let me explain…
I started my working life in 2005, in the position of Trainee Clinical Molecular Geneticist at Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Sounds like a cool title, and it was pretty cool. I was thrilled to get the job, it was my first job straight out of University and I absolutely loved it. It was proper science, I was learning every day and had the best colleagues – supportive, funny and sociable, it was great. I bounced out of bed every morning ready to see what the new day would bring – and I was helping people, real people who would benefit from a diagnosis with new treatments and access to healthcare and support services. But, this was the NHS, and as the time went by the funding for the department dwindled, colleagues left and didn’t get replaced, we gradually got spread more thinly and the workload increased and life became more and more miserable. I qualified as a State Registered Clinical Scientist after 4 years (weirdly, a less exciting title) and the initial excitement about my pay rise was quickly overshadowed by the huge increase in workload and responsibility. The communal lunch and tea breaks that were once punctuated with laughter became non-existent, the mood changed, the enjoyment went out of the job. The camaraderie was still there between the long standing staff who had hung on, but it felt more like uniting against a common enemy rather than the free and easy socialising we had in the early days.
It all came to a head when a colleague left and I took on his workload. Initially I was thrilled, it was my area of expertise and a progressive area of genetics, it was an exciting time. However, the progression involved the introduction of new technology, which was hugely exciting, but also required a lot of work to bring it into mainstream service. The laboratory purchased a new and hugely expensive ‘next-generation’ sequencing instrument. Who was responsible for setting it up? Me. Just me, with a little help from my deputy head (who, by the way, was awesome, just easily distracted!) I had no clue what I was doing, I was presented with this machine that was more expensive than my house and significantly more delicate, along with an instruction book thicker than the bible and basically just left to get on with it. It was a nightmare, I constantly felt like I was just treading water, trying desperately to get this new system online and writing protocols but not progressing nearly as much as I should. In fact the first couple of weeks were spent watching runs fail and not being able to do a thing about it. The new machine had a terrible feature that allowed you to watch data come off the machine remotely in real time, and as each run cost around £1k it was like watching money literally wash down the drain from your home at 11pm in the evening, whilst texting with my deputy who was watching the same data. After several weeks and many, many conversations with customer service we finally figured out that it was a machine error and got a repair and some money refunded, but that level of stress seemed to set the tone.
I should also mention that my husband and I were newly married at this point, I had recently lost my mum to breast cancer, we had also just moved house and we were hoping to start a family. Anyone who works in a laboratory environment will understand how difficult it can be for women who want to get pregnant – I was the sole scientist in charge of development of this new technique and many of the reagents used in the testing are toxic to developing foetuses. We had several pregnancies in the department when I started my work (genetics for some reason seems to be skewed towards female staff), and as we did not have a dedicated work area I had to stay after hours and work with the windows open to reduce the risk to the other pregnant staff. Kind of a kick in the face when you’re hoping to get pregnant yourself – what can you do beyond go to your male bosses and announce that you’d like to have a baby?!
So I did what so many “career oriented” women do – I plodded on and told my husband that it wasn’t the right time and we should wait. I worked my a*se off trying to get the new procedures working, which involved data analysis using Unix based software – I had to teach myself how to set up a Linux dual boot on a laptop using Google and texting my dad because we had no money for bioinformatics support, it was ridiculous. Note that there was never any opportunity for career progression, your job was just your job and unless you relocated to another city it was made very clear that no promotion would ever become available. It got to the point where I would fantasise about being involved in an accident as I was walking to work – not a big one, just sufficient to get me some time off. It was at this point that I realised I couldn’t put it off any longer, I was utterly miserable and I desperately wanted to start a family, so when I had a break from laboratory work over the Christmas period we went for it and were blessed to fall pregnant very quickly. Then you have a new issue – in labs we have a ‘check’ system where you are routinely called upon to double check the names of patients on a test to ensure there isn’t a mix up. However, there are certain rooms that you can’t enter when expecting due to the hazardous chemicals, how to deal with it when you’re not ready to announce your pregnancy to the world? My solution was to have a buddy, a wonderful friend who I have worked with for years that I could confide in, and she would volunteer for me until I was ready to share the news. When I was finally ready to tell my boss, I steeled myself to go and give him the news feeling like I was a naughty teenager who had to confess to her parents – but he was a professional, right? Nope. His response was, ‘Oh, That’s going to be a problem…’ Ah. Awesome. Thanks. I should mention that my boss was not a bad guy, he was great, but he had a tendency to speak without a filter, hence these types of comments!
I spent the rest of my pregnancy working just as hard as I had before, no lunch breaks, still working up the new test by myself and getting increasingly stressed about what would happen while I was away. I still stupidly thought I would be coming back full time after my maternity leave, as people who haven’t experienced parenthood yet do, so I wanted to leave everything in the best state that I possibly could for when I came back.
I took 12 months off with my son RJ, and came back to a very different place. More cutbacks were happening, the threat of reorganisation, relocation and redundancy was hanging over everyone and certain middle management types were making life very difficult. When RJ was about 6 months old my dad had fallen suddenly and seriously ill. Like, he nearly died kind of ill. He ran his own business and I ended up stepping in to cover for him while he recuperated, which was terrifying. We had always spoken about me getting involved in the business, but I hadn’t expected that kind of baptism of fire!! So by the time I came back to the lab after 12 months away, I had to reduce my hours to part time so I could continue to help out my dad (and also because I still hated working there). I then fell pregnant with our second son AJ and during my second maternity leave things deteriorated even further. The place felt like a ghost town when I came back, so many of the old staff (and my dear friends) had left and we were woefully understaffed. Other people had taken over my old job and we had finally recruited the IT support that I had desperately needed but had never received. I was feeling sad and unappreciated, as so much progress had been made in my absence by people who had been given the assistance that I never had. I simultaneously felt resentful of the support that others had received, and like a total failure for my lack of progress before I had my boys. In the meantime, my husband and I had started our new catering business, not knowing where it would lead but hoping that it would be an opportunity for him to get out of his rut. His career was finally blossoming while mine was stagnating.
My old boss retired and was replaced, and his replacement then promptly set about creating new managerial roles. Promotions. The promotion that I thought would never become available finally happened – but not for me. There was a position created that would have been perfect for me, heading up a new team dedicated to developing the new technology that I had worked so hard on. But I was not ever in the running.
There is a myth that has been told to women of my age, and it is that women can have it all. We can have a career AND a family, we don’t have to sacrifice anything, we don’t have to be a stay at home mum, we don’t have to be a career driven spinster. But it’s a lie. If you want to keep your career, you have to say goodbye to watching your kids grow up. Yes you can put them in full time nursery, and after school and breakfast clubs, but what’s the point of having kids if you never see them? A senior manager once said to me that she ‘got bored’ after a few weeks at home with her kids and came back to work. Wow. That’s not something to be proud of, that’s awful. She now works for NHS England and is so full of bullsh*t I don’t know how she manages to speak in sentences so god help us all. If, on the other hand, you want to spend time with your kids and reduce your working hours, say goodbye to career progression. Say goodbye to promotions. You will never be considered, because part time workers are not viewed as ‘proper’ employees. It’s almost like you’re doing it as a hobby, like you don’t care. A colleague recently told me that a member of senior management at her place of work recently stated that part time staff ‘aren’t real scientists’. Oh yeah, because those days off just make us forget those 14 years of school, 3 years of university, 4 years of scientist training and countless years of on the job experience.
So I decided to quit. Watching someone else get the job that I gave up on ever materialising years ago just broke me, so I left to help my husband with his new business. When my new manager asked why I was leaving, I explained that I was upset that I wasn’t considered for promotion because of my part time status and that I was disillusioned with my NHS career. She conceded that it was unfair. SHE. She has kids herself and presumably knows how hard it is for women in senior positions, but still had to have it pointed out to her. Anyway, it was liberating to finally leave, and I have been lucky so far that my husband’s business has become our family business and I now have more work than I can cope with. I remained on as ‘bank staff’, partly as a backup in case anything went wrong for me, but mostly out of a sense of loyalty to my friends and colleagues. By this point we had worked together for 13 years, many of them had trained me when I was so green I didn’t know how to use a pipette, we had grown up together. I knew the struggles they faced and I was happy to lend a hand, trawling through the endless, tedious data when I was called upon. As time went by, I got more and more busy and didn’t have time to come in, but it never really felt like I left because I was still in touch with them all. We still get together regularly, we took all our kids out to a farm a couple of weeks ago, they are true friends and not just people I once worked with.
Then this morning, a letter plops through my door. No stamp or return address, so I opened it – to find my P45. No cover letter. No note. No explanation or communication. All I can assume is that I have not been in for so long that I have been removed from the bank staff. That’s fair enough, and I understand, my life has moved on. But you would expect that after 13 years of service, after all the free overtime I contributed, all the lunch hours I worked through and all the evenings I sat watching data roll off my machine from my bed, that I deserve a little more than a P45 stuffed into an envelope with a blank compliments slip. Compliments to what?!
Oh, and just to add insult to injury – the compliments slip didn’t even come from the hospital I’ve been working at for 13 years because they outsourced payroll. You’re welcome, NHS.
