Pregnant Pause

This entry could be construed as somewhat non-inclusive and even perhaps chauvinistic. I have no intent to offend.

I work in a female-dominated world. Of six people here who share my job title, I am the only male. Of the five writers on our team, one is male. Only in desktop publishing is the situation reversed: three people, two males (but one is currently working from a different building). I report to a team of two women, who each report to a different woman, who both report to the same woman (our organziation chart is a mess), who reports to a woman, who reports to a woman, who reports to two different men. Female-dominated, but that in and of itself is not an issue.

What I'm finding is that many of these female co-workers are of the soon-to-be or recently-married crowd, and also of the soon-to-have-children crowd. When I was redeployed last year, I was doing the work of someone on maternity leave; when she came back, I returned to my normal job. There, I was picking up the work of one of my peers on maternity leave. The leader I reported to on my return, went on maternity leave shortly after, so I had to switch leaders. That leader has been on maternity leave since early April. About the time she gets back, the other leader on that team will be going out on leave. And shortly after that, another one of my peers will start her leave as well. This doesn't even touch the two leaders higher in the chain who have been on leave at some point in the past two years.

I understand it's doing the right thing, overall. You can't discriminate based on gender or age — nor would I want to. You have to provide leave for new mothers — I'm not against that. You have to keep someone's job for them while they're on leave — fine, one day this could benefit me (although for something other than childbearing leave). But it seems we constantly have key people out on leave. Either we don't actually need the number of people we have staffed here (unlikely), or we need some way to hire someone as the "leave-filler" to move around and do these people's work while they're gone. <rant>I'm a little tired of picking up the pieces and the constant organizational chaos.</rant>

I feel better now.