Innovation: Women Like Us

United Kingdom

AAI Domains:

• Employment

• Independent, healthy and secure living (financial security, lifelong learning)

• Participation in society (voluntary activities)

Active ageing takes place across the whole of the life course and there are numerous key points when important transitions take place. These transitions include having a good start in the early years of life so that young children are prepared and ready for school or when a young person leaves full time education and enters the world of work. With increasing numbers of women now working in the formal labour market compared to earlier generations, a major transition that many women experience is when they have children.

Many women leave the labour market for a period of time that might only be a few months but can last for several years if they decide to give up paid work and raise their children until they are ready to go to school. Women may then seek work opportunities that they can manage around their parental responsibilities but achieving this can be challenging and often leads to substantially lower levels of lifetime earnings for women that is then reflected in lower levels of pension income when they reach retirement age. There is scope for socially innovative solutions to assist women in this period of transition that usually occurs when they are in their twenties or thirties but has effects that last a lifetime.

Women Like Us was created by Emma Stewart and Karen Mattison in 2005 as they experienced the realities of having a break in their careers to have children and the difficulties that ‘women like us’ faced in getting back into the world of work. With initial support from several councils within London, the European Social Fund and charitable foundations they established Women Like Us as a social enterprise to provide employment and career advice and support to women with children who were facing difficulties in returning to the labour market. Many employers still take a negative view of a woman who has had a career break to have children and are not willing to offer family-friendly flexible patterns of work that can enable women to both workers and mothers.

Women Like Us provides free online advice packs that help women with the direction of their career by enabling women to assess their skills, the obstacles they face and how they can be overcome. The advice packs also cover information on finding job opportunities, how to successfully apply for jobs, how to succeed at interviews and advice for women who want to start their own business. Women Like Us also offers face-to-face careers advice from expert coaches in workshops in London. More than 5,300 women have paid modest fees to participate in these workshops over the last eight years and more than 2,000 have been successfully supported back to work.

Stewart and Mattison established Timewise Jobs in 2012 as a source for part-time job opportunities and in 2014 established Timewise Consultancy to work with employers through making the business case for employing women after a career break. They have also mobilised volunteer female mentors from a range of organisations to provide support to women both through an online forum and face-to-face. Stewart and Mattison have both been awarded MBEs by the Queen while Women Like Us has won numerous awards including the prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise Innovation and awards for women at work and for social entrepreneurship.

In terms of active ageing, Women Like Us is aimed at improving the employment prospects and therefore the financial security of women both in their twenties, thirties and their forties and consequently in their retirement pension income which is broadly linked to their life time earnings. It involves mobilising women who have returned to work after a career break to act as volunteer mentors and the advice and support it offers is effectively a form of lifelong learning.

Women Like Us website