三河マルシェ【MARCHE】三河エリアのコミュニティポータルサイト

Dame Helena Morrissey founded the 30% Club, a campaign for more gender-balanced boards, and is Chair of the investment best dropshipping products industry’s Diversity Project. She is now Head of Personal Investing at Legal & General Investment Management. She talks to me about how her family is breaking gender stereotypes and what this means for the next generation.

With nine children and a high-flying career, Dame Helena appears to juggle her family and work life with ease and remain cool, calm and collected (if a little weary after a full week of evening engagements). She puts much of her success down to a supportive husband, Richard, stay-at-home dad and Buddhist meditation teacher. We discussed the dynamics of their relationship and how their choice of careers impacted the confidence of their children.

“My eldest son captured it very nicely,” Helena says, “about how it’s given him the confidence to be a man in the way that he wants to be, not to feel he has to follow what might be the stereotypical alpha-male route.”

Is there a difference between the levels of confidence between girls and boys?

“It is not about gender,” she says. “All of our children have confidence in different ways – none of them have (yet!) followed in my footsteps, but I know they have the confidence to be who they want to be. And this makes us proud parents that we have never pushed them in one direction or another. One of our daughters, Flo, (who is also a mum) is a musician and recently performed at the O2 arena. We are both keen to ensure they feel they have the confidence to live life as they want to.”

“In our family, I don’t think it’s particularly different for the boys and the girls, because it is more of an innate thing – a state of mind, which has a lot to do with other aspects: do they feel secure and do they feel they have a sense of place and self-worth?”

“When I asked our third child when he was about eight years’ old what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, ‘I thought I’d stay at home like dad.’ It never occurred to us that it was the boy children that might take something a bit different from our family situation. There is a different way of being a man.”

Flo said, in an interview in The Times: “It’s sad when women feel they have to choose between being a housewife or succeeding in their career…. it can be inspiring for children when mothers can juggle working and family.”

Helena feels there is a need for a wholesale dropshipment shift in thinking in society about the role of men and women in the home. Richard comments in Helena’s book: “Being a parent in our society is not seen as a meaningful full-time role, especially for a man. Our society is driven by wins, striving, pushing forward, public success and this success is often measured by financial power.”

In fact, Helena’s choice to become first the main and then the sole breadwinner emerged, in part out of necessity, following Richard’s redundancy. This role reversal was therefore the result of both chance and design at a time when binary choices were still the norm. Let’s hope that the Morrissey family heralds an emerging ‘new normal’, in which women and men both have the chance to bring their particular skills to home and workplace in equal measure.