”Finishing early, you part-timer!”
MMB Magazine was started in 2015 by me, Abbie Coleman. With over 20 years in recruitment, from headhunting for key roles to creating graduate and school leaver campaigns and ten years of running my own successful recruitment company, it was still a shock to see how the market changed once I had my first child at 35yrs old and in experiencing it first-hand although, with my previous experience, it really shouldn’t have come as such a shock.
I had been privy to many meetings where comments were made freely around hiring and promotion of women around their level of attractiveness, age, marital status, child status, and the potential to have a child as part of a hiring or promotion process followed with what they seemed to believe as a caveat of “I know we shouldn’t say this, but in the real world of business, we all know this is true”. Now, do not get me wrong, I have met some fantastic employers who challenged their own unconscious bias and were leading in recruitment talent, not just talent that fit the 8 am to 6 pm sat at a desk within their business premises. What shocked me most was the lack of skill, ability, and knowledge attached to anything requiring an employee to ask for a flexible working pattern.
Returning to my recruitment business after having my first child, I found that although my ambitions hadn’t changed, that of the employment landscape had and had been making decisions for me but without my consent, including the presumptions around the fact that I was now working fewer hours to support childcare and my business and therefore was no longer serious about my business or career and would be concentrating solely on my family or should be as a mum with a new baby.
After many conversations with some fantastic women at all career levels, the storyline for women having children showed that it wasn’t a one-off, with so many women suffering the same experiences and worse with inflexibility and assumptions around out-of-date ideology. Furthermore, our national returner survey launched in 2018 of over 1k mid to senior women returning to work painted an even darker picture. Things haven’t changed as much as they should, and these women made too many sacrifices as a business economy and as families. We all missed out on too much due to these historic and outdated ideas. Women had been forced into taking career breaks because the marketplace was not flexible enough to support their talent and work needs, and for those who took a career break returning to the market seemed even harder, and their value even further deprecated.
"If 2018 is the year of the woman, lucky us it only took 2018 attempts against one opponent."
Rachel Parris Comedian
So the idea for MMB Magazine was born to create an online resource to allow working mums to find great advice that was clear and concise and delivered in a modern way, to provide lunches for senior networking women to connect and form the future of business in our regions. From here came more information about family finance, networking, careers, maternity and returning to work and much more.
We are working and collaborating with high-profile brands who appreciate the importance of our audience and our message. This includes building relationships with businesses to help support and advise on creating positive working environments for working parents, including returner programmes, employee benefits, HR toolkit, family friendly employers, career coaching listings and maternity to-returner handbooks.
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