At the end of this month, Working Families will close after 47 years helping working parents navigate the realities of combining work and family life.
The charity will shut its doors with a voice that was influential and demand for its services stronger than it had ever been. The reason for the closure is the lack of funding to sustain its work.
The news comes as The City Women Network – one of the longest standing women’s networks in the UK – also plans to wind up.
Together they join AllBright and Chief, two relative newcomers, as organisations who found that the aspiration to provide support for women navigating careers, ambition and the competing demands of professional and personal life wasn’t matched by financial support in the UK.
Losing one organisation might be regarded as misfortune, attributable to straitened times. To lose four looks like a pattern worth examining. Not from the perspective of what went wrong with each of them individually but why now and what does it mean when organisations like this are no longer there?
For the first question, an obvious answer is that what they offered is now available elsewhere.
Many employers now fund a range of employee resource groups, internal women's networks, mentoring schemes, parenting forums and leadership programmes. The support that once sat outside organisations has increasingly moved inside them and you could argue the ecosystem has evolved rather than weakened.
But internal and external networks do different things.
ERGs are, by their nature, internally focused. They don't connect people across organisations in the same way or do the work around community and advocacy that groups like Working Families or The City Woman Network did.
It is clear that the issues these organisations existed to address remain unresolved or even more acute. It has become harder for many parents to balance work and family. Leadership pipelines remain uneven and employers continue to wrestle with retention, progression and succession.
What is less clear is whether the evolving ecosystem is strong enough to meet those challenges.
The infrastructure behind much of the progress made over the past two decades depended on many distinct parts working together: research and benchmarking to track progress and hold organisations to account; advocacy to shape policy and raise the floor for everyone; professional communities and peer networks to connect people across organisational boundaries; and organisations like Working Families helping individuals navigate rights and transitions that their employer could not or would not provide directly.
Together they shape the confidence, capability and career choices of the employees and leaders organisations will hire tomorrow as much as those they employ today and give employers the insight to understand what these employees need.
Employers will naturally focus on the support that delivers value inside their organisations. And from this perspective an internal focus makes sense: you see the benefits, tailor to what works and evolve to meet changing needs.
But every sponsorship withdrawn and membership not renewed has consequences beyond the ROI argument at the heart of the decision.
A diminishing ecosystem, with fewer places where people build relationships beyond their employer, less campaigning and fewer organisations providing benchmarking means fewer reminders that the underlying challenges remain.
The danger is that this is read as progress rather than retreat and more employers choose to divert resources elsewhere.
And while no single closure changes the picture overnight, the effect is cumulative because together they change the environment in which careers are built and decisions about work, ambition and family are made over time.
The unintended consequence is that employers may ultimately find themselves carrying a burden that was once shared across a much wider ecosystem.
So the real question raised by the closures of this year and before is not why they closed but whether organisations fully understand the role they are inheriting and whether they are prepared for everything that comes with it.
News
Working Families to Close after 47 Years – Charity Times
Doors close on support charity for employers and employees
Working mothers feel work pressure more than fathers – poll – Personnel Today
Research exposes the different experiences of men and women as working parents
European engineering employers try to close big gender gap – Financial Times
Innovative schemes which target women
Sweden’s PM puts IVF at centre of re-election bid amid record low birthrate – The Guardian
Bid to win over female voters
NHS staff should be banned from wearing political badges, report recommends – BBC News
Anti-semitism adviser makes recommendations to UK government
Michelle Obama: white men do not have to worry about impostor syndrome – The Guardian
Former first lady talks about her experience of meeting men at the top table
Women Take Majority of Cabinet Seats in First for Denmark - Bloomberg
Opinion
‘The next phase of gender equity must focus beyond FTSE data’ – People Management
A Britain where people cannot afford to raise children? We see that risk, and won’t let it happen -The Guardian
Why the UK government is announcing a review of UK childcare costs
Whisper it: becoming a mum can make you a more productive writer – The Guardian
Having less time can help you value the time you have
Meta gagging order makes a mockery of free speech – The Times
Why it is wrong to silence book author critical of Facebook’s culture
Insight
The tipping point: what happens when deaths outnumber births? – The Guardian
Long read on the implication of changing population trends
Is it time for employers step in to fill the AI education gap – Financial Times
The case for organisations helping with knowledge and skills
How should bosses talk about AI? – Financial Times
How to discuss “lower value human capital”
My husband and I created a simple and life-changing parenting rota – The Guardian
How a division of labour and mental effort helps two parents with careers
The graduate job coaches offering access to ‘unwritten rules’ – Financial Times
Paid for support for young adults to start their careers Students in racially diverse MBA and Law Classes Earn Higher Starting Salaries – Bloomberg
Better outcomes for those educated in diverse cohorts