Why Mumsnet may be the perfect place to recruit the next James Bond
|
Version 0 of 1. It was a fairly normal morning at the Mumsnet offices: our crack team of staffers were tidying up Natalie Bennett’s macaroon crumbs and tearing up over the deeply moving moment when a dad of four hears silence for the first time. It took a while for us to notice the message slipped under the door by our receptionist Brian (is he called Brian though, really? Is he?). “Blears has blown the lid on Operation Naughty Step. Remove material and extricate deep cover agent ‘Dorries’ immediately. PS Your delivery of wine is blocking the lift. Love Brian x” 'Nobody suspects a woman in mum boots of anything underhand,' said ShatnersBassoon wisely It turned out that parliament’s intelligence and security committee had caused a bit of a stir, advising MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to recruit mothers and middle-aged women in an effort to diversify the ranks and break down the “‘unacknowledged biases’ that will circumscribe both the definition of problems and the search for solutions”. More specifically, it recommended that they start with Mumsnet. Our users were enthused, and more than happy to help. “I have experience of sitting in cafes,” offered commenter iseenodust. “Nobody suspects a woman in mum boots of anything underhand,” said ShatnersBassoon wisely. LegoSuperstar was even able to identify her own speciality: “I’m a poisons expert, if the look on the children’s faces at teatime is anything to go by.” GaggiaGirl had to politely excuse herself (“I can’t keep my own piss in, never mind international secrets”), but Hassled had thought ahead: “I KNEW all those Homeland threads I started weren’t for nothing.” The most popular suggestion was to rename Mumsnet’s most famed board “Am I Being Treasonable?” And then they were off, taking MI5’s online “investigative challenge” and shamelessly posting their scores on the thread. These are women who know an opportunity when they see one. Frankly, by Monday it will be a wonder if there’s anyone left on the boards. Japes aside, there’s undoubtedly a decent point being made here. Mothers and middle-aged women – indeed, women, full stop – are under-represented in the security services: the committee notes that they make up just 19% of senior positions across the three services. Greater diversity – something that doesn’t just apply to women, of course – endows organisations of all kinds with a resilience that cannot be bought on Savile Row. Overcoming the “motherhood penalty” requires employers to become more creative in their attitudes to flexible working (“I’ll need to work from home at least one day a week” commented NormaStanleyFletcher to the crowds of spook-recruiters who are definitely crawling all over Mumsnet right now), and to engage in national conversations about childcare and family-friendly approaches. If it was the committee’s intent to bring these issues into the spotlight by dropping the Mumsnet bomb, we can only applaud the success of her approach (while researching standard recruitment agency commission rates). Less concretely, there’s an aspect of chauvinism that could be genuinely useful in the world of covert operations: the almost literal invisibility that women seem to acquire once they reach middle age. In a culture that places excessive value on female attractiveness (generally defined as having youthful qualities) and sexual availability, older women can pass unnoticed from one dead-letter drop to the next. Mumsnet user thoth noted cannily: “As a middle-aged woman, no one ever looks at me twice – I’d be perfect for surveillance work.” The skills commonly deployed by the average middle-aged mother read like the “About me” section of the perfect spy CV. Covert monitoring of your child’s online activity: check. Accustomed to hours of enforced inactivity punctuated by bursts of intense effort: check. Unshockability: check. Experience of sleep deprivation: check. Eyes in the back of your head (aka 360-degree surveillance): check. All we ask is that reasonable adjustments are made if we have to chase down any triple agents while wearing three-inch heels. |