Balancing Family and Caregiving Responsibilities

Read the missed session as information about the week, not as a verdict on the mentoring. Across the OECD the employment gap between immigrant mothers and native-born mothers averages 20 percentage points, and in the EU 57 per cent of migrant women are in work against 73 per cent of migrant men. Care work sits behind a large share of that. In practice it is usually the thing deciding whether mentoring happens at all, not a detail to work around at the end.

The change that helps most is in the first conversation. Instead of offering a slot and hoping, ask what the week actually looks like: school runs, shift patterns, an appointment for a parent, the day the washing machine repair is coming. Build the schedule out of that.

Two short sessions tend to survive better than one long one. And say out loud, early, that moving a session costs nothing and loses nobody their place. Many people assume that asking to reschedule means going to the back of a queue, so they simply do not ask.

What worked for me was changing one question. I stopped asking when someone was free and started asking what Tuesday looks like for her. The answers were completely different. One woman had ninety minutes between dropping her son at nursery and starting a cleaning shift, and she had never offered it because it did not look to her like a proper appointment.

That question is worth keeping, and there is one thing to add underneath it. How much room a mentee has depends heavily on her contract. EIGE found that women in temporary jobs or with no formal contract spend twice as long on unpaid care every day as women in permanent jobs. So a mentee in casual work is not simply busier. She has less say over which hours are hers, and often finds out late.

Asking about the contract, gently and for this reason only, tells you how far ahead you can plan with her. With a permanent contract you can fix a slot for two months. With shift work you may be agreeing each week, and that is not a failure of commitment on either side.

One case where none of this worked: a woman caring for a disabled adult who could not commit to any hour at all, not even a moving one. We ended up dropping the session model entirely and doing everything by voice message, her at midnight, me the next morning. It was slower and it was the only thing that fitted.