Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  To the majority of men and women who think of caregiving as a woman’s responsibility, redefining the “women’s problem” as a “care problem” may seem redundant. Women are indeed the considerable majority of caregivers in our society. Among parents, mothers spend roughly twice as much time as fathers on childcare. And the typical caregiver of an elderly relative is a woman in her forties who provides twenty hours a week of care to her mother.

  Women also face much more cultural pressure to be caregivers, and perfect ones at that, than men do. Even in the twenty-first century, America looks askance at any woman who doesn’t appear to put her children’s care above her professional life. Texas politician Wendy Davis has experienced extreme scrutiny about how and where she raised her children. Her decision to leave them with her then-husband in Texas while she went to Harvard Law School has been held up as an example of her selfishness. In general, men aren’t scrutinized in the same way. As a Democratic pollster pointed out in a New York Times article about Davis, Rahm Emanuel left his young children behind in Washington while he was running for mayor of Chicago and no one ever said two words about it.

  A physician who had two kids during her medical training wrote to me and said she feels like motherhood is the hardest thing she’s ever done, in part because of the guilt that comes with it. “There are pressures from many many different sides—for being a ‘perfect’ mother (from nursing exclusively to making my kids’ baby food from scratch!), to being a perfect doctor (well read on the latest studies, engaging in meaningful research, publishing studies). I started my first year of fellowship with a 9-week-old newborn,” she wrote to me after my article was published in The Atlantic. “I felt guilty for not being a good-enough mom while I was working 80 hours a week and taking overnight calls, and I felt guilty that I wasn’t giving 100% to my job.” She eventually decided to work part-time so that she could be there to put her kids to bed every night.

  When I gave a talk on work and family to a group of young Hispanic men and women who had won internships and fellowships in Washington, a young woman in the audience raised her hand and talked about the way in which her family and community judged mothers, criticizing those who were not home for their children. How, she asked, could she navigate those expectations and still pursue her career? Political strategist Maria Cardona, who was sharing the podium with me and has been an important role model in the Hispanic community, suggested that perhaps she could rely on other women in her extended family to be caregivers. None of us challenged the premise of her question, which was that it is up to women to provide care.

  The good news, however, is that the care problem is slowly but steadily becoming a men’s problem too. A Wharton School study comparing expectations and attitudes between the class of 1992 and 2012 found that young women today are more likely to anticipate the stress of fitting together work and family than they were twenty years ago. Also noteworthy, however, is that 43 percent of the men either agree or strongly agree that their pursuit of a demanding career “will make it difficult…to be an attentive spouse/partner,” up from 33 percent in 1992. A 2014 study of more than 6,500 Harvard Business School grads over the past few decades also found a significant shift in male attitudes. It showed that a third of male millennial HBS grads expect to split childcare responsibilities fifty-fifty with their partners; that’s compared with 22 percent of Gen X men and 16 percent of boomer men.

  Think about it. Almost a third to a half of the men in two highly competitive business schools, schools that attract a disproportionate number of alpha males in the first place, expect that family life will have a significant impact on their future success and personal lives. A venture capitalist friend of mine who teaches at Stanford Graduate School of Business reports a similar shift, saying that the attitudes of the young men he teaches have changed remarkably.

  In an article for The New Republic, Marc Tracy, a twenty-nine-year-old writer, notes that some men his age have begun to have the same kind of full-throated conversation about work-life balance as their female counterparts:

  Most men stress over the next step in their professions, with the attitude that if they happen to fall in love and settle down, well, that’s great, too. But recently, in many cases inspired by the women in our lives and the conversation they are having among themselves, we have begun to question whether our most basic priorities aren’t out of whack, and to wonder whether, for reasons both social and surprisingly biological, we shouldn’t be as “ambitious” to have children as we are to land the next great job. Plus, having had children, many of us hope to play a more active role in their upbringing than has typically been expected of fathers. Many of us were lucky to have mothers who, whatever other ambitions and accomplishments they had, clearly took great joy in raising us; some of us were even lucky enough to have similar fathers. Do we want it “all”? Who knows (or cares). But we want that.

  A 2013 Pew Research study on modern parenting fills in the statistics: almost as many fathers as mothers bemoan the stress of trying to juggle work and family. Fifty percent of fathers and 56 percent of mothers with children under eighteen at home said that they find it difficult “to balance the responsibilities of [their] job with the responsibilities of [their] family.” And an almost equal number of fathers and mothers agreed with the statement “I would prefer to be at home raising my children, but I need to work because we need the income.”

  In short, both women and men who experience the dual tug of care and career and as a result must make compromises at work pay a price. Redefining the women’s problem as a care problem thus broadens our lens and allows us to focus much more precisely on the real issue: the undervaluing of care, no matter who does it.

  …and a Company Problem

  IT’S EASY FOR EMPLOYERS TO marginalize an issue if they label it a “women’s problem.” A women’s problem is an individual issue, not a company-wide dilemma. But again, suppose the problem is not with the woman but with the workplace. Or more precisely, with a workplace designed for what Joan Williams called an “ideal worker.” The ideal worker is “the face-time warrior, the first one in in the morning and the last to leave at night. He is rarely sick. Never takes vacation, or brings work along if he does. The ideal worker can jump on a plane whenever the boss asks because someone else is responsible for getting the kids off to school or attending the preschool play.” Fifteen years after Williams coined the term, the ideal worker must now also contend with a globalized workplace where someone is always awake and electronic devices ensure that someone can always reach you.

  Recall the research undertaken by Professors Padavic, Ely, and Reid at the consulting firm. After careful study, they found that women and men at the firm had equal levels of distress over work-family conflicts and that equal percentages of men and women had left the firm in the past three years because they were being asked to work long hours. The firm’s key HR problem was not gender, as management believed, but rather a culture of overwork.

  The firm’s leadership simply refused to accept these findings. They didn’t want to be told that they needed to overhaul their entire organizational philosophy or that they were overpromising to clients and overdelivering (for example, making hundred-slide decks that the client couldn’t even use). That would require a lot of effort and soul-searching.

  What the leaders wanted to be told was that the firm’s problem was work-family conflict for women, a narrative that would not require them to make changes in anything they were doing or feeling. As Padavic, Ely, and Reid wryly conclude, their attitude required a “rejection [of evidence] on the part of evidence-driven analysts.”

  Debora Spar, president of Barnard College and author of Wonder Women, echoes these conclusions. “ ‘Fixing the women’s problem,’ ” she writes, “is not about fixing the women, or yanking them onto committees, or placating them with yet another networking retreat. It’s about fixing the organization—recognizing a diversity of skills and attributes, measuring them in a concrete wa
y, and rewarding people accordingly.”

  Journalists and media companies are just as guilty of perpetuating the myth of the “women’s problem.” Issues of work-life balance are discussed at The New York Times under the rubric Motherlode. Other websites like Slate and Huffington Post also house smart and worthwhile discussions of work and family in old-fashioned women’s sections. If you look at any large business conference, it’s the same story: work and family will be framed as a women’s issue, never as a mainstream issue. As one of my friends wrote to me,

  I am beyond tired of these critical issues—about work culture, about gender equity, about implicit bias, about how constrained many of the “choices” for both men and women are, about the lack of meaningful family policy, about the way we live, really—always defined through the lens of the harried working mother.

  A better lens is that of the harried caregiver, male or female. Best of all would be the lens of the failure of modern American companies to adapt to the realities of modern American life, insisting instead that workers turn themselves inside out to conform to outdated twentieth-century ideas of when and where work should get done.

  HALF-TRUTH: “FLEXIBILITY IS THE SOLUTION”

  IF YOU ARE A YOUNG woman interviewing with a company, law firm, bank, or university that sees itself as a progressive institution and wants to recruit you, you are likely to be told about their “family-friendly policies.” (If you are a young man in exactly the same situation, you are not.) Twenty percent of U.S. companies now offer paid maternity leave ranging from two to twelve weeks; 36 percent allow employees to work part-time for a while without losing their position in the company; some allow them to work from home part of the time on a regular basis; a few let them opt out of the workforce for a while and then still welcome them back in a position that reflects their previous experience.

  These policies reflect genuine progress by the women’s movement; those of us who have been able to take advantage of them have benefited in many ways that the majority of women have not. My two years working on the inflexible schedule of the State Department—even for a boss I loved and with the understanding that the world certainly would not wait on me—brought home the indispensability of having enough control over your own time to fit your work and your life together. In the academic world, I had that kind of flexibility. Indeed, one of the best reasons to strive to be the boss, if you can do it either before you have caregiving responsibilities or even during, is the much greater latitude you have to make sure meetings and work are in sync with your schedule rather than someone else’s.

  Real flexibility—the kind that gives you at least a measure of control over when and how you work in a week, a month, a year, and over the course of a career—is a critical part of the solution to the problem of how to fit work and care together. So why then is it only a half-truth? In most workplaces, flex policies—which range from telecommuting and variable workday schedules to more radical policies like part-time jobs, job sharing, prolonged sabbaticals, or shortened workweeks—exist largely on paper. It is often exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for employees to avail themselves of them. Indeed, reading through the various studies on this point reminds me of reading through the constitutions of countries behind the Iron Curtain in the former Soviet Union and in dictatorships around the world: they all guaranteed a full panoply of rights and liberties, but only for show.

  The HR department may roll out flex policies, but if you have an old-school manager, someone who came up never seeing his or her family, you are likely to face what academics drily call an “implementation gap.” In other words, some managers simply refuse to let their employees take advantage of policies on the books, which explains why the National Study of Employers finds a virtual chasm between the percentage of companies that allow some workers to work at home occasionally (67 percent) and the percentage of companies that allow all or most workers to work at home occasionally (8 percent). The managers who resist change like the workplace culture the way it is—based on presence, and hence control, more than on performance. In the words of one human resources manager: when some managers “can’t get someone right there at that particular moment it is actually an uneasy [feeling] for them.”

  Even when firms mean what they say and managers support flex policies, employees often don’t ask. And for good reason. In a work culture in which commitment to your career is supposed to mean you never think about or do anything else, asking for flexibility to fit your work and your life together is tantamount to declaring that you do not care as much about your job as your co-workers do. Dame Fiona Woolf, a British solicitor and former lord mayor of London, puts it succinctly: “Girls don’t ask for [flexible work] because they think it’s career suicide.”

  Flexibility Stigma

  IN 2013, THE Journal of Social Issues published a special issue on “flexibility stigma.” It included several studies showing that workers who take advantage of company policies specifically designed to let them adjust their schedules to accommodate caregiving responsibilities may still receive wage penalties, lower performance evaluations, and fewer promotions.

  A young woman who wrote to me, Kathryn Beaumont Murphy, was already a mother when she became a junior associate—a rarity at big law firms. She had a generous maternity leave and took advantage of their flextime policy when she returned after having her second child. She was allowed to work “part-time” for six months after her maternity leave ended, though it was still forty hours a week. “At the end of that six-month period,” Murphy says, “I was told by the all-male leadership of my department that I could not continue on a flexible schedule as it would hurt my professional growth.” She ended up leaving the firm entirely for a less prestigious job that pays much less, but where she has more control over her schedule. Her children are now five and eight, and after her experience she now believes that “flexibility is as valuable as compensation.”

  If anything, men who try to take advantage of flexible policies have it even worse. Joan Blades and Nanette Fondas, co-authors of The Custom-Fit Workplace, give the example of a law firm associate named Carlos who tried to arrange for paternity leave and was told that his company’s parental leave policy was really meant just for women. But even if his firm had said yes, it’s likely that he then would have paid an even bigger price in terms of his chances for advancement and overall mistreatment than his female colleagues did.

  A Catalyst study showing that men and women tend to use flexibility policies differently underlines the dangers that men perceive. The men and women in their study were equally likely to use a variety of flextime arrangements, from flexible arrival and departure times to compressing work in various ways across the week. But women were 10 percent more likely than men to work from home and men were almost twice as likely as women to say that they had never telecommuted over the course of their careers. Patterns like these show that men are aware that if a certain kind of flexibility means a lot less face time at the office, they won’t run the risk of being penalized for taking advantage of it.

  To be stigmatized means to be singled out, shamed, and discriminated against for some trait or failing. Stigma based on race, creed, gender, or sexual orientation is sharply and explicitly disapproved of in contemporary American society. Why should stigma based on taking advantage of company policy to care for loved ones be any different? Workers who work from home or even take time off do not lose IQ points. Their choice to put family alongside or even ahead of career advancement does not necessarily affect the quality of their work, even if it reduces the quantity.

  However effective flexibility policies may seem in theory, flexibility cannot be the solution to work-life issues as long as it is stigmatized. The question that young people should be asking their employers is not what kinds of family-friendly policies a particular firm has. Instead, they should ask, “How many employees take advantage of these policies? How many men? And how many women and men who have worked flexibly have advanced to top
positions in the firm?”

  DANGER: When Flexible Means Disposable

  THUS FAR, I’VE BEEN WRITING primarily about the white-collar world. Yet as with most things in the workplace, even the limited flexibility that white-collar workers take for granted doesn’t exist at all for low-income hourly workers. More than 70 percent of low-wage workers in the United States do not get paid sick days, which means that they risk losing their jobs when a childcare or health issue arises. In fact, nearly one-quarter of adults in the United States have been fired or threatened with job loss for taking time off to recover from illness or care for a sick loved one.

  Consider the case of Rhiannon Broschat, who was fired from her job at Whole Foods during the frigid winter of 2014 because Chicago schools were closed due to inclement weather. Broschat, who is also a student at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, called her mother to see if she could watch her son, but her mother had to work too. Then she called several friends to babysit, but they too had to work. Broschat couldn’t swap shifts with a co-worker, because at the time, Whole Foods policy required workers to swap shifts forty-eight hours in advance. She had no way out. Broschat’s story—she is now a senior at Northeastern Illinois—is so emblematic of how low-wage women struggle to get childcare that she spoke on a panel called “Why Women’s Economic Security Matters for All,” with Hillary Clinton, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Representative Rosa DeLauro in September 2014.

  Schedules that are too rigid to accommodate family needs on the one hand are often too flexible on the other. Many companies have begun to manufacture goods on flexible schedules keyed to changing demand in real time, rather than predicted demand. On the consumer side, they also now track customer flow more carefully and ask employees to adjust their schedules accordingly. In both cases, the ebb and flow of employee hours tracks the ebb and flow of customers and their desires. Walmart, Jamba Juice, Pier 1, Aeropostale, Target, and Abercrombie & Fitch are among the companies that employ a just-in-time workforce.