Unfinished Business (7 page)

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to outdated twentieth-century ideas of when and where work should get done.

I
F 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.”

I
N
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?”

T
HUS 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.

University of Chicago social services professor Susan J. Lambert points out that sales associates and restaurant servers only learn about their weekly schedules a few days in advance, and those schedules are always in flux. They may work seven hours one week and thirty-two the next. “
Hotel housekeepers might work Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday one week, and then Sunday, Thursday and Saturday the following week,” she says.

This kind of flexibility translates into radical unpredictability, which is a nightmare for caregivers. High-income lawyers, bankers, or consultants who work at the whim of a client's demand experience such stress all the time but typically buy their way out of it by having full-time or live-in childcare. The majority of workers without that luxury must face the drama of having to find child- or eldercare on a moment's notice, week after week. Workers who live with extended families can sometimes manage, but they are also the most likely to have eldercare as well as childcare responsibilities.

New York Times
reporter Jodi Kantor brought this experience home to millions of readers in August 2014 with her heartbreaking front-page story about twenty-two-year-old Starbucks barista and single mom Jannette Navarro. Thanks to scheduling software, which allows chains to use customer data to inform its day-to-day staffing, Navarro rarely knew her schedule more than three days before the start of the workweek. This wrought havoc
on her ability to find consistent childcare for her four-year-old son, which in turn put immense strain on her familial and romantic relationships. Her aunt became frustrated with having to pick up last-minute babysitting duties due to Navarro's erratic schedule; her boyfriend broke up with her because she was too worn out after work to keep her promises to him.
She and her son lost two homes within six months, and her schedule—which some weeks required her to close the store one night at eleven
P.M.
and be back the next morning to open it up again at four
A.M.
the next day—left her so sleep-deprived she napped on the sidewalk outside the store.

The day after Kantor's article ran in the
Times
, Starbucks executives vowed to revise the scheduling software for their 130,000 employees, giving local managers more discretion and preventing employees from having to close up shop one night and then open it back up again in the predawn hours the next day. But individual fixes like this aren't a cure for the larger problems that retail and hourly workers all over the country have to deal with every day.

For millions of American workers, then, flexibility is not the solution but the problem. Women and men at the top cannot advocate for more flexibility without insisting that these policies be implemented in ways that help workers rather than hurt them. The kind of flexibility we need is about making room for care in all our lives, not an additional excuse to stop caring about the human impact of our policies.

“T
IME MACHO
,”
AS
I
LIKE
to call it, is the relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours the international dateline affords
you. One of the paragons of time macho was Ronald Reagan's ferociously competitive budget director Dick Darman. According to one story, “
Mr. Darman sometimes managed to convey the impression that he was the last one working in the Reagan White House by leaving his suit coat on his chair and his office light burning after he left for home.” (Darman claimed that it was just easier to leave his suit jacket in the office so he could put it on again in the morning, but his record of successful bureaucratic warfare suggests otherwise.)