Why Gender Quotas Are Bad for Business and for Feminism

A few weeks ago CV Harquail at Authentic Organizations drew my attention to this New York Times article about Norway’s policy requiring that 40% of corporate board members be women.  On its face, the legislation seems like a good thing for women — I often say that getting more women into top corporate positions is one of the keys to improving life for women at all levels in the workplace.  However, the idea of forcing companies to fill quotas each year doesn’t sit well with me.

Norway’s policy in particular seems naive.  Even in large countries like the US, women haven’t had the same opportunities to gain corporate governance and management skills, so the talent pool remains limited.  In the case of Norway, a relatively small country, the quota system has required companies to recruit women who may be less qualified than their male counterparts.  A study on the policy from the University of Michigan suggests that corporate boards “grew younger and more inexperienced, [and] performance declined.”

The findings are something of a surprise since it has been de rigueur in the last year to claim that more women in positions of corporate authority would lead to better business.  There have been any number of articles asking whether greater gender diversity could have mitigated the financial crisis (check out some examples here and here).  Sylvia Ann Hewlett writes that there was “too much testosterone on Wall Street” in the Harvard Business Review, and Claire Shipman and Katty Kay of Womenomics fame talk about the financial advantages of having more women in top jobs in TIME Magazine.

If all of the hype about women being better managers is true, how come Norway’s policies haven’t improved corporate performance?  Partly it’s the flawed notion that women are inherently — even biologically — more thoughtful and prudent than men.  While some research is showing that diverse corporate boards do better, there’s no evidence that this is because of women’s involvement per se.  It is more likely that a mix of opinions from a diversity of experienced professionals lead to success.  Women are a part of this because there are many who are seasoned professionals.  Their opinions are valuable because of their expertise, not their gender.

The idea that you can just recruit more women at the top is also flawed.  While there are  experienced female managers, they are many fewer than experienced male managers.  The Times article points out that women in Norway get a whopping 48 weeks of paid parental leave, which often takes them out of the workforce for a year or more in the prime of their career.  In the US the drawbacks for women in the workforce are less benevolent, but equally destructive — American women learn early that honoring family life while climbing the corporate ladder can be an insurmountable challenge.

I badly want to see more women in corporate boardrooms.  But we set this endeavor up to fail if we don’t start by encouraging women in middle and upper middle management to stay in the workforce so they can be trained to fill these roles.  Setting arbitrary quotas without providing the appropriate back-end education and support just means that we recruit unqualified people.  Ultimately this isn’t good for business or women — business suffers from poor managers, women may be branded as less qualified even when they have all the right skills.

Glorifying women’s business sense based solely on their gender doesn’t serve the greater cause of equality; it just creates expectations that can’t be met based on where women are today.  Our reality is that there are many fewer qualified female corporate leaders than male.  But if we can get more women to major in business in college; pursue MBA programs; and get on-the-job management training that would give them comparable experience to men, we stand a much better chance of improving our corporate boards without imposing quotas that frustrate the very companies we most need to enlist as allies.

Related links:

• The Times article prompted this response from the right-wing National Review.
• Before the University of Michigan study was released, Kate Sweetman wrote this glowing report on the Norwegian policy in the Harvard Business Review.
• Nancy Clark at Women’s Lunch Talk cites statistics on women and corporate boards in the US.  I don’t agree with all of her conclusions, but it’s interesting data.
• NPR reports on the Norway policy here.

Work/Life: Only for the Wealthy?

Om Tuesday I had lunch with some big thinkers: Cali Yost, CV Harquail, Leanne Chase, Ellen Galinsky, Judy Martin, Chrysula Winegar, Morra Aarons-Mele and Kami Lewis Levin.  Over the next few days I’m going to write about some of our discussions.  Today’s question: how relevant are work/life issues to the working poor?  Can the work/life discussion go beyond the privileged few who are able to kiss the corporate world good-bye for more appealing options?

Some at our table suggested that work/life was inherently an issue for the upper middle class and wealthy; working class people need more work, not less, and are eager to gain income through additional hours on the job.  Furthermore, only people who have the leverage and resources to give up the benefits of corporate America — health insurance, life insurance, retirement benefits — can really aspire to making major shifts in work/life.

I think this is a valid point if you think that work/life strategies are mostly about  working fewer hours.  But I would characterize work/life as a much broader set of issues, including gender equity, health, childcare and other family policies that support workers’ ability to pursue satisfying career and home lives without significantly compromising either.  If we contextualize work/life in this way, then it has even greater relevance for working and middle class families than those with greater resources.

It reminded me that I’ve felt for a long time that we need to reframe this conversation.  Work/life doesn’t mean reduced hours for all employees.  I want to be a chief executive, and I don’t expect to do that by reducing the time I spend at work.  But that doesn’t mean that work/life isn’t important to me; on the contrary, I still want the flexibility to pick up my child from school some days, or take an elderly parent to the doctor.  I am keen to see more high-quality childcare options at or near  my workplace so that I can see my child at lunchtime.  I want to be able to pump milk or breastfeed at my office.  And I don’t want to face discrimination because I have children, when the work I do is comparable to or better than my peers.  These are all work/life issues, and yet they are dwarfed by the perception that work/life is simply about working less.

But what about those who don’t want to be a CEO?  Any way we slice it, reduction in hours means a reduction in income.  Enabling families to spend more time together only at the expense of long-term financial security is not a fair choice.  Not to mention that workers who go “part-time” often end up working as many hours as their full-time counterparts, but with a lower salary, no health care, and reduced benefits.

Some of the people around the table felt that greater government legislation was in order to make work/life feasible.  I agree — but it’s neither practical nor good economics to legislate reduction in hours or flexible scheduling.  Companies need to have the freedom to determine what staffing structures work best independent of government oversight.

Instead, our government’s role should be to provide basic social services that allow both business and individuals to make staffing choices without worrying that workers on a reduced or alternative schedule might be slapped with a $19,000 hospital bill because they need an appendectomy.  (This story really did appear in The Wall Street Journal, but The Journal charges for archived content, so I’m linking to a free, but strange-looking version.)

It is true that reducing hours is a part of the work/life equation for some, but the reality is that for many of us — whether because of economic necessity or choice — limiting time at work and income is undesirable.  Do those of us who still work a 40 or 50 or 60 hour week have less stake in work/life?  I think we have even more.

Related links:

• A new report from the Center for American Progress talks about “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict: the Poor, the Professionals and the Missing Middle.”
• From the Sloan Work and Family Research Network: “Flexible Work Arrangements: Improving Job Quality and Workforce Stability for Low-Wage Workers and their Employers.“
• Cali Yost writes about different work/life strategies in Fast Company — important insight: “Sometimes finding a new fit involves big changes, and oftentimes small adjustments are enough.”

Elevating the Work/Life Conversation

Today kicks off a two-week blog series on “Work/Life in Our Communities” coordinated by Fem 2.0 and including some of my favorite people and organizations.  Each day will include a radio conversation and posts from some of the web’s most important women’s bloggers at AAUW, Feminist.com, Feministe, MomsRising, NOW, and Blogher, among others.  I’m excited to hear what promises to be a high-level discussion.

However, I do have a couple of concerns about the conveners and panels.  The group includes women’s activists, bloggers, and academics, with no meaningful representation by business, and very little by men.  If we really believe, as the organizers say they do, that work/life is not a women’s issue, we need to take it out of the “women’s rights” arena.  (Tomorrow there is a session on male roles, but there might have been more value in approaching inclusion of the male perspective throughout the conference, rather than in a separate panel.)

I’m a pragmatist.  I know that corporate America is never going to adopt work/life just because it’s the “right” thing to do.  We need to be engaging companies on their terms — talking about the bottom line and how work/life strategies can either make or save them money.  Cali Yost over at Work+Life Fit talks about this frequently, pointing out that “work+life is not about ‘nice,’ it’s about long-term, strategic, global competitiveness.”  While I laud the Fem 2.0 conference, I see it as another discussion happening in an echochamber.

The panels are also heavy on academia and light on practical experience.  If you are going to focus on work/life in the women’s sphere, it would be worthwhile to include some women who actually work in management roles at large companies.  Some of the solutions I hear proposed by the blogging, journalist and activist communities don’t take a 360 degree view of the issues.

For example, there’s lots of talk in the feminist blogosphere about how adopting a more European maternity leave system could make women’s lives better, but little mention of how the same system can lead to smaller numbers of women in top management.  There’s frequent discussion of how technology can help us work more flexibly, but less recognition of the kinds of technology changes companies will need to make to support large numbers of employees working remotely.  And there is too little honesty about the trade-offs of scaling back.

Consider a real-world situation: what does a manager at a small company do when one or two employees take lengthy maternity leaves or ask for part-time hours?  How does this affect the rest of the department’s work/life?  When we talk about what is “fair” for parents, there needs to be profound understanding that fair for some of us can quickly devolve into unfair for others.  Work/life is not about children or eldercare or any specific situation; it’s about solutions that promote revenue and allow businesses the flexibility they need to secure and maintain the best talent pool possible.

I see a role for academia and activism in this conversation, but they won’t take it far without some practical discussion of how corporate work models need to fundamentally change to make work/life a greater priority.  More importantly we need hard data, research, longitudinal studies, and concept papers on work/life that come from outside the women’s rights sphere to show our businesses.  Only when corporate America is convinced that work/life will make them wealthier, more competitive, and more sustainable will we see real change.  That requires a different kind of conversation all together.

P.S.: I hope the radio sessions are archived somewhere…right now they are all scheduled for the middle of the day, when I work.

Related links:

• From The American Prospect: Work/Life Balance is Not a Women’s Issue.
• From Work+Life Fit: Stop Talking About Work+Life Flex Solely in the Context of Women…Really, Seriously, Once and For All.
• From PunditMom: Work/Life “Balance” – Changing the Conversation.

“Working Parent Confessions” of New York’s Governor Paterson

From time to time I criticize The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other big media for their coverage of working parent issues.  But if there’s one sacred cow in my life, it’s been public radio.  That is until now.

This month one of my favorite local news programs, The Brian Lehrer Show, has had a segment on parenting taboos featuring Babble’s Rufus Griscom encouraging parents to “confess” parenting realities that are not socially acceptable to discuss in public.  Last week’s show was on “What I Will Not Sacrifice for My Child,” and it opened with a clip of an older interview with New York’s Governor David Paterson responding to a question about how he and his wife balance raising kids with their demanding careers.

Paterson admitted that he and his wife sometimes don’t get home until 9 or 10pm and that their schedules do make it hard to spend time with their 15 year-old son.  Brian discussed the clip in the context of a recent news story about Governor Paterson’s son, who was found gambling illegally with a credit card that didn’t belong to him in his pocket.  Though the clip and the news story weren’t linked — the Governor wasn’t responding to the allegations against his son, and there isn’t any evidence that the family’s schedules were related to this incident — Brian made the connection in a very direct way.

If you heard “Why Brian, why?” ringing out in the tri-state area that evening of January 14th (I was podcasting the show), it was probably me wailing in betrayal and alarm.

Because whatever your politics, I think we can all agree that it was a low blow to take something the Governor said in an entirely separate context and apply it to a tremendously disturbing family situation.  Many 15 year-olds have parents who work late, especially those with parents in high-powered jobs.  But there’s no evidence that these kids are more likely to become petty hoodlums or act out.  What is clear is that teenagers do stupid things no matter how vigilant their parents are — it’s the nature of being a teenager, and it’s not likely to be changed by parents giving up their best professional opportunities to watch their kids relentlessly.

Brian’s implication, intentional or not, was that if the Governor and his wife, who holds a high-level position at the Health Insurance Plan of New York, had sacrificed more in their careers — giving up the late nights, etc. — their child might not have problems.  But how could Brian know this?  What does it say to working parents if the media tells us that taking care of our children requires us to give up wonderful career opportunities.  Should the Governor have decided not to take the office because he had a teen-age son?  Should his wife have left her job?  Would this have made a meaningful difference given that most 15 year-olds are not especially interested in spending lots of time with their parents day or evening?

Since the segment was framed in the language of confession, it’s also worth pointing out that the Governor wasn’t “confessing” in the interview.  He said that their schedules made work life balance difficult, but he didn’t say that he or his wife regretted their choices.  Brian implied that they should.  Apparently even the most progressive media needs a sea change to deal with work life issues sensitively and accurately.

Related links:

• Despite my issue with this segment, The Brian Lehrer Show is one of the best things on public radio.  Their coverage of the Haiti earthquake from the perspective of Haitian New Yorkers has been terrific.  Check them out here.
• More confessions at Babble’s “Bad Parent” column.  I like Babble, but this is more sensationalism to drive traffic than journalism.

Cutting Back at Work or at Home?

One of the things I’ve been thinking about since I started blogging on the politics of working motherhood is this male/female divide: when women feel overwhelmed by the demands of parenting and work, their solution is to look to the work paradigm and think about cutting back in that arena.  Men are more likely to either power through the crisis, or consider how they might delegate better both at work and at home.  It is rare that a man advocates for flextime or cutting back his hours.

Some suggest that this is because women are “hard-wired” differently; our domestic lives are simply more important to us than working for some company.  But while there may be women who like housework, I have yet to meet a critical mass who strongly prefer domestic labor to challenging work outside the home.  The rub is finding work with the autonomy, meaning and variety that can lead to happiness.

Even when we have good jobs, why are women sometimes so quick to give up work hours in favor of time at home?  It would make sense to me if our time was largely spent playing with our kids, but that’s often not the case.   The trade-off is spending time doing things like grocery shopping, house-cleaning and countless other small domestic tasks.  Especially in cases where women are in higher-paid management roles, we could hire people to do a lot of this for us, relieving pressure without insisting that we down-time our work.

Of course, it’s true that not all families can afford domestic help.  But think about the cost-benefit: hiring someone for a few hours a week might make it possible for a working mother to take on a greater role in the office that leads to more money and promotion potential in the long-run.  Five hours of help weekly would cost less than $100, but eliminate the need for time spent doing chores that are stressful and unfulfilling.  (Cleaning the bathroom and chopping vegetables are two that come to my mind!)

And there is another solution — insisting that our partners share domestic chores.  So often we laugh about how our husbands are couch potatoes while we do all the cooking and cleaning.  But the joke is on us when we don’t demand their participation so that we have equal opportunity to meet our professional goals.

One of the problems is that there is a pervasive sense in our culture that our families should always come first.  And to some extent that’s absolutely true — if the trade-off is the health or well-being of your child or spouse versus a job, your family will always be paramount.  But if the trade-off is laundry versus a higher-level job or a cleaner kitchen versus better long-term pay, how does that change the paradigm?

One of the side benefits of finding ways to delegate in your home is that you really do spend more quality time with your kids.  I may spend less physical time with my son than a stay-at-home mother, but during our time together I never do housework, not even grocery shopping unless there is something we want to buy together for a recipe.  I don’t take calls unless they are critically urgent, and I keep my computer closed.  My focus is entirely on him.

It seems that we feel pressured to spend more time with our families, but what we really need is more quality time.  Cutting back hours in the office won’t give us that, but it will diminish our ability to achieve the kinds of challenging and autonomous jobs that studies show impact happiness as significantly as relationships.

Related links:

• From Newsweek: studies suggest that the happier women are with the division of housework, the happier men are with their sex lives.
• At InsideHigherEd, Mama PhD asks “Why does hiring a cleaning service seem so indulgent?”
• Want to make sure your domestic help is treated fairly?  Consider using a co-op with structures and policies that ensure workers are supported.  Some possibilities are here (New York), here and here (Bay Area), and here (Chicago).
• Whenever I think about 50/50 housework, I’m reminded of the poem “Housework“, originally recited by Carol Channing, from “Free to Be You and Me.”  The final stanza reads:

Children, when you have a house of your own,
Make sure, when there’s house work to do,
That you don’t have to do it alone.
Little boys, little girls, when you’re big husbands and wives,
If you want all the days of your lives
To seem sunny as summer weather,
Make sure, when there’s housework to do,
That you do it together!

A Wrecking Ball for the House of Work

I’ve been lucky to be a part of some interesting conversations this week on the nature of work, and how it might better serve the needs of women and parents in general.  Commenting on Christine Livingstone’s great post on job satisfaction statistics at A Different Kind of Work, Chrysula Winegar of Work. Life. Balance. says:

When we talk about work-life issues, and getting policies in place to facilitate the reality of parenting, care-giving or just plain old life, I fear we’re providing a quick coat of paint and new curtains for a house that’s really a tear down…The model is broken. We have to start over.

Chrysula makes a good point here.  The constellation of factors contributing to worker unhappiness, and particular women’s dissatisfaction with the workplace, is more complicated than just making flex-time available or lengthening maternity leave.  A host of disadvantages face women at many levels in the workforce, and they have to be addressed systemically in ways that promote business development, revenue, and women’s advancement.

Morra Aarons-Mele picks up the discussion at the Families and Work Institute blog with her thoughtftul commentary on Chrysula’s idea that “the house of work is a tear down.”  Morra, who also writes the Women and Work blog, identifies a core need to de-gender the discussion around work-life and family policy issues to move the needle.  As I commented:

…[De-gendering] is absolutely core to our discussion of these issues moving forward — not the least because the reality is that right now it’s men who are in the kinds of positions that can effect real change. I wish it weren’t so, but there are not enough women in either corporate and public policy leadership to launch the kind of revolution we will need to change our work environments.

It’s true that the “traditional male” way is not the only way to the corner office.  But if large numbers of women opt out of corporate culture, we have even less of a chance of de-gendering the argument — we will be, in effect, ceding the fight for family policy to our male and childless counterparts. Some of them will be sympathetic, but many won’t even have these issues on their radar.

So at least some of us need to continue to climb the ladder, with the understanding that work family solutions have to improve company’s bottom lines (and they do!) as well as make us feel good.  We can’t fight this fight on the basis of gender equity alone — it needs to be fought on the basis of what will do the most economic and social good for our country and it’s corporate infrastructure.  That’s where serious change can happen.

Full disclosure too: some of us like climbing the corporate ladder.  Working in a corporate environment is right for me.  It just would be even more right if universal, high-quality daycare existed.  And if I didn’t have to worry that I might be fired or downsized because I got pregnant.  And if I knew that I would have the same opportunities for compensation and promotion as my male colleagues, and even my female colleagues without children.

And while I have no empirical evidence, it seems to me that implementing a lot of these changes, “tearing down the house” to borrow Chrysula’s metaphor, will also have a positive impact on office politics.  The little bits of petty, dysfunctional mismanagement that we find so frustrating might diminish with a happier, less threatened workforce.

Unfortunately, there’s still a pervasive sense among both male and female executives that improved work-life policy will errode their bottom line or somehow damage their business infrastructure.  They think we will become generally less productive.  Not only are studies suggesting that this is untrue, in an editorial a few years ago, “French Family Values,” Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman pointed out that the big difference between European economies with better family policies and the US is “priorities, not performance.

Side note: conversations like this, where we bounce ideas and opinions off each other in thoughtful and respectful ways, are what I love best about blogging.  I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to discuss these issues in a public forum with this extraordinary group of women.  One more to mention is Cali Yost who has a fabulous series at her blog Work+Life Fit this week: Work+Life Fit in 5 Days.  Anyone interested in thinking practically about these issues should check it out!

But Women Just Don’t Want to Work…

Last week my post “Looking at Lists” struck a chord with some of my favorite cyber-friends.  Although many agreed with the idea that fixing our corporate culture will take more women in top jobs, some also mentioned that they had opted for part-time work to improve their quality of life.

There are so many different ways to structure work and family obligations; every family, every parent has a slightly different strategy.  For many people — women and men — consulting, part-time or flexible work schedules are a better fit than full-time corporate jobs.  Frequently these arrangements work for companies too; high-quality employees are willing to work for less money and fewer benefits.  And, of course, the reality of many part-time jobs is that they are essentially 3/4 or even full-time jobs with slightly more flexibility.

As much as I’ve said in the past that scaling back or opting out have serious consequences for women collectively and individually, I also recognize that part of the problem is the unforgiving nature of the corporate world.  We all know that part-time, flex and consulting work can be as or more challenging and time-consuming as 9 to 5 jobs, and yet they are scorned by many supervisors as less valuable and valid experience.  Asking for flex-time is still a red flag for most corporate employers.

As I was thinking about this last week, I saw Jodie Allen’s editorial in US News & World Report.  Allen is a Senior Editor with the Pew Research Center, and she writes in response to The Economist’s recent “We Did It!” story about women’s ascenscion in the workforce, citing a number of studies Pew has done on women’s ambivalence about work and family.  Unfortunately, I don’t think she gives these statistics the context they deserve, and it comes off as if women, by nature, just don’t want to work outside of the home.

This adds fuel to the idea that the gender pay gap is related to women’s choices to leave the workforce — that inequities in compensation and promotion are our own fault.  In fact economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn have analyzed the data and found that just 10.5 percent of the pay gap is explained by choices; another 50% or so has to do with the kinds of jobs men and women hold.  But a whopping 40% is “unexplained” and likely has some grounding in sexism.

Let’s start with the widely quoted study indicating that 62% of working mothers would prefer to work part-time, while 72% of fathers say full-time work is ideal for them.  Allen doesn’t mention that women (and particularly mothers) working full-time earn at least 20% less than their male counterparts, or that they are less likely to reach executive management, even if they work as long and as hard as men.  Knowing this, it’s little wonder that women prefer the idea of part-time work; that’s what we are compensated for doing even when we do work full-time.

Allen also a study that indicates working mothers are “ambivalent about daycare.”  I would suggest that the ambivalence doesn’t stem from anything inherently wrong with having others help care for children, but rather with a lack of high quality early childhood education in many communities.  Daycare would be a less controversial concept if there were greater numbers of well-trained and outfitted facilities.

But Allen’s piece presents these and other studies as if they are inevitable facts about the nature of working mothers.  In fact, these are attitudes and ideas that can be changed — and perhaps along the way we can come up with some different questions too.  In my mind, the question is not whether working mothers prefer full- or part-time work, but rather what motivates their decision to leave full-time employment, and what could motivate them to stay.  The question isn’t whether daycare is or is not good, but what childcare solutions would be preferable and how we might improve the system.

And there is an ultimate question: how can we address the implicit sexism in our corporate cultures, and what can be done to make work environments more efficient and palatable for everyone?

Related links:

• An interesting take from a newly laid off stay-at-home mother in The London Times online.  Jezebel responds to the piece.
• Conducive Magazine writes that “Equal Pay for Equal Work Still Not a Reality.”
• Tammy Erickson’s five predictions for work in 2010 from the Harvard Business Review.

Looking at Lists

The other day Crain’s “Book of Lists,” a magazine devoted to listing the top firms and executives in various New York industries, crossed my desk.  Flipping through, I could count the number of women included in the entire publication on two hands — literally.

Particularly stark was the “Fortunate 100,” the top compensated CEOs in the city, including just four women with the first coming in at number 26.  The top 180 privately held companies included 12 female CEOs, and while the publicly held companies didn’t list their executives, the only one I could easily identify was Indra Nooyi at Pepsico.  Interestingly, Nooyi is head of the 11th largest publicly held company, but ranked number 37 on the compensation list, behind a number of men who run smaller operations.

Later that same day I opened up my latest New Yorker to find a letter by philosophy professor Kascha Semonovitch on the lack of female faces in their recent “Photographs of Power” feature, just four in a group of fifty world leaders.  Out of curiosity, I checked out a few of the other “big lists,” and found that only 15 companies on the Fortune 500 have female CEOs.  The Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans includes 42 women, at least half of whom inherited their wealth, and their “Most Powerful People” list includes four women out of 67.  (Although, there is small consolation in seeing Hilary Clinton come in at number 17 while Bill is at number 31).

Perhaps most galling is the Vanity Fair “New Establishment” list, which includes 12 women out of 100 total.  I can’t fault Forbes or Fortune or Crain’s – presumably their data is compiled using formulas — but the VF list is entirely subjective.  It includes men who are major business powerhouses, but women who are mostly actresses, media professionals and a couple of White House staffers, some of whom are listed with male partners or cohorts.

Seeing all these lists together was demoralizing.  It reminded me that, despite the recent media blitz about women being over 50% of workers in the US, and the new “diverse, digital and female” workforce, we are still far behind our male counterparts in terms of participation and representation at the top.  And that means that a host of other issues — equal pay, sound family policies, amenities that would improve the lives of families like on-site daycare and lactation facilities, are not on the table.  Women may be 50% of workers, but their needs as employees are woefully underserved, largely because they simply don’t hold positions of power either in business or in politics.

I would be more optimistic about seeing the women in today’s cohort of young managers rise to the top if I didn’t see them scaling back so radically.  While I don’t think large numbers are opting out of work per se, many of the best are opting out of the corporate world.  I hear life coaches and career coaches and editorialists counsel “down-timing” all the time as a way to make women’s lives happier, more fulfilled, less stressful.  But this strategy takes women out of the running for exactly the jobs that would give them power and autonomy.

During the 2000s I noticed that women continuously needed to tell each other that “we can’t do it all, and that’s okay.”  Of course, no one can do everything well; there is such a thing as being overcommitted.  But with support from our partners, we can do an awful lot — including have wonderful family lives in tandem with high-powered careers.  The more we reassure ourselves and our junior colleagues that we don’t have to work so hard, the less competitive we become and the more likely we are to get stuck in boring and unpleasant middle management jobs.

If we can successfully move into executive suites, women will have leverage to advocate for the kinds of reform that can promote our own advancement — public policy that support families, business policies that understand the link between productivity and employee well-being, and mentoring for each other.  But we have to remind ourselves that work and family are not mutually exclusive, and that we can excel at both.

Related links:

• The Economist’s recent piece on women in the workforce is a worthy read, discussing the issues in both a national and an international context.
• I’ve been enjoying the blog Hello Ladies, which reports on the intersection between feminism and life.  It’s part of a new generation of sites for women that aren’t afraid to openly use the f-word (that’s feminist!).
• Catalyst is working to expand opportunities for women in business, and has been a great advocate for getting more women into executive roles and boardrooms.
• The Sloan Work and Family Research Network is a terrific resource for information on women, work and family.  Can’t check their site all the time?  Follow their Twitter feed here — they are great at keeping you posted on the latest news related to work.

A Caregiver’s Worth Revisited

A few weeks ago I posted on “A Caregiver’s Worth.”  Over the holidays, I received this response from reporter Ruth Mantell, who I quoted, clarifying her position.  She writes:

I want to clarify a point you made while discussing a column I wrote about the value of “woman’s work.”  My column is actually titled: “Calculating the true value of ‘woman’s work,’ ” rather than what you wrote: “Calculating the Value of Women’s Work.”  The difference between the two titles is small but important.  I used rabbit ears around “woman’s work” to indicate that the phrase is somewhat of a misnomer.  After all, there are many households in which men make substantial care giving contributions.

That said, the Labor Department’s most recent data from its American Time Use Survey indicates that women do spend more time on “household activities” and caring for children.  Here’s a link to that report: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf.  The relevant data are contained in tables one and nine.

I’ve reposted my original piece below for reference.  Thanks so much to Ruth for her response.

TMB

A Caregiver’s Worth

Last week Ruth Mantell at The Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch posted this ill-titled piece “Calculating the Value of Women’s Work.”  I say ill-titled because what the article discusses is not “women’s work” per se, but rather work that has traditionally been done by women.  It also mixes apples and oranges by comparing paid caregiving jobs with stay at home parenting, two very different things from an economic perspective.

I’ve criticized the idea of putting a dollar value on unpaid household work before.  It’s tempting to try and monetize the chores we do around the house, cooking dinner, taking care of a baby, or helping with homework, but the reality is that a certain amount of this work is a regular part of our non-working lives, male or female.  Furthermore, as Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin puts it, “Much of what we do with our children is not work — it’s love, education and the instilling of values. It is often not something you could ever farm out to anybody.”

When we try to put a dollar value on the work stay at home parents do, we also ignore the opportunity cost of their not working.  Hearing estimated values of stay at home mothers’ work like $122,732 (the number Salary.com suggests) may make some parents feel good about their decisions, but such estimates mask the reality that, over the long-term, mothers who are out of the workforce lose significant earning power.  Since the “salary” they earn during their stay at home years isn’t in cash, doesn’t come with benefits, and doesn’t enhance skills or build a resume, it can’t compare to an actual $123,000.

Even more to the point, most families who don’t have a stay at home parent aren’t spending $123,000 on childcare and household expenses, so the “savings” doesn’t amount to nearly the estimated value.  You don’t bank anywhere near that amount of money by staying home, but you are likely to lose at least that much in lost wages and benefits over time.

Despite my problems with the article, it rightly identifies an important issue: childcare costs seem astronomical to most families, and yet pay for caregivers is pathetically low.  It’s an irony that parents especially struggle with at this time of year, when figuring out bonuses, vacation time, and thinking about renewing contracts with their caregivers.  Intellectually we know that our babysitters make very little money, and get even fewer benefits.  And yet, for many of us, paying more would be a tremendous burden.

That’s part of the reason we switched our son from a full-time nanny to a high-quality daycare center a few years ago.  Don’t get me wrong — it wasn’t cheaper — in fact the costs of daycare were neck in neck with one on one care.  But in addition to the social benefits of a group setting, I knew that my childcare dollars were paying for appropriate salaries, healthcare, pensions, vacation time, and sick days for the caregivers.  By pooling our resources, our group of parents could stretch our dollars, ensuring that our childcare workers were adequately compensated.

Aside from making life easier for working parents, policies creating high-quality daycare programs would improve the lives of many caregivers by offering workers fair compensation, training, and more formal employment structure.  While this wouldn’t help everybody, particularly not those who are here illegally, an increase in the number of top-notch daycare facilities would surely raise the mean caregiver salary from the shockingly low $18,350.

Finally, I’m not convinced that caregiver salaries are low simply because caregiving has traditionally been “women’s work.”  Sexism is part of the equation, but caregiving has also been part of the “unskilled” labor pool.  (Of course, great caregivers have “skills,” but they are not the kind that are easily expressed in the job market.)  Professions that require education tend to be higher paid, those that don’t are less well compensated.  The question is whether moving caregiving to a more professional level — one that might require some kind of standard certification — is desirable.  It would likely raise the mean salary, but limit the number of people who could become caregivers.

If I had my druthers, economists would give up on trying to find a value for household work, and start looking at how we can implement policies and business practices that ensure caregivers receive fair pay and basic benefits without seriously burdening parents.  That would be Nobel-worthy.

Related links:

• MP Dunleavy at MSN Money on “7 Ways to Combat Crazy Child-care Costs.”
• This year, in honor of Equal Pay Day, Jon Henner at Salon.com collected stories of how equal and unequal pay have impacted people’s lives.  Read them here.
• An interesting set of statistics on childcare workers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Equal Rights Advocates encourages workers to “know their rights” with this helpful list.

The Happiness Opportunity

For the past couple of weeks I’ve had a taste of the stay-at-home mother life.  We gave our sitter/housekeeper days off between Christmas Eve and New Years, and I stayed home to take care of Baby Bee during the school break, clean, cook, and otherwise domesticate.

Every working mother fantasizes about staying at home from time to time, no matter how committed she is to her job.  Even though intellectually I know that working offers me a great deal of fulfillment, I still dream about giving up my career and slipping into a less stressful life at home.  It’s good for me to have these “trial periods” from time to time.  As fun as it is to take Baby Bee places and do things together, I’m reminded that much of my time is spent cleaning, grocery shopping and running errands — not terribly stimulating work.

Knowing that the drudge work is a big part of the stay-at-home mother’s day, why do those of us in the working world still dream about that kind of life at times?  I think the answer has to do with the nature of our work outside of the home.  I recently read a great post by social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky at Psychology Today about the correlation between work, happiness and wealth.  Her research suggests that work is one of the most important factors in happiness — towering even above relationships.  Furthermore, she says that:

…People who have jobs distinguished by autonomy, meaning and variety – and who show superior performance, creativity, and productivity – are significantly happier than those who don’t…And, of course, the income that a job provides is also associated with happiness, though we now all know that money has more of an impact when we have less of it.

I suspect that most working mothers don’t have jobs characterized by “autonomy, meaning and variety.”  Our work is often plagued with monotony, workplace politics and lack of greater purpose.  Based on Lyubomirsky’s research, it’s no wonder that we sometimes see staying at home as a way out of jobs that dominate our lives and make us unhappy.

My stay-at-home sojourn had none of the terrific highs that I can have at work, where great accomplishments are acknowledged and contribute to a larger whole.  However, it also had none of the lows — the in-fighting, the time-wasting projects, and many petty agitas that sometime bring me down.  My life was on an even, if not very interesting, plane.

Studies suggest that this “eveness” doesn’t lead to happiness either.  A British survey from a couple of years ago indicated that working mothers are, by and large, happier than their stay at home counterparts.  And regardless of being at home or at work, research points to declining female happiness overall since the 1970s when women reported higher levels of well-being than men.

Contrary to some who suggest that work is part of the problem for women, I suspect that work could actually make us happier as a group if we had more of the right kinds of jobs — jobs that offered autonomy, promoted and recognized achievement, and had greater meaning.  And that means competing with our male colleagues aggressively throughout our careers, but particularly in the period before we have children when we have the time to invest in higher education and overtime.

This is where I worry about the recent focus on work-life balance as a women’s issue.  When we tell young women that they should aspire to “balance” we may hold them back from aspiring to the highest level jobs.  But, paradoxically, these top jobs are the ones that will offer the freedom and flexibility that comes with autonomy.  It is precisely this freedom and flexibility that would increase women’s ability to spend more time with family.  But that’s not all: these high-level jobs also come with interesting new challenges and increased income, both of which positively correlate with happiness.

Rather than focusing on feminism or too many choices or too much work as the root of “declining female happiness” we need to encourage women to aim high and face their competition head-on so that we can truly have the same professional opportunities as men — including the opportunity to live a happy life.

Related links:

• Posts from Salon’s Broadsheet and Feministing about the Bristish study suggesting working mothers are happier than stay-at-home mothers.
• Differing views from Marcus Buckingham and Barbara Ehrenreich on “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.”
• Cathy Greenberg and Barrett Avigdor on “Happiness and Working Mothers” in The Huffington Post.
• Maureen Dowd and Leslie Morgan Steiner face off on women’s unhappiness in Mommy Track’d and The New York Times, respectively.
• Gretchen Rubin’s terrific Happiness Project blog with practical tips on happiness.  Can’t stand another blog in your life?  Buy her book “The Happiness Project” here.