A one-sided balance is no balance at all
I’m always delighted to see studies showing that men do an ever-increasing share of housework and childcare. My husband and I do equal amounts of both in our household nowadays, and it’s nice to know that we’re not an anomaly in this way. (We perhaps are anomalies in our lack of multitasking — in particular, I am completely incapable of it — and so our time spent multitasking is far, far below the average.) However, two recent events at work have reminded me that we still have a long way to go when it comes to the work-family balance:
- At work, there is a long-running speaker series called Women We Admire, “in which women [...] share their insights about career, workplace challenges and work-life balance.” These are all accomplished women who are at the tops of their fields. Yet at the recent talk I went to, the audience was at most 10% male.
- I am also starting an affinity group at work for other parents — there aren’t a ton of people at work with young kids (let alone in the Bay Area), and I thought there could be a lot of interesting, focused meetings. What schedule flexibility do we have? How are the labor and delivery departments at the various hospitals in our different health care plans? What on earth do you do with school-aged kids in the summertime? The sign-ups are finally starting to roll in, and so far only two men have signed up. TWO.
To be fair, the majority of my co-workers are women. But men are underrepresented in both cases above. Apparently, when a woman works outside of the home, there’s a work-life balance she has to achieve. When a man works out of the home, it’s business as usual!
How can this be changed? Is the framing language the problem? Or is it another symptom of the bigger problem — that women’s issues are considered to be “special issues”, and not issues faced by, you know, HALF THE DAMN POPULATION?
Both are part of a wider cultural problem. One that is slowly moving in the right direction, as you’ve seen. But it still persists.
Take the fist one – Women We Admire. 10% of the attendees are male. Even if it was Men We Admire, “in which men [...] share their insights about career [...] and work-life balance,” I still don’t think you’d see very many men in attendance. My personal experience has been that we men are supposed to figure this out on our own. We don’t talk about it much, and we certainly don’t attend seminars about it. Anecdotal evidence, I know. But something to consider.
The second one I think is more interesting, and speaks to the inequality still existing between men and women with work-life balance. Although the housework gap is being closed, and fathers are more involved in parenting than ever before, there’s a long way to go. I drop-off/pick-up Alexander at preschool maybe 20% of the time. After all, Michelle is the full-time parent with three little ones, and I’m working during the day. And when I do go? There’s usually only one other dad out of the 11 other parents dropping their child off. Oooof.
But why? And why no dads signing up for an affinity group? I think because there are very few stay-at-home dads, that far more often than not the woman is the “lead” parent. I know in my male-dominated field of software development, I have never seen a part-time gig. Never. You want to program? You work 40 hours. Yet in Michelle’s physical therapy field, it was quite easy to either work full-time, part-time, or as needed, or to an extent almost any schedule you wanted. Why? Because it’s a female-dominated field, and they have to accomodate a lot of mothers. Michelle works on average 1-1.5 days per week. I’d love to work fewer hours, and be a stay-at-home dad more. Even if I worked 4 days a week instead of 5. But I’d almost certainly have to take a huge effective pay cut, since I almost certainly would not be offered any benefits.
Maybe the first step toward narrowing the parenting gap would be benefits for part-time workers. For me at least, that would give a encouraging step toward working less than 40 hours/wk.
And now I will probably curse the lack of paragraphs in these posts.
I think Mike hit on a good point in that men don’t seem to need/want to talk about these issues, even when it pertains to them.
Mike, the paragraphs show up in the email I get! Sigh.
A Men We Admire series wouldn’t be particularly interesting, because many (but not all) of the top men have a stay-at-home wife. (These are people who are at fairly late stages in their careers.)
Those are really good points about the workplace flexibility available in different fields. (Although other women-dominated fields, such as teaching, do not have that sort of flexibility on a weekly basis.) In general, Americans have too little access to family leave, paternity leave, and general schedule flexibility.
I probably wouldn’t show up to a “Women we Admire” speaker series because I would assume that it was primarily (if not solely) targeted at women. I think if you want to make it more inclusive, I think I would do the following:
Call it “People We Admire” (this isn’t to say that there’s no place for a women we admire series — just that I think most men (me included) would assume that they weren’t welcome.
Heavily skew the starting lineup (say the first 10 to 15 talks) towards female speakers (say, 70/30 or 80/20) before allowing randomness to assert itself.
Ensure that the beginning talks are focused on work/life balance, being at the top of your field and maintaining a healthy relationship, etc from both men and women.
I think if you set the stage as being one of “here are people at the top of their field, and how they maintain fair relationships in a structurally unfair society,” you stand a better chance of drawing
I don’t normally go to after-work events/talks/drinks because I usually like to get home in enough to do my part of the night time routine.
I think we have to do a lot to make this more equal: increase paternity leave and increase the pay of woman-dominated fields to start with. It made sense for me to keep working — the reverse was much less feasible.
I guess I’m a bit spoiled from my experience in astronomy, where there were a lot of men involved in the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, and a fair number of men attended a similar talk at a AAS meeting. (Then again, maybe that’s in part due to how many dual-career couples there are in astronomy.)
Low pay in women-dominated fields is a huge problem. I have no clue how to fix that — there are so many feedback cycles happening out there.
I don’t think there’s a single fix, I think you just have to fight it incrementally.
Dads need to be encouraged to be part-time stay-at-home, part-time worker. Benefits need to be available for such families. Give paternal leave. Women’s fields could pay more, or be more competitive (i.e., what if we paid teachers like engineers? I’d be real curious how our students would fare then). Women need to keep kicking butt in school (I actually worry about young men academically, but men still have such a ridiculous lead in the workplace). I’m sure I’m forgetting another half dozen easy ideas.
But even if all these were enacted, the cultural change would be slow. Probably at least a generation.