Princeton Professor, Anne-Marie Slaughter has certainly brought to life an important discussion of the expectations of women regarding their life choices. In a beautifully constructed and compelling written essay in The Atlantic, she raises a number of issues but ultimately concludes that the promise that women can have both a high-powered career with a minimally acceptable level of family time is not easily attainable. In part, this is because some jobs will never permit a balance between work and life. But more importantly, it is because expectations in the workplace do not permit people to exercise trade-offs. “Having it all” translates into “All or Nothing”; a black and white choice rather than a carefully considered balance.
WASHINGTON - MAY 03: Professor of politics and international affairs Anne-Marie Slaughter testifies during a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee May 3, 2011 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The hearing was to discuss the end-state in Afghanistan and how the death of Osama Bin Laden will affect the withdrawal of U.S. troops, transition strategy, and partnership in the region. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
Now one of the issues with the essay, of course, is that Slaughter does appear to have had it all. She rose to the top of academia while maintaining a healthy family life. It is only when she went to Washington to work at the State Department that the family life suffered beyond what she wanted. One suspects, as Dan Drezner has argued, that those types of jobs really involve a all or nothing trade-off as part of their intrinsic nature. But aside from that Slaughter’s main argument resonates. Academia is, for the most part, well suited to work-life balance choices. (I, say, for the most part because science, maths and engineering appear to have deeper problems). That is, indeed, why I chose that path for myself. But, for the vast majority of other workplaces, there is way too little attention paid as to how to design jobs to allow people to achieve a balance. The evidence, neatly summarized by Slaughter, indicates that workplaces that are designed for employees to exercise more inside-outside work choices end up being more productive. So why is it that so many workplaces make this so hard?
It is instructive to look at academia, a place where choices are relatively easy, to understand the pressures. I know from my own experience that when your ‘boss’ (in my case a Dean) does not factor in family constraints, poor outcomes result. When my first child was due back in 1998, I anticipated that I wanted to be home the following semester at nights and not to be teaching. We had a part-time MBA program that was taught at night so I requested not to have that assignment for the semester after my daughter’s birth. Now the family leave policy for fathers at the University of Melbourne was to allow for two weeks off. But I did not even get that when I was called into a couple of days after her birth to the Dean’s office because they had decided to revoke my request and needed me to get my course syllabus and materials in right away. Near as I can tell this was all done because they could rather than do some more difficult re-scheduling. But for that time and the next semester, being away a few nights a week (and not to mention teaching with little sleep) tore me up. I vowed not to let it happen again and have since that time spent considerable energy in working out how to move my workload to activities other than teaching. Nothing in this was good for my workplace.
But even when I could exercise choice it was amazing how costly it could be. When we had our first child, we decided that this would be the best time for my wife to pursue an MBA as it would allow her not to have a visible CV gap. It was actually really hard to do that. What we wanted was a part-time program that allowed day-time classes but arbitrary University rules stood in the way. Once this was explained to us that she could not take a day-time class because those students were full-time and would have expectations on her to meet for study groups that, taking time to say, nurse a baby, would interfere with! MBA programs were really missing out on opportunities here.
Faced with that, she took classes at night. For the initial period, we had to interweave nights to accommodate my teaching. But MBA studies required study. Say whatever you want about their value, they require work. That meant that I took on the majority of the housework. That was fine and exhausting but it also allowed me to bond with my children in ways so many miss out on. And clearly, it got me thinking about parental issues which is why I can write here today.
But there was actually a cost and I only realized it many years later. For over two years, I could not travel. For academics, especially ones in Australia, travel is very important. It is how you maintain visibility and sell your work. Perhaps my best academic paper was written just before my second child was born. People constantly ask me why it is so poorly cited. The reason was that I only presented it twice. Academics pick up on the work of others through presentations much more than just picking up journals. Now, in this case, that career cost fell on me (although I should say that the benefits to family vastly outweighed that cost). But consider a world where this cost mostly falls on women academics and it becomes easier to understand why, in academia, with its better work-life balance, women are still so under-represented. I should say, however, that despite taking on the vast majority of household duties during my wife’s MBA time, I was fired from most of them as soon as that degree was done. My way of doing things was apparently less valuable than I had thought.
Moving beyond my experience, again from academia, I had a friend who had, at a very young age, risen to a Dean’s position. At the same time as the upper level University job she was made for and was perfect for came up, she was pregnant. I was thrilled as I saw this as an opportunity for someone to hold a top position and to enable the organization to fit around family balance. But that turned to dismay when she decided to withdraw her candidacy because of concern that she would not be able to strike the right balance. As I read Slaughter’s article, it occurred to me that I was being unfair in my judgment. It isn’t fair to expect someone, just because of her gender, to take a risk on her family especially for purposes of setting an example. The whole issue is that we expect women to behave in certain ways and it expect it to be as a role model is part of the problem. And it would have been a risk. It is easy to imagine that one can strike a balance in a higher powered job. It is more sensible to realize that might not be possible.
What this means is that we actually need broader changes rather than individual changes to improve the balance in most jobs. Slaughter talks about many of these but I thought here I would concentrate on what governments can do; in particular, parental leave policy. Everywhere except the US, governments have state mandated parental leave policies. Some of these give mothers (and in some cases fathers) rights to leave upon the birth of a child from six weeks to a year. Employers have to hold their jobs and not put them at a disadvantage upon re-entering the workforce. In some cases, the parental leave is paid through government subsidies or mandates on employers. But while commonplace, these policies concern me. Yes, they make taking parental leave easier but they do not take into account the root of the problem. Rightly or wrongly, many employers believe that having employees who sacrifice work for family life is costly to them. These policies actually increase those costs and may lead to employers opting to employee ‘lower risk’ people. And let’s face it, today as it has been before, that ‘lower risk’ is more likely to be a man than a woman.
We have to think outside of the box when it comes to parental leave. A few years ago when this issue was being debated in Australia, I argued that parental leave should come in the form of a tax credit paid to employers rather than a subsidy. To be sure, rights to parental leave should always be there but the question was: a right isn’t much value without an income but how do we pay for that? My tax credit plan worked as follows: if an employer successfully had an employee take parental leave and then return to the workforce, the employer would receive a tax credit on that employee’s income for the first year of return to work. My reasoning is that it was on return to work that the issues of work-life balance really came to the fore. But it was precisely then that the workplaces failed to allow a balance to be struck. That is where things would start to fall apart.
With a tax credit, a returning employee would suddenly be much cheaper for employers. That would give them an incentive to make the return to work, well, work. Moreover, employers would want to pay some of that benefit forward by introducing paid parental leave schemes. After all, if you didn’t tie the employee to come back to you, you would miss out on the tax credit. Done the right way, employers could see employees with family lives not as a risk but as an opportunity. Once a workplace gets over the hump of how to organize for families we might be on our way to a better outcome for women or anyone else desiring more flexible arrangements.
Tax rebates are one way governments might be able to break the cycle that leaves us with too many jobs having too poor design for work-life balance. Yes, there is much more to the issue than economics. But my hunch is that by getting the economic policy right we can nudge workplaces in the right direction.
For more on my parental leave idea you can watch this series of short videos or read about it, here, here or here.
