May 31, 2013
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How many employed American mothers work more than 50 hours a week?
Go on, guess. I've been asking lots of people that question lately. Most
guess around 50 percent.
The truth is nine percent.
Nine
percent of working moms clock more than 50 hours a week during the key
years of career advancement: ages 25 to 44. If we limit the sample to
mothers with at least a college degree, the number rises only slightly,
to 13.9 percent. (These statistics came from special tabulations of data
from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2011
American Community Survey.)
This "long hours problem," analyzed so insightfully
by Robin Ely and Irene Padavic, is a key reason why the percentage of women in top jobs has stalled at about 14 percent, a number that has
barely budged
in the past decade. We can't expect progress when the fast track that
leads to top jobs requires a time commitment that excludes most mothers
and, by extension,
most women. A recent
study
by Joni Hersch of Vanderbilt Law School found that the mothers most
likely to enter the fast track -- graduates of elite universities -- are
less likely to be working full-time than mothers with less prestigious
degrees. Only 45.3 percent of mothers who graduated from top-tier
institutions and only 34.8 percent of MBAs have full-time jobs. Most
aren't full-time homemakers: in addition to parenting, they typically
have part-time jobs or community service roles. But you can bet your
boots it's under-valued work that rarely, if ever, leads to positions of
power.
Despite the obvious importance of the hours problem,
progress has been limited. An increasingly common response is to declare
victory.
"What flexibility means today is not part-time," the
head of work-life at one large organization told me recently. "What
people want is the ability to work anytime, anywhere." That's true if
your target labor pool is twenty-somethings and men married to
homemakers. The head of HR at another large organization asked, when I
described the hours problem, "What do you mean, how can we get women to
work more hours?"
We can't get mothers to work more hours. We've
tried, and failed, for 40 years. Mothers won't bite for a simple reason:
if they work 55 hours a week, they will leave home at, say, 8:30 and
return at 8:30 every day of the workweek,
assuming an average commute time. Most moms have this one little hang-up: they want to see their children awake. Increasingly, many fathers do, too.
And
yet, after 40 years of intensive effort, the work-life frontier looks
grim. Recent events confirm this. In late 2012, Bank of America
announced that it was preparing to add
more restrictions to its work-from-home program, reportedly to increase efficiency. Early this year, Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly
ended
the company's "results only work environment" (ROWE) program that
judged corporate employees only on (gasp!) performance, and not where or
how long they worked. And, of course, Marissa Mayer
eliminated telecommuting at Yahoo! (Why have we only heard about that one? Because women CEOs are
held to higher standards, that's why.)
Why are workplace flexibility programs so hard to sustain? The
business case for such programs'
benefits is
well-known.
The elimination of ROWE is particularly striking because the
path-breaking work of Erin Kelly, Phyllis Moen and their colleagues has
produced rigorous regressions that ROWE
reduced turnover and turnover intentions,
reduced employees' interruptions at work, reduced time employees' engaged in work
of little value to the company, and increased employee's
sense of job involvement, using rigorous social science methodology.
But the issue here is not money. At issue are manliness and morality.
For upper-middle class men,
notes
sociologist Michèle Lamont, ambition and a strong work ethic are
"doubly sacred... as signals of both moral and socioeconomic purity.
Elite men's jobs revolve around the work devotion schema, which
communicates that high-level professionals should "demonstrate
commitment by making work the central focus of their lives" and
"manifest singular 'devotion to work,' unencumbered with family
responsibilities," to quote sociologist
Mary Blair-Loy.
This ideal has roots in the 17th century Protestant work ethic, in
which work was viewed as a "calling" to serve God and society. The
religious connection has vanished... or has it?
Blair-Loy draws
parallels
between the words bankers used to describe their work -- "complete
euphoria" or "being totally consumed" -- and Emile Durkheim's classic
account of a religion ceremony among Australian natives. "I worshipped
my mentor," said one woman. Work becomes a totalizing experience.
"Holidays are a nuisance because you have to stop working," said one
banker interviewed by Blair-Loy. "I remember being really annoyed when
it was Thanksgiving.
Damn, why did I have to stop working to go eat a
turkey? I missed my favorite uncle's funeral, because I had a deposition
scheduled that was too important."
Work devotion marries moral
purity with elite status. Way back when I was a visiting professor at
Harvard Law School, I used to call it the cult of busy smartness. How do
the elite signal to each other how important they are? "I am slammed,"
is a socially acceptable way of saying "I am important." Fifty years
ago, Americans signaled class by displaying their leisure: think
banker's hours (9 to 3). Today, the elite -- journalist Chrystia
Freeland
calls them "the working rich" -- display their
extreme schedules.
Not only is work devotion a "class act" --a way of
enacting class status
-- it's also a certain way of being a "real" man. Working long hours is
seen as a "heroic activity," noted Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and her
co-authors in their 1999
study of lawyers. Marianne Cooper's
study
of engineers in Silicon Valley closely observes how working long hours
turns pencil pushing or computer keyboarding into a manly test of
physical endurance. "There's a kind of machismo culture that you don't
sleep," one father told her. "Successful enactment of this masculinity,"
Cooper concludes, "involves displaying one's exhaustion, physically and
verbally, in order to convey the depth of one's commitment, stamina and
virility."
Workplace norms cement felt truths that link long
hours with manliness, moral stature and elite status. If work-family
advocates think they can dislodge these "truths" with documentation of
business benefits, they are sorely mistaken. The coverage of Marissa
Mayer's decision to eliminate telecommuting highlights how even hard
data get lost in the shuffle.
The press
coverage
acknowledged the robust evidence that telecommuting boosts productivity
-- and then dismissed it as if productivity were a silly little
side-issue. "Okay, okay, it might boost productivity," was the argument,
"but it inhibits innovation." Okay, but after you spark those great
ideas in the lunchroom, you need quiet time to work them through -- for
which telecommuting is perfect. No mention of that, though.
So,
here's where we stand. If institutions are serious about advancing
women, they'll have to address the hours problem -- that's the only way
to get a critical mass of women poised for leadership. But we'll never
address the hours problem until we open up a conversation about what
drives it.
It's not productivity. It's not innovation. It's
identity. If you've lived a life where holidays are a nuisance, where
you've missed your favorite uncle's funeral and your children's
childhoods, in a culture that conflates manly heroism with long hours,
it's going to take more than a few regressions to convince you it wasn't
really necessary, after all, for your work to devour you.
This post originally appeared on HBR.org here.
Williams is Founding director, Center for WorkLife Law and Distinguished professor of law, University of California, Hastings.
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