The Case for Normalizing Part-Time Schedules

As a country, we have spent the last six weeks arguing and debating and, sadly, name-calling over how women who happen to be mothers should be working. But what if we looked at the issue from a broader perspective? Would we be able to stop the judgment game and, instead, think about how to make work and family actually work for families?  Author Robert Waring has written about just this issue in his book, Upside Down: The Paradoxes of Gender in the Twenty-first Century. With permission, here is an excerpt from his book that asks us to consider how we could make part-time schedules work for professional success, as well as family happiness:

Providing longer maternity and paternity leaves would be appreciated by many parents, but does not offer a real solution to balancing family and work for most women. The Scandinavian experience in offering long periods of such leave is a cautionary tale for women’s career advancement, and for why periods of part-time employment must be normalized and available if women are to penetrate the upper ranks of management in larger numbers. The Swedish authors of a 2009 study found a correlation between paid parental leaves exceeding one year and slower career progress. They noted that women’s representation in management is higher in English-speaking countries than in Nordic nations and suggested the length of maternity leaves as a reason.

An important lesson of the 2008 economic collapse is that the short-term focus of market forces sometimes must be redirected by longer term public policies initiated by government. Business and government employers don’t seem to be recognizing the value of keeping women in the workforce. There aren't enough employers offering part-time tracks for people seeking such work. If job seekers don’t have meaningful choice, there is little or no pressure on employers from market forces.

There are two steps to making part-time work accessible to all. The first is removing the considerable disadvantages often faced by part-time workers. The 1997 European Union Directive on part-time work (97/81/EC) largely did that by guaranteeing part-time employees treatment equal to full-time employees, including pro rata equal compensation and benefits such as paid leave and retirement. Law in European Union nations, New Zealand and Australia also recognizes that because most part-time workers are women who work part-time only because of family caregiving obligations, disparate treatment of any part timer in the workplace is gender discrimination.

Academia should provide extended tenure tracks, so that aspiring professors do not have to choose between having a family and meeting rigid up or out deadlines many universities impose on junior faculty. Partner track professions such as law would need to provide similar extensions. Employers also could be required to provide on ramps – reinstatement to full-time status with six months’ notice from the employee. (In order to minimize disruption, employees could be limited to making a switch only once a year.)

The second step is providing actual access. One idea is the Working Families’ Flexibility Act, first introduced in Congress in 2007, co-sponsored by Senators Kennedy, Clinton and Obama and modeled after similar successful laws in the U.K. and other European nations. Still dormant after three sessions, the bill would require employers to consider all workers’ requests for reduced or flexible hours. (California and a few other states already require state agencies to offer “reduced work time” to “the extent feasible,” and guarantee part-time workers pro rata pay and benefits.) Many European nations go a step further for caregivers and provide them with the right to part-time schedules in all jobs. However, Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands set the gold standard by providing all employees the right to work part-time, with unreasonable employer refusals subject to legal review.

Great Britain’s voluntary approach requires an employer to give “serious consideration” to an employee’s request for “flexible working” to care for a child or closely related adult. Businesses can refuse to honor a request for flex time, job sharing, telecommuting or reduced hours if it would, among other things, impose additional costs or reduce production, quality or performance. A 2005 survey of all requests, not just those covered by the law, found that in the preceding two years fourteen percent of employees requested flexible working, with women asking at a much higher rate than men. In spite of their power to say no, employers accepted more than eighty percent of requests. But the same survey found that less than two-thirds of workers knew of their right to ask. What is not known is how many employees wanted to make requests but feared the career consequences of doing so.

Part time work is important for another reason affecting us all. The Atlantic’s widely read July 2012 cover story, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, observed that workplace structures make it almost impossible for mothers to have high pressure, long hours careers. Author Anne-Marie Slaughter wryly noted that, “In Washington, ‘leaving to spend time with your family’ is a euphemism for being fired” for men, but is often the truth for women. Writer Anand Giridharadas responded that America may actually be worse off for being governed and managed by “single-minded, obsessive, fierce, hurried … self-serving [and] less-than-empathetic” alpha career types who largely “ignore their families.” He rightly wondered what biases affect policymakers who “have prioritized the making of social policy over their own families.”

Originally published in The Broad Side on April 7, 2013.

Should Men Lean In To The Debate?

Robert Waring navigates the conversation on gender.

Lean in? Opt-out? Man up? Dial down? Are you keeping pace with the latest debates on gender in the workplace? Robert Waring, Staff Attorney at East Bay Children’s Law Offices in Oakland, California, and author of Upside Down: The Paradoxes of Gender in the Twenty-first Century, cuts through the buzzwords and zeroes in on what's important in today's guest post.

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The past nine months have seen huge growth in the number of voices in the national debate about expanding opportunities for women. It’s a challenge for MARC members to keep up with the differing views about how best to expand opportunities for women, in order to effect “real change” (as opposed to something inauthentic). A brief recap may help you find your place in the discussion. Even if you’ve been following the conversation very closely, there are some links here to essays that may surprise you.

In June, Professor Anne Marie Slaughter’s article, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, started a dialog, with some lining up in support of Slaughter’s arguments that workplace policies need to change, and others complaining that Slaughter’s “whining” was limiting women’s aspirations. Because of her disagreement with parts of a TED talk Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg gave in 2010, several prominent commentators suggested that the two meetand work together, but it was not to be.

Traditional and social media lit up again when new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced she was taking only a two-week maternity leave, and denounced feminism. Most commentators did not know what to do with this information, and so cheered her on, while at the same time complaining that she risked imposing her choice on many less powerful mothers.

In September, Hanna Rosin’s book, The End of Men, ignited a firestorm, by promoting the idea that the gender wars were over and women had won. Some agreed that men should be worried. Critics complained she had her facts wrong, and risked killing the motivation behind the women’s movement. Others accused feminists of reflexively rejecting her message.

Relative calm ensued for a few months until CEO Marissa Mayer was savaged for ending telecommuting at Yahoo. Critics pointed out that Mayer had resources for being a working mother that few others could claim. But soon, Slaughter defended Mayer - as did others.

During the same week, COO Sheryl Sandberg’s soon to be released book Lean In was attacked and defended, with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd one of the snarkiest prosecutors. Some of Sandberg’s supportersattacked Slaughter, despite Slaughter’s efforts to distance herself from Sandberg’s critics. One feminist, attacked by others for criticizing Sandberg, decried what she called “feminist on feminist hate.” Criticize her campaign as a clever ploy to remake feminism into a corporate tool if you must, but Sandberg is the only high level corporateleader willing to proclaim she is a feminist. A measure of her notoriety is that although @sherylsandberg has tweeted only 17 times, she has over 62,000 followers.

Some critics complained that “Sandberg is behaving too much like a man, and speaking too much for other women who do the same thing.” A supporter responded that “@sherylsandberg's detractors are male in their complaints” because of their “zero-sum” thinking that only one idea or movement can prevail. If nothing else, the exchange illustrated the hazards of being male in this debate.

So what are men to make of all this conflict? One could ignore it and wait to see if a winner is declared 1, 3 or 20 years hence. But a wiser strategy is to pay close attention. The ground has been shifting, and could portend larger quakes to come. For example, Pay Pal, Tesla and Space X founder Elon Musk created the wrong kind of buzz at SXSW - that perhaps he could have gotten away with a year ago - when he said he does not spend much time with his five children.

If you want to take sides in the debate, here’s a short guide that might prove useful. If you are a dedicated feminist, and describe yourself as such when discussing gender issues, your choices in this debate may seem clear. You can criticize Mayer and Rosin, perhaps Mayer more so if you are passionate about workplace flexibility. You may at the same time complain about the pushback towards Sandberg, if you nuance it well. But if you reject feminism or agree, as Rosin wrote, that feminism is dead (citing as authority Mayer’s rejection of feminism), then Mayer and Rosin may be your patron saints.

If you don’t see women and workplace issues through the lens of feminism, the next question is whether you see problems in expanding women’s opportunities more in terms of individual initiative on the one hand, or systemic obstacles on the other. If it is the former, you’ll want to lean in to Sandberg, and perhaps object to Slaughter for questioning women’s ability to “have it all.” If it’s the latter, you may praise Slaughter and complain about Sandberg’s failure to embrace specific proposals for systemic change. You might earn extra points if you can navigate the contrasts and argue that there is room for them all be right.

The gender and workplace debates have been challenging for me, in part because my background in legislative advocacy steers me towards policy solutions. But many people focus instead on the impact of gender on individuals and on how to create change on an individual level. One thing I've learned from observing and participating in this discussion is that some of the resulting acrimony stems from the difficulty the policy and individual initiative camps can have in understanding one another. By analogy, it's not unlike the fights liberals and conservatives have over government versus individual responsiblity - conflicts political psychologist Jonathan Haidt (author of The Righteous Mind) asserts stem from differences in core beliefs about the nature of society. If someone like Haidt were to turn their attention to studying how the opinions of the various camps within feminism were shaped by their core beliefs, we might all better understand each other.

-Originally published by MARC (Men Advocating Real Change) on April 5, 2013.