Unfinished Business (6 page)

Of course children do need their mothers. And their fathers. And their grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and close family friends who will follow them on Facebook and look out for them during the years when parental advice, or even conversation, suddenly becomes unendurable. “Children need their mothers” is true. But “Children need their mothers more than they need other loving adults in their lives” is false.

The one time children genuinely cannot do without their biological mothers is during pregnancy. Even surrogate and adopted babies need someone to gestate them. Particularly in the United States, we don't always recognize that enough.
Along with Liberia and Papua New Guinea, we are one of the few countries that doesn't offer paid maternity leave.
The unpaid leave we do offer only covers women who work for companies that have fifty or more employees and who
have been at those companies for more than a year.

Even if you have an understanding employer who provides adequate leave, pregnancy can still throw you—and your career—for a loop. I remember, when I was teaching at Harvard Law School, one of my younger colleagues announced that she was planning to take a two-week maternity leave, much as Marissa Mayer did when she became CEO of Yahoo seven months into a pregnancy. In both cases I thought to myself,
I certainly hope everything goes smoothly, but clearly this is your first pregnancy!
What about an unexpected Cesarean section, as happened with my first son? Or other complications? My experience with our second son,
who was born three weeks early, shows that even with the very best medical care available it is still possible to have medical problems that can land you in bed for nearly a month. Virtually every mother I know has a similar story about what she didn't expect when she was expecting.

All that said, after pregnancy, birth, and breast-feeding, nothing a mother does can't be done equally well by a father (and plenty of fathers bottle-feed breast milk to their babies). Yet the stereotypes and cultural expectations about mothers remain out-sized when compared to the expectations about fathers, even as we try to challenge them. No one wrote a book called
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Father
. No one wrote a book called
Perfect Madness: Fatherhood in the Age of Anxiety
talking about the unrealistic expectations suddenly placed on fathers. No one developed a theory of good-enough fathering, telling dads they did not need to be perfect parents to create thriving children.

The Oscar-winning movie
Kramer vs. Kramer
addressed exactly this issue. The movie opens with Meryl Streep as a beautiful young mother sitting by the bedside of her six-year-old son, Billy, steeling herself to leave him and divorce his father, played by Dustin Hoffman. At the outset of the movie, Hoffman's character, a successful ad executive, is so preoccupied with work he doesn't know what grade his son is in. But over time as a single parent, Hoffman learns to be a fully engaged dad and takes a less stressful job. Streep's character returns after this evolution and after a nasty custody battle is awarded custody of Billy. Even though she abandoned him completely, the judge believes that the child is best raised by his mother. (Ultimately, Streep gives the child back to his dad, realizing that he's better off with Hoffman.)

Kramer vs. Kramer
came out in 1979, more than thirty-five years ago. But astonishingly, in light of the tens of millions of divorces
since and substantial changes in the custody laws, we are still clinging to and having to combat the deep assumption that a mother's love and care are somehow better and more essential than a father's, even when that father has time and energy that the mother does not.

And really, what are we to say to gay fathers, if it is only mothers who matter? Despite the fact that numerous studies have shown that
children raised by gay parents are just as well-adjusted as children raised by straight parents, our culture hasn't caught up with these truths.
Frank Ligtvoet, a gay dad, wrote a moving essay in
The New York Times
about his experience raising a daughter and a son with his partner. Ligtvoet's children were adopted in an open adoption, and their biological mother remains part of their lives and part of their birth narrative. Even so, when Ligtvoet is doing something like picking a sick child up from school, the world looks askance at him. “Every step we as a family take outside in public comes with a question from a stranger about the mother of the children: a motherless child seems unthinkable,” Ligtvoet writes.

What children need above all is love, stability, stimulation, care, nurture, and consistency. Those are things that can come from an array of caregivers. Stability is key here, no matter what the parental arrangement is.
A study from Ohio State showed that children from stable one-parent homes (homes where the caregiver was always single, from birth) fared as well on test scores as children from stable married homes.
Conversely, a 2013 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation demonstrates that the biggest barriers to a child's social, emotional, and physical well-being are rooted in poverty. It's much easier, though, for pundits to fall back on the crutch of long-held cultural norms—that children need their mothers—than it is to confront and attempt to solve the more serious, endemic issues facing children.

T
HE ORIGINS OF THE DEEPLY
held assumption and conviction that it is “a man's job to provide” are actually biblical, from the New Testament.
Saint Paul writes to Timothy, a young priest, that “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.”

Understood as a command to take responsibility for those you love—those you either brought into the world or who cared for you in various ways—the injunction to provide is uncontroversial. Anyone who cares for anyone else is a provider. We provide love, food, clothing, shelter, nurture, education, solace, support, nursing, stimulation, and many other things for one another's benefit. In an industrial or post-industrial economy, some of us provide income, in the form of money coming in from the outside in return for labor or investment. Others of us convert that income into the necessities and luxuries of life. Without income, there is nothing to convert, but without that conversion, the income itself cannot sustain life.

Understood as a command to men only to provide income for the support of their households, however, Saint Paul's dictum has very different and much more negative implications. There are similar precepts in chapter 4 of the Quran: “
Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means.” But why does “providing” or “supporting” mean money rather than care? The production of food rather than the preparation of it? The growing of flax rather than the spinning of it? The purchase of a car rather than the driving of it? The building of a house rather than the making of a home?

Still, the idea that men have to provide is taken literally and quite seriously. Though stay-at-home dads have received considerable
media coverage of late,
a mere 2 million men identified themselves as such in 2012.
Only 8 percent of Americans say they believe that children are better off with dads at home, compared with more than half who say children are better off with a stay-at-home mom. Furthermore, when Pew Research asked the question “How important is it for a man to be able to support a family financially if he wants to get married?” almost two-thirds of respondents said very important.
When asked the same question with a gender flip, only a third of Americans say it is very important for women to be able to support a family before she gets married.

These ingrained cultural assumptions, however, do not track with economic reality. The waves of globalization that hit us in the 1990s and 2000s created outsourcing opportunities that hit traditionally male factory jobs much harder than the traditionally female sectors of education and medicine.
The resulting shift in economic power from men to women has prompted books like
The Richer Sex
and
The End of Men
. One simple statistic says it all: 40 percent of American women are the primary breadwinners in their families. That number includes single mothers, but it still tracks a major trend.

The even bigger story is the way in which economic trends in the United States since the 1980s have been hard on everyone outside of the educated elite. Most families with two adults have responded by sending Mom to work.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi dubbed this development the “two-income trap.” When their book of the same name came out in 2003—more than a decade ago—
average mortgage expenses had risen seventy times faster than the average father's income.
In the intervening years, fixed costs have risen further; wages have continued to stagnate or even decline; and in the post-recession universe, jobs are even more precarious, particularly for
people without a college education. For all these families, it is equally the woman's job to provide, even if she does not necessarily frame it in those terms.

And despite the resistance to the idea of stay-at-home dads, a growing number of men say that they are committed to caregiving.
Nearly 50 percent of millennial men say that being a good parent is one of the most important things in their lives, compared with 39 percent of Gen X men. In her book
The Richer Sex
, journalist Liza Mundy talks to many happy stay-at-home dads, like Danny Hawkins. His wife, Susan, is a senior VP with the Henry Ford Health System. Danny used to be in financial services, but he hated the long hours, so he stepped back to take care of the couple's two daughters. “
I have told Susie several times that my job is to make her life easier….And I like doing it,” Hawkins said to Mundy. Though fewer companies are offering paternity leave, more men are taking advantage of whatever leave is available.
According to Mundy in an article in
The Atlantic
, in the decade since the state of California started offering paid paternity leave, “the percentage of ‘bonding leaves' claimed by men has risen from 18.7 in 2005 and 2006 to 31.3 in 2012 and 2013.”

I would not counsel my teenage sons to make it their life plan to marry a successful woman any more than I would counsel a daughter to marry a successful man as her meal ticket. If things go sour—a lost job, a divorce—a person of either gender who leaves the labor force for a prolonged period of time is vulnerable. But neither would I tell them that it is their job to provide for their families in the sense of bringing in income. I tell them that it is a man's job to provide, and a woman's too. Both are responsible for providing the combination of income and nurture that allows those who depend on them to flourish.

Advice on how to achieve a sane work-life balance has become a cottage industry.
Numerous books on the subject have been published within the past few years alone, many of which I've read with pleasure. But they are all aimed at workers, overwhelmingly women, who are presumed to have the responsibility of stretching the twenty-four hours in a day to cover an impossible and never-ending list of things to get done. Why not tackle this issue from a different angle? Perhaps the problem is not with women, but with
work
.

American workers all over the socioeconomic spectrum, from hotel housekeepers to surgeons, have stories about working twelve- to sixteen-hour days (often without overtime pay), experiencing anxiety attacks and constant exhaustion.
Public health experts have begun talking about stress as an epidemic.
Indeed, the United States is one of the only industrialized countries that does not require paid sick leave, time off during the week, or vacation days.

In 2014 alone,
Huffington Post
founder Arianna Huffington and
Washington Post
reporter Brigid Schulte each wrote a bestselling book about stressed-out American workers, another sign that
we're desperate for solutions to our currently unsustainable pace of work. Desperate for solutions, but still trapped in a culture that values quantity over quality, assuming that he who works most works best. Or, less poetically, that he who takes time off is a wimp.

This underlying culture makes a mockery of so many purported work-life “fixes.” They are never going to achieve real equality between men and women in the workplace, at the top or the bottom, no matter how hard employers try to make workplaces more family-friendly by adopting policies aimed at women. They will not work because they are at best half-measures based on half-truths.

The first half-truth is that the issue of work-life balance is a “women's problem.” If we define it that way, then it is up to women to find or at least implement the solution. The second is that employers can make room for caregiving by offering flextime and part-time arrangements. While these policies certainly represent progress over rigid “all-in or get out” workplaces, they're not nearly enough for many workers with caregiving responsibilities. Third is our assumption that wanting “work-life balance”—or even just wanting a life outside of work—signals a lack of commitment to that work. That assumption reflects a mindset that promotes men with full-time wives and no lives.

Once again, a half-truth is just that—it's not wholly false. But it often obscures a bigger, deeper truth, something that we do not want or do not choose to face. Yet if we cannot even be honest about what the problem is and what it would actually take to fix it, we cannot possibly succeed.

It's time for some truth telling in the office.

F
LORIDA
S
TATE SOCIOLOGIST
I
RENE
P
ADAVIC
, Harvard Business School professor Robin Ely, and Erin Reid from Boston University's Questrom School of Business were asked to conduct a detailed study of a midsized global consulting firm where top management thought they had a “women's problem.” The firm had a paucity of women at the highest levels—just 10 percent of partners were women, compared with nearly 40 percent of female junior employees.
The firm's brass assumed that their company was shedding women along the way because of work-family conflict on the part of workers who had to care for families, i.e., women. As one partner put it:

What do I want people to worry about when they wake up first thing in the morning? For Business Development people, I want them to worry about business development. For project managers, I want them to worry about the project. Women are the Project Manager in the home, so it is hard for them to spend the necessary time, energy, and effort to be viewed here as senior leaders.

The plethora of women's leadership groups and support networks at companies across the United States all grow out of the same perception: the lack of women at the top is due to something women themselves are doing or not doing: a lack of ambition, the difficulty of juggling multiple roles at home and at work, or insufficient support from other women.

This depiction of the problem is half true, in that it is indeed a problem that is showing up much more among women than among men. But it is a problem that affects some women much more than others, and it is also a problem for a growing number
of men. By thinking of it as a “women's problem” we are missing a much bigger truth.

T
HOUGH WOMEN HAVE MADE UNPRECEDENTED
progress in the workforce over the past forty years, what doesn't always come through in the statistics is the enormous and enduring discrepancy between women who have caregiving responsibilities and those who do not. As I noted in the last chapter,
in 2013 women earned 82 cents on a man's dollar.
But hidden within that average is a stark difference.
Single women without children made 96 cents on the male dollar. Married mothers?
They make 76 cents. Indeed, many writers have pointed out that
motherhood is now a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender is.

This pattern is even clearer if we look through the lens of age. Girls and young women are surpassing boys in high school, college, and many graduate schools and often draw higher salaries during their early years in the workforce. Overall,
women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four now make 93 percent of what their male contemporaries do.
But those gains dissipate once they become mothers.

To the majority of men and women who think of caregiving as a woman's responsibility, redefining the “women's problem” as a “care problem” may seem redundant.
Women are indeed the considerable majority of caregivers in our society. Among parents, mothers spend roughly twice as much time as fathers on childcare. And
the typical caregiver of an elderly relative is a woman in her forties who provides twenty hours a week of care to her mother.

Women also face much more cultural pressure to
be
caregivers, and perfect ones at that, than men do. Even in the twenty-first
century, America looks askance at any woman who doesn't appear to put her children's care above her professional life. Texas politician Wendy Davis has experienced extreme scrutiny about how and where she raised her children.
Her decision to leave them with her then-husband in Texas while she went to Harvard Law School has been held up as an example of her selfishness. In general, men aren't scrutinized in the same way. As a Democratic pollster pointed out in a
New York Times
article about Davis,
Rahm Emanuel left his young children behind in Washington while he was running for mayor of Chicago and no one ever said two words about it.

A physician who had two kids during her medical training wrote to me and said she feels like motherhood is the hardest thing she's ever done, in part because of the guilt that comes with it. “There are pressures from many many different sides—for being a ‘perfect' mother (from nursing exclusively to making my kids' baby food from scratch!), to being a perfect doctor (well read on the latest studies, engaging in meaningful research, publishing studies). I started my first year of fellowship with a 9-week-old newborn,” she wrote to me after my article was published in
The Atlantic
. “I felt guilty for not being a good-enough mom while I was working 80 hours a week and taking overnight calls, and I felt guilty that I wasn't giving 100% to my job.” She eventually decided to work part-time so that she could be there to put her kids to bed every night.

When I gave a talk on work and family to a group of young Hispanic men and women who had won internships and fellowships in Washington, a young woman in the audience raised her hand and talked about the way in which her family and community judged mothers, criticizing those who were not home for their children. How, she asked, could she navigate those expectations and still pursue her career? Political strategist Maria Cardona,
who was sharing the podium with me and has been an important role model in the Hispanic community, suggested that perhaps she could rely on other women in her extended family to be caregivers. None of us challenged the premise of her question, which was that it is up to women to provide care.

The good news, however, is that the care problem is slowly but steadily becoming a men's problem too. A Wharton School study comparing expectations and attitudes between the class of 1992 and 2012 found that young women today are more likely to anticipate the stress of fitting together work and family than they were twenty years ago. Also noteworthy, however, is that
43 percent of the
men
either agree or strongly agree that their pursuit of a demanding career “will make it difficult…to be an attentive spouse/partner,” up from 33 percent in 1992. A 2014 study of more than 6,500 Harvard Business School grads over the past few decades also found a significant shift in male attitudes. It showed that
a third of male millennial HBS grads expect to split childcare responsibilities fifty-fifty with their partners; that's compared with 22 percent of Gen X men and 16 percent of boomer men.

Think about it. Almost a third to a half of the men in two highly competitive business schools, schools that attract a disproportionate number of alpha males in the first place, expect that family life will have a significant impact on their future success and personal lives. A venture capitalist friend of mine who teaches at Stanford Graduate School of Business reports a similar shift, saying that the attitudes of the young men he teaches have changed remarkably.

In an article for
The New Republic
, Marc Tracy, a twenty-nine-year-old writer, notes that some men his age have begun to have the same kind of full-throated conversation about work-life balance as their female counterparts:

Most men stress over the next step in their professions, with the attitude that if they happen to fall in love and settle down, well, that's great, too. But recently, in many cases inspired by the women in our lives and the conversation they are having among themselves, we have begun to question whether our most basic priorities aren't out of whack, and to wonder whether, for reasons both social and surprisingly biological, we shouldn't be as “ambitious” to have children as we are to land the next great job. Plus, having had children, many of us hope to play a more active role in their upbringing than has typically been expected of fathers. Many of us were lucky to have mothers who, whatever other ambitions and accomplishments they had, clearly took great joy in raising us; some of us were even lucky enough to have similar fathers. Do we want it “all”? Who knows (or cares). But we want that.

A 2013 Pew Research study on modern parenting fills in the statistics: almost as many fathers as mothers bemoan the stress of trying to juggle work and family. Fifty percent of fathers and 56 percent of mothers with children under eighteen at home said that they find it difficult “to balance the responsibilities of [their] job with the responsibilities of [their] family.” And
an almost equal number of fathers and mothers agreed with the statement “I would prefer to be at home raising my children, but I need to work because we need the income.”

In short, both women and men who experience the dual tug of care and career and as a result must make compromises at work pay a price. Redefining the women's problem as a care problem thus broadens our lens and allows us to focus much more precisely on the real issue: the undervaluing of care, no matter who does it.

I
T
'
S EASY FOR EMPLOYERS TO
marginalize an issue if they label it a “women's problem.” A women's problem is an individual issue, not a company-wide dilemma. But again, suppose the problem is not with the woman but with the workplace.
Or more precisely, with a workplace designed for what Joan Williams called an “ideal worker.” The ideal worker is “
the face-time warrior, the first one in in the morning and the last to leave at night. He is rarely sick. Never takes vacation, or brings work along if he does. The ideal worker can jump on a plane whenever the boss asks because someone else is responsible for getting the kids off to school or attending the preschool play.” Fifteen years after Williams coined the term, the ideal worker must now also contend with a globalized workplace where someone is always awake and electronic devices ensure that someone can always reach you.

Recall the research undertaken by Professors Padavic, Ely, and Reid at the consulting firm. After careful study, they found that women and men at the firm had equal levels of distress over work-family conflicts and that equal percentages of men
and
women had left the firm in the past three years because they were being asked to work long hours.
The firm's key HR problem was not gender, as management believed, but rather a culture of overwork.

The firm's leadership simply refused to accept these findings. They didn't want to be told that they needed to overhaul their entire organizational philosophy or that they were overpromising to clients and overdelivering (for example, making hundred-slide decks that the client couldn't even use). That would require a lot of effort and soul-searching.

What the leaders wanted to be told was that the firm's problem was work-family conflict for women, a narrative that would
not require them to make changes in anything
they
were doing or feeling.
As Padavic, Ely, and Reid wryly conclude, their attitude required a “rejection [of evidence] on the part of evidence-driven analysts.”

Debora Spar, president of Barnard College and author of
Wonder Women
, echoes these conclusions. “ ‘
Fixing the women's problem,' ” she writes, “is not about fixing the women, or yanking them onto committees, or placating them with yet another networking retreat. It's about fixing the organization—recognizing a diversity of skills and attributes, measuring them in a concrete way, and rewarding people accordingly.”