Stop! Don’t Listen to Advice that Women Can Plan Our Way to Worklife Fit
Posted September 13th, 2012 by Kristin Maschka
I am so fed up with advice from people telling women that if they just make the right personal choices at the right time in the right order then there is no problem fitting career, marriage, and kids into our lives.
That’s a load of crap. If anyone had been able to figure out a way to PLAN her way through this mess it would have been me.
Let me just take one example of this kind of advice – Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg tells women in commencement addresses and TED talks:
The implication is that as long as you marry the right guy you’ll be fine, and if you aren’t fine, well, you made the wrong choice. Too bad.
My “awesome husband” David and I were married seven years before our daughter was born. While I don’t believe we thought of it as a “career choice” we certainly married because we shared a vision of our future together. And for seven years we shared household chores and generally tackled life together, as “real partners.” We always assumed we’d both have careers when we had kids, and that we’d share parenting “50/50.”
Then within a few short months of our daughter’s birth, our lives turned into something more like a 1950′s Leave it to Beaver episode.
Five days after our daughter was born, my husband had to go back to 70 hour workweeks or risk losing his annual bonus. The firm had no process for dealing with paternity leave in the bonus structure. So he didn’t take any.
As a matter of pure survival and sanity since I was the only one in the house, I became acutely attuned to baby Kate. How to get her to sleep, how much she would eat, how long we could be out of the house before the next nap. Each time Kate cried at night, I dragged myself out of bed so David could be fresh for work the next day. With David gone 10-12 hours a day, I soon became the more practiced parent and the default person for laundry and cooking and cleaning too.
I prepared to return to work after 12 weeks. During my pregnancy, my proposal to go half-time in a job I’d had for years had been turned down because the budget structure only allowed my manager a specific number of full-time employees. I had resigned from that job and happily taken a new job at a company that offered me the opportunity to work half time for a while after our daughter was born.
The day I returned from maternity leave to my new job, I was laid off.
So three months into “the plan” that said we would both continue our careers and share parenting 50/50, instead we found ourselves in the 1950′s and became June and Ward Cleaver.
With no immediate options for him to work less and me to work more so we could also share more parenting, our vicious cycle continued. Me doing everything at home. Him working nonstop. And the two of us fighting in the kitchen over whose fault this all was.
The problem was not that I failed to choose “an awesome husband.” I had one of those.
The problem was our well-laid 21st century plans and choices had run into a rigid 1950′s workplace model, which then thrust us into a vicious cycle of taking on traditional 1950′s roles at home that we had never intended.
All of this advice that implies women can simply plan and choose our way through today’s worklife challenges – marry the right guy, don’t lean back, choose a family friendly career, have kids early, have kids late, freeze your eggs, just ask for flexibility- actually prevents us from taking effective actions.
If I think I planned wrong and chose the wrong guy, there’s not much I can do about that but blame myself – and him. And listen to advice we know is absurd on some level.
If instead I know that the 1950′s model of work and the vicious cycle we fell into are the problems, those my husband and I can remodel together. And you can too.
So invite me to your next commencement address instead. I’ll bring my “awesome husband” along and you can listen to us share how it was the choice we made after we got married, the choice to remodel everything together, that played a huge part in our success.
~ Kristin
Catalyze!
- Next time you hear a version of this advice, step back and unpack the assumptions underneath. Is it based on 1950′s or 21st century assumptions about men, women and work? How does it make you feel? Does it make you feel inadequate or anxious to have the “right plan?” Or does it make you feel like you can figure out the right action to take at any juncture because you know how to look for the real issues?
- Alternatively, next time you hear a version of this “plan and choose your way through it” advice, you could just stick your fingers in your ears, close your eyes and “La la la la la la la, I’m not listening!”
- If you liked this post, you might enjoy these as well.
6 Comments
September 23, 2012 at 2:49 pm by Kausar BilalA very interesting, absorbing and beneficial article…Thanks for sharing it!
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September 14, 2012 at 1:15 am by excellencecenterSo true, and what’s perhaps even more devastating is that there’s been so little support to help the community rebuild.
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September 13, 2012 at 2:57 pm by Leila D'AquinThank you, thank you, thank you for publishing this. I know from both personal experience and my observations of other hard working professional women that no matter how much we plan, we cannot achieve balance or fairness through our efforts alone. Until employers and society join the effort and value our contributions to both business and family, we will not get there no matter how much we plan.
I spent almost 3 years as a single mom dealing with the demands of a large company. Though the company bragged regularly about its diversity initiatives, it had no interest whatever in recognizing or accommodating the diverse needs of working moms. Men of color and childless women were valued; moms were regularly penalized and criticized for having to respond to the needs of their children and their aging parents. Whether employees could do their work and do it well was less important than whether they could fit the rigid structure of being physically present in the office between 8:30 a.m. & 5 p.m.
For example, when one woman’s child’s school announced it would close for several days due to a flu outbreak, she scrambled to arrange child care sharing with other affected families, so that each parent could work on most of the days. She requested permission to work from her home office for 2 days while an enrichment teacher the group had hired taught a group of 5 kids in her living room. Stunningly, the response was that she would be allowed to work from home for part of 1 day only. Her manager didn’t allow work from home because he said that he knew he would not really be productive if he were at home. This same manager often allowed male employees to leave mid-day on Fridays to go golfing, on the theory that those outings were valuable for “team building.” He simply did not appreciate the work of moms who would have felt more committed to a team that made it possible for them to meet their kids’ needs.
On one occassion, a manager told a professional mom that she was brilliant and did excellent work, but that wasn’t what he needed. It did not matter that she worked through lunch or late or on weekends to get the job done (both when family issues had pulled her away between 8:30-5:00 and when they hadn’t). He preferred someone less capable but less likely to ever be pulled away by a teacher conference, a sick child, or an older parent’s doctor’s appointment.
The 1950′s Ward Cleaver model of what was expected of a professional employee was in some ways better than what is has evolved into. In those days, the average work week was considerably shorter. Ward was able to come home to have dinner with June, Wallie & the Beav virtually every night. He rarely (if ever) had to catch a red-eye and spend several days in another city. Today, professional success and advancement often demands the 70 hour week and 24/7 availability at the drop of a hat to which your husband returned. There is no “plan” that permits anyone to meet those demands and reasonably contribute to parenting their kids.
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Kristin Maschka Reply:
September 13th, 2012 at 6:15 pm
@Leila D’Aquin, wow powerful stories. And love this line at the end of your comment “There is no “plan” that permits anyone to meet those demands and reasonably contribute to parenting their kids.”
I find when I talk to young women (and men frankly) they are quite taken aback in a good way when I tell them “you can’t plan your way through this and here’s why.” They feel pressure to make the right sequence of choices that will get them to some magic place because that’s the bill of goods we’re selling to them.
Thanks for sharing!
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Amen sister! Couldn’t agree with you more that the idea that we can control our way through the maze of juggling work, marriage and career by making the “right” decisions is a load of crap. You are absolutely right in that you identify the 50s model of work and life that still persists today as the culprits for why we struggle so to balance career and family. In spite of all the technology that is supposed to make our lives easier, it’s amazing to me that there is still such resistance in many companies to allowing people to have flexible work schedules. It’s a shame that so many men feel they will be penalized at work for simply wanting to take some time off after the birth of a child. Bad policies all around for the health of families of this country.
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Kristin Maschka Reply:
September 13th, 2012 at 6:18 pm
@Susan, And and Amen! right back at you! I believe the resistance is deeply cultural, meaning it’s lodged in a set of outdated unspoken assumptions about mothers, fathers and work. That’s why often workplace policies don’t work they way they are intended, and why public policy change is so hard to achieve. We have to change what everyone believes about mothers, fathers and work and that comes from all of us doing things differently every day to challenge those steretotypes.
Kristin
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