Flexible Work Policies Hurt Women
Here’s Why and What Executives Can Do About It
In honor International Women’s Day, we’re exploring how to be bold for improving the policies and patterns that support women (and families!) at work.
When we talk about creating flexible workplaces to accommodate parents, we tend to think about programs: flexible hours, work from home policies, paternity leave. These programs are well-intentioned (and good!), but they miss an important fact — it’s easy to change policy, it’s much harder to root out the “flexibility bias” that impacts working moms, and policy can’t fix that.
Here’s the reality: even when mothers and fathers prioritize family obligations over work obligations at the same rate, women take the hit in their paycheck. Mothers who prioritize family obligations over work obligations one or more times per week make 4.3% less than working fathers who make the exact same decision.
Why is this happening? Christie Hunter Arscott writes:
One revealing study at Boston University, by assistant professor Erin Reid, points to one possible reason for this discrepancy. “Reid found that women were far more likely to seek accommodations or ask for greater flexibility in order to help them achieve the work-life balance their personal lives demanded,” according to a summary of the research. “Men, on the other hand, were much more apt to find ways around the system without revealing that they were falling short of expectations. As a result, women didn’t advance professionally at the same rate as their male counterparts.
In other words, it’s the EXACT formal policies designed to support working moms that end up punishing them. By raising their hand and saying, “I need flexibility,” women inadvertently trigger assumptions that they are less committed to their jobs.
This changes the question, right? The question now is no longer, how do we create a flexible work environment for parents. Instead, the question is, how do we remove the bias against women using flexible work arrangements?
Before RJMetrics was acquired by Magento, I was the only woman on the executive team — and I also happen to be a mother and have brown skin. What I saw as my #1 cultural priority, and still do, is to be a useful role model. The actions I take send a strong message to my team about what is acceptable, and they are the single most impactful tool I have to eliminate flexibility bias from our team.
Here are some ways I do that…
- When my child was 1, I would walk her the 10 blocks from home to day care, often singing to keep her calm. I am a terrible singer and here I was singing at the top of my lungs through the busy rush hour in Center City Philadelphia. Some days, this EXHAUSTED me, and by the time I rolled into the office I often felt like I had nothing else to give. Yet I made damn sure to share my morning routine and resultant exhaustion with team members. Why? Not because I think I’m great, my kid’s great, or whatever — but because I wanted them to know that it was ok. Someday, they (or someone they manage or report to) will come in exhausted from pulling every resource in their body together to get their kid relatively happily off to daycare and get themselves into the office. In that moment, I want them to know they are not alone and that it’s ok to talk about it. It doesn’t mean you’re bad at your job.
- During the holidays, I felt like I had just come off a period of not wanting to spend a lot of time with my child. I wanted her to have some good memories of the holidays, and its specialness. So, I worked from home for about 10 days. I worked at off times — her naps, before/after she went to sleep — and spent her waking hours doing holiday-y, mom-y stuff (lord knows I hate crafts but I LOVE baking).
- When I was going through the ridiculous high-class problem of preschool applications and admissions, I shared all of it with my diagonally seated co-worker, who also happened to be the youngest person at the company at the time. Why? Not because I thought he gave two sh*ts about it, but I saw him as someone who is going somewhere in life, and I knew that, at some point, he would be working with others who would be dealing with the same city school challenges as I am. I wanted him to know the preschool craziness is real.
- I don’t apologize (explicitly or implicitly) when my kid is sick or real stuff comes up in life. There is absolutely nothing I can do about recurring ear infections, stomach infections, school half-days, and the like. I manage it the best I can, and trust it will all work out.
- Almost every day, I have some tidbit about raising a city kid, being a professional working wife and mother in high tech, and so on, that I share with someone at the office. More and more my team members respond by telling me when they have a family or personal thing they have to take care of.
All of these little daily exchanges and interactions normalize the need for flexibility. My hope is that the people who work with me and for me will no longer feel guilty about asking for flexibility, and we will break the cycle of unconsciously punishing people who ask for it.
One of my fondest and proudest moments at work was when a co-worker said to me, “You seem like you manage well many different things — work, family, professional engagements, etc. — and I’d like to understand more about how you balance all of that, because me and my wife plan to have kids in the not too distant future, and I’d like to manage it well too.”
Executives play a powerful role in removing the workplace bias against mothers. Executive mothers have even more power in this area. It can be uncomfortable at first, but other people are watching you and taking note. What all of us executive moms do today will make the future much easier for mothers of tomorrow.
