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On Balance: Not A Woman's Issue Anymore
Amy Gage
I’m happy to be here today in the presence of employers who are doing this right. It’s nice to be among people who get it. If all employers were providing flexibility and work-life services for their employees ¾ for all their employees ¾ we wouldn’t need to have awards and special programs.
But the reality, as you may have seen in the Business Week cover story September 15, is that too few employers see the vital need for work-life programs and policies. And even the progressive companies often fail to change their culture in a way that gives people permission to say: I need this. I need help. I can’t do this juggling act alone.
The 1997 Working Family Support Awards conferred by the Working Family Resource Center prove that we have come a long way. But we have miles to go. That’s what my work is all about, chronicling what the changes have been and what the changes still need to be.
Define Your Terms
As a journalist, a writer and, years ago, a college English major, I pride myself on being precise with the language. I like to define my terms. It’s one way journalists can expose their biases, and we do have them.
So I will tell you upfront that I think the word “balance” is misused, and that by defining “work-family benefits” primarily as women’s issues we both deny men the opportunity to participate in the family ¾ to take a strong hand in rearing children and caring for aging parents ¾ and we deny women the time it takes to fulfill their ambitions outside the family.
While I’m defining terms, I want to assure the men here today that speaking up for women's rights does not mean putting down men. This is not about calling men to task. It is not about finger-pointing, labeling or blame. This issue of how we all lead more integrated lives is not just a women’s issue. And it’s not just a men’s issue.
To me, it’s an issue about our children, about society's children. It’s an issue about our society’s future. It’s an issue about business competitiveness. And even though it’s fashionable to promote work-life balance as essential to the bottom line, I think at root it is an issue of fairness and equity. People who are raising children in this society deserve a break, and employees who are struggling with personal problems ¾ from addiction to depression ¾ deserve the benefit of the doubt. They deserve to be treated as human beings who will bounce back, given time and help.
I believe journalists have a responsibility to define their terms. Because much as people carp about the media, they still believe what they read. They soak in what they see on the evening news. They count on the press to put borders around the messiness of their lives. They look to journalists to help them make sense of their world.
That’s a huge responsibility, and it’s why people both love and loathe the press. But most journalists do take their responsibilities seriously. For me, that responsibility ¾ what we used to call the power of the pen ¾ begins and ends with how I choose my words.
And I choose deliberately not to label “balance” or child-rearing or elder care or community volunteerism as women's issues. Nor do I choose to equate ambition, ego, investment savvy and competitiveness solely with men.
Since I began writing about women in business in 1994, I have tried especially to redefine the word “balance,” to expand upon the mental image it evokes.
I’d bet any one of you a nice dinner at the St. Paul Grill that when you hear the word “balance,” you think of someone like me: a career woman who has two young children, who gets too little sleep, who makes too little time for her own interests. You see a woman who loves her work but who likely resents her husband because the laundry is piled up at home or he makes comments like my husband did last night: “Oh, honey, you go work. I’ll do your dishes.”
No, thanks.
The word “balance” conjures up images of a woman who feels overwhelmed, a woman who commisserates with female friends and who occasionally looks back wistfully at the days when women had fewer choices.
Our mothers’ lives were more conscripted and confining, but they were also less confusing. Our mothers knew what their role was. They knew their place. As a result, they knew who they were in a way that modern women don’t today.
But here’s what women forget: Men once knew their place, too. They were the breadwinners. Someone else handled the domestic details. So they’re confused when we yell at them for not knowing a Hoover from a Handi-wipe or how to soothe a screaming baby. Men are struggling these days. And from what I hear second-hand, men are telling each other they need a break.
Instead of men and women working together on their struggles ¾ instead of acknowledging that roles and relationships are hard for everyone these days ¾ we blame each other. And that keeps us stuck, and it keeps us suspicious of each other in the workplace.
A friend of mine counsels couples about money. She runs the business out of her St. Paul home and has a two-year waiting list. As women earn more, she says, they naturally want to learn more about money. They want more say in their family’s financial decisions. They want to learn more about investments.
But that confuses the men with whom these women live. Their newly empowered wives are blaming them for behavior that the women condoned before. So, what gives here? The financial counselor, Ruth Hayden, said the men often look bewildered. “Somebody changed the rules,” one man told her, “and nobody gave me a vote.”
I turned 40 this past summer, which I don’t often announce in public, but it’s relevant to my point.
Many men and women my age were raised by the old rules. Our fathers earned the paycheck; our mothers worked at home. And now we’re playing a new game, and the rules are different. For every woman, and I know many, who feels torn between work and family, there’s a man who resents that woman have more options.
I am my family’s breadwinner, and that's a heavy load to shoulder. I don’t have the option to quit work. Any man who supports his family at times feels caught ¾ I guarantee it ¾ because he doesn’t have the choice to be with his children or volunteer in his community. He can’t even allow himself to dream about it.
When I entered the work force full time in the early 1980s, the word “balance” applied to women ¾ specifically, career women with young kids. But balance is about more than that these days. If I were asked to name one trend I’ve spotted since I began writing the “Women in Business” column in 1994, I would say this: Every-one is in search of balance.
Fathers want more time with their children. Childless career women want more time for themselves. Men and women both feel acutely their inability to give time to their churches or synagogues, to volunteer in their children's schools, to run for political office, to make a difference in their communities, to be alone with their spouse, to spend an afternoon with an aging parent.
The scarcest commodity in our lives today is time.
I spoke with a female manager at 3M yesterday who sits on a diversity committee made up primarily of men. She asked the committee recently to name its No. 1 work issue and the answer, to her surprise, was work-life balance.
“It's a great catch-all term,” this woman told me. “The trick is figuring out what it means for you.”
That’s the trick for individuals, and it's the trick for companies. What does work-life balance mean? How do people achieve it? And how do companies help provide it?
Who Is Work & Family For?
We are here today to honor companies, institutions and government agencies that help people deal with all aspects of their lives. Their work, their families, their communities, their personal interests.
That means more than helping mothers with small kids. That is the challenge employers face today. How do they meet the diverse needs of their diverse employees? Do they provide low-cost day care for the financially strapped single mother? Do they help their middle-aged employees take care of aging parents? Do they ensure that the single, childless people in their work force don't get burdened by too much travel and too many long hours? Do they make sure men feel free to take parental leave?
And then there’s the toughest question to answer: Why should employers care? In an era when shareholder value means everything, when success is measured by each quarter’s performance, when companies cut costs by trimming jobs ¾ not executive salaries ¾ and overloading the workers who are left, why should employers worry whether people have time to jog around the lakes or see their kids or see a movie?
Dare I say it? Because it’s the right thing to do.
My father is an attorney. He was the family breadwinner. He never talked about whether he was balanced. He got away twice a year, during fishing and hunting season. Otherwise, he worked. He put in the hours the job required.
The difference, of course, is that he had a wife to run the house. He rarely saw his kids, and he didn’t see that as a sacrifice. He was fulfilling his obligation.
Most of us don’t want to live an either-or existence anymore. We look at life through a broader lens. And that, too, is a challenge for companies, especially when the unemployment rate is low. Flexible schedules, the option to telecommute, anything that allows employees more control over their lives has become a recruitment and retention tool. You see it especially in Silicon Valley, where people work in what they call virtual offices. That’s how you get and keep the best and brightest.
Flexibility, on-site day care, the option to work from home. We call these tools “benefits,” but in the long term they really are about the bottom line. Sure, they help employees, but they help employers even more.
I realized that three years ago, when I was pregnant with my second son. I live in Northfield, so I have a 45-minute commute to the Twin Cities. My son was due in January, and I was driving two-lane roads alone. My male editor, without my asking, quietly handed me a cell phone one day. He told me to carry it with me in the car until I had the baby. It was a small gesture, but it's one I'll never forget.
When our employers show us that they care, they instill a loyalty that money can’t buy. They light a fire that can’t easily be extinguished. But that’s the soft, humane argument. The challenge for all of us here today is to demonstrate the difference work-life balance programs make, to show how companies can do good and still do well.
Sexism remains in our society. We see it at work every day. But we have laws now to deal with the overt forms of sexism, such as sexual harassment. That’s changed how people behave. Attitudes are slower to change than behavior, and I believe it’s attitudes that are holding men and women back.
A few moments ago I mentioned the woman at 3M. She said that even though the men in her department feel overwhelmed and out of balance, they don’t feel they have the option for flexibility. One man even confronted her about it: “You can tell someone you’re leaving for the afternoon to attend a soccer game,” he told her, “but that’s unacceptable for men.” She says the men lie when they leave work for personal reasons. They tell their boss they have a meeting outside the office.
Those men are hurting themselves in the long run. And they also are hurting women. If men don’t stand up and say: “I have family issues, too,” they’ll never gain the freedom to take advantage of work-life programs. They’ll reinforce the corporate culture that says these programs are for women.
Women’s work and women’s issues are still devalued in society. Look at the stigma attached to full-time motherhood. If we want to make real change, we have to include men in the conversation. We have to help men see that family and balance are their issues, too.
When the “Women in Business” column changed its focus this fall, my editor and I spent some time coming up with the new title, “On Balance.” He wanted the subhead to read: “Issues that affect our work and family.” I argued that “work and family” connotes people who have child-ren and would appear to be a women’s column. So we changed the subhed to “Issues that affect our work and home lives.”
During the course of that debate, I asked my husband -- who used to be home full time with our two sons -- whether he read Sue Shellenbarger's “Work & Family” column in the Wall Street Journal. He said he doesn’t, not because it focuses on so-called women’s issues but because he thinks she writes primarily about high-income people with big careers. My husband works part time for an hourly wage.
He is among the workers who face the biggest work-life dilemmas. Because they lack the money and the flexibility to give them options. My husband is a woodworker in a rural shop south of Northfield. It’s a blue-collar job, and the workplace is fairly conservative. It’s a 10-person company so there’s no human resources department. He doesn’t get a paid vacation, let alone flex time.
None of his male colleagues is the primary caretaker of small children. They can’t fathom why he can't get to work by 7 a.m. because he has to get one of our sons off to day care and the other to school. They don’t understand why he can’t go out of town on a moment’s notice. They haven’t walked in his shoes.
Like many of the companies here today, the Pioneer Press has work-life options for professionals. I telecommute one day a week and work a flexible schedule the other days. But those privileges don’t extend to the receptionist with four kids, nor to the shiftworkers in the printing plant, some of whom must find child care at night and most all of whom earn less than I do.
That’s the biggest work-life challenge that lies ahead. We can’t just pat ourselves on the back because $70,000-a-year managers have the option to job-share. Hourly workers, shift workers, low-wage workers in general need the most help meeting their work-and-family needs, and they probably get the least help from their employers.
Work-life balance is not a women’s issue. It is a class issue. We have to start talking about the secretaries as well as the senior executives.
Random Thoughts
I want to leave you with a few random thoughts, some things that have been challenging my thinking.
If I have one conclusion for you this morning, it is this: We can’t get caught up in comparing our lives with someone else’s. Women are driving themselves crazy trying to live by the old-style male model of success, which dictates that careers are built during your 30s and early 40s. For many career women, those are child-bearing years.
Older women have taught me to take a longer view of life. They have taught me to see that I can do anything, but I can’t do everything at once. They have taught me to accept the consequences of my choices. They have taught me to see the value in time with kids.
For me that has meant putting my career on the “Mommy Track” ¾ a term that has always made sense to me, so long as a corresponding “Daddy Track” exists ¾ so I can spend more nights and weekends with my sons.
I took a week-long vacation at home in August, and after immersing myself in books and long walks and my journal, I came to the conclusion that I don't want to live a stress-filled life. Nor do I want to define myself any longer solely by what I do.
I just happened to be working at home the other day when my 7-year-old boy got off the school bus with a note from his Spanish teacher praising his good behavior in class. He met me at the door with a shy smile and thrust the note into my hand.
My God, I thought, children are so vulnerable. Then I thought: Thank God I was here.
I don’t have the answers for any life but my own. And what I’ve decided to do is speak up. When there is work to be done, I do it, and I'm one of the hardest workers around. But I no longer pride myself on face time. I don’t brag about working 60-hour weeks.
If there’s any advantage to turning 40, it’s that you see the bend in the road. You see that life is finite. I don't mind if they write on my tombstone that I loved and took pride in my work, so long as they leave space at the bottom saying I also was a good mother and I made some difference in the world.
To me, that’s what work-life balance is about.
Thank you.
This speech was given at the 1997 Working Family Support Awards Breakfast co-sponsored by the Working Family Resource Center and Ceridian Corporation on September 24, 1997. |
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