RebelDad

Posted on 13. Oct, 2004 by Brian Reid in General

I missed Sunday’s 60 Minutes on women fleeing the workplace for home (anyone got a tape I could buy/borrow?), but Hogan Hilling was good enough to send me the link for the corresponding story on the CBS website.

I know it’s about women and work-life balance and this site is generally about men, but bear with me. What happens to women in the workplace has a lot to do with how society is prepared to deal with involved fathers. Those fighting for a flexible workplace that respects family commitment are mostly women, but fathers have reaped many of the benefits. So this is important stuff.

The story followed the same bouncing ball as Lisa Belkin’s New York Times Magazine piece from a year ago: high powered women who are stepping out of the work world to spend more time at home. In many ways, the 60 Minutes piece hits many of the same bumps that Belkin’s narrowly focused story did. The women seemed suspiciously upbeat about their choices. (I have no doubt that they enjoy their current roles. But the utter lack of ambivalence about chucking careers suggests a certain sugar-coating. Ambivalence about the path not taken is the common thread running through the experiences of the at-home parents I speak to.)

In addition, the men are completely absent. Not only is there no discussion about the identical trend happening on the at-home dad side, there is no mention of the husbands of the opt-out women from the story, either. That’s too bad; such a look would probably explain a lot. I suspect that the guys are uber-successful, financially, removing the economics from the decision to stay home and skewing the storyline.

That said, the 60 Minutes piece had a strong contrarian voice, and it hit (though didn’t hammer), the fundamental truth about work-life balance: real flexibility is key. The story details the headaches of part-time work that never really ends up being part-time. This is critical. Too often, lip service is paid to the idea of part-time work or flexibility. Company policies go unused, and workers that do manage to rearrange their schedules often find that while hours (on paper) may be cut, expectations aren’t, setting up a disconnect between the family-friendly policy and the reality in the cubicle.

Another interesting aspect of this discussion: the San Diego Union-Tribune tackled the mommy wars story with this profile of a linguist, Jocelyn Ahlers, who says that working-outside-the-home moms and today’s at-home moms have much in common. What’s more, she argues that they both should take an interest in promoting the same policies:

In Ahlers’ view, these two camps shouldn’t be fighting over which side has the better mothers, but instead be linking forces to demand that policy-makers provide more support for the work of motherhood, as she says European nations do with their more- generous leaves and parental resources.

“People are so blinded by cultural models of behavior, the prototypes like June Cleaver and Hillary Clinton, that they don’t question the parameters of the debate,” said Ahlers. “They don’t see the bigger picture about why does it have to be a choice? Why can’t it be balanced, with societal support?”

It’s a thoughtful call for a truce and a more balanced view of, well, balance, than even 60 Minutes was able to come up with.