WCW's Women Change Worlds Blog

For years it was a secret: that we had lives outside of work.

Thirty years ago, I dashed into the Massachusetts State House to interview the lieutenant governor, sat, opened a notebook—and a Cheerio fell off my blazer. I was mortified.

In those days, “juggling” was done with guilt. As a society, we debated whether women “could do both,” that is, be a parent and a professional. There is “the mommy track,” of course, an invention that codifies the failure of the American workplace.

The pandemic—ironically enough—may finally give us the opportunity to correct historic and structural problems with how work works.

That is not to say that the last nearly two years have not been tough. Working women with children and/or caretaking roles have been hit hard.

According to the U.S. Census, nearly 45 percent of mothers with school-aged children were not working in April 2020. A Deloitte Women @ Work survey of 5,000 women conducted from November 2020 to March 2021 found 77 percent reporting an increased pandemic workload even as two-thirds also reported bearing the greatest role in household tasks.

More than half felt less optimistic about their career, citing physical and mental health tolls. Fifty-seven percent planned to leave their current job within two years.

This data (and there’s more) underscore the burden on women that we have long known about, but ignored. Rather than address the root issue, society leaned harder on women, expecting them to tap their creativity, energy, and endurance to keep it all going. (By “women” I refer not to biology, but to the gender role often occupied by females.)

. . . when women entered the workforce in increasing numbers in the 1960s-1980s, they did it on men’s terms, beginning a frustrating effort to “be taken seriously.” That issue has not faded . . .

Arlie Hochschild created a sensation when she published “The Second Shift” in 1989. But decades later, little has changed. This is because modern-day, post-Industrial Revolution work is structured with men in mind, from the timing of meetings to conventions of what a “leader” looks, sounds, and acts like (talking over others and peacocking your dominance).

Rather than challenge the structure, when women entered the workforce in increasing numbers in the 1960s-1980s, they did it on men’s terms, beginning a frustrating effort to “be taken seriously.” That issue has not faded, and reporting, surveys, and advice columns have repeatedly returned to the challenge—as if doing the work itself wasn’t enough.

Despite passage of laws, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin), the problem persisted. After all, it took a long time—and much debate—to shake the belief that we needed sex-separate “help wanted” ads or that, as a July 30, 1970 New York Times headline put it, “Doctors Deny Woman’s Hormones Affect Her as an Executive.”

When Title VII first went into effect, an official with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission assigned to enforce the law insisted that it was not their task “to get on our charger to overturn patterns.” Yet patterns were (and are) exactly the problem. The New York Times wrote of “experts in sex discrimination” flummoxed by “the Bunny Problem”—how would the new law manage if a man applied for a job as a bunny at a Playboy Club?—under the August 20, 1965 headline, “For Instance, Can She Pitch for Mets?”

Such talk by officials and reportage by The New York Times now looks embarrassing. But it reveals the ingrained beliefs that we need to have sharp lines between women and men when it comes to work. Even if those lines have softened, a gender power differential remains in many fields. One has only to recall #MeToo coverage or examine the gender wage gap.

The pandemic offers us a reset button. We have been forced to work differently. We cannot un-see what we saw on Zoom.

To this last point, the Boston Women’s Workforce Council, whose analysis uses wage data from actual companies, reveals an ongoing issue. Interestingly, it tracks wage gaps by job role; the only positions in which women’s pay is comparable to men’s, according to the 2021 report, are “Laborers/Helpers” and “Administrative Support Workers.”

The pandemic offers us a reset button. We have been forced to work differently. We cannot un-see what we saw on Zoom. People have lives that are busy and complicated. Employers have been forced to trust employees to work away from the geography of the office and the gaze of supervisors. They learned that people, on their own, are actually quite productive.

Workers have also discovered there is more to one’s identity and life than work. We are now keenly aware that we have one life—and that things can change radically at any moment. We must use our time for stuff that matters. Work must now fit alongside other elements of life, not at the dominant center.

In November, a record 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs. Anyone who dines out or shops understands that the customer is no longer always right. It is a privilege to be served.

Employers everywhere are now in competition for talent. This alters the balance of power. It changes work conventions, such as how meetings run, who must be there, what the “workday” looks like, how power operates (no bonus points for hanging out at the office).

Let us hope it means an end to the “mommy track” mentality. The very notion that women with childcare responsibilities must degrade their ambition now looks repugnant. Or, taking away the moral layer, dumb.

It is telling that a co-working space in Brooklyn includes childcare. Men in leadership have long had flexibility in their work schedules (golf, anyone?). Why shouldn’t we all build in time for relationships and renewal?

America’s economy cannot afford to require people to choose between ambition and parenthood (or other caretaking). They are both part of life. The pandemic has been painful and exhausting. It’s not over yet. The past 20 months have been about survival, but they have also been about invention. In 2022, we must finally build a better workscape.

This does not mean replacing a male-normed workplace with a female-normed workplace. Rather, it means truly un-gendering jobs and work—and seeing one another not as employees or job functions, but as fellow human beings fully capable of both feeding a toddler Cheerios and writing a political profile.

Laura Pappano is writer-in-residence at the Wellesley Centers for Women. An experienced journalist who writes about education and gender equity issues in sports, she has been published in The New York Times, The Hechinger Report, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Christian Science Monitor, among other publications.

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led Massachusetts (along with many other states) to close all forms of child care, except emergency care. Many parents found themselves working from home and caring for their young children at the same time, muddling through as best they could until child care reopened in summer 2020.

When child care became available again, what did parents do—especially given their fears and lack of confidence in the child care system? New health and safety guidelines, including smaller group sizes and other limitations, raised costs and made fewer slots available. Many child care centers and family child care homes closed, and fewer educators were available to care for and educate young children.

Thanks to support from WCW’s Harold Benenson Memorial Research Fund, I explored this “new normal” of child care by interviewing 25 Massachusetts families with children under the age of five. I looked at how these families were accessing child care during the pandemic, their experiences and perceptions of the multiple dimensions of child care, and the implications for parents’ daily lives as well as their employment, economic mobility, work hours, and advancement.

One mother said it wasn’t feasible to be 100% parent and 100% worker at the same time, and that she felt she wasn’t doing anything well.

For all the parents I spoke to, being home with their children from March until July 2020 (or later) was tough. The majority tried to work while caring for their children, working during naps, before children woke, or long after bedtime. One mother said it wasn’t feasible to be 100% parent and 100% worker at the same time, and that she felt she wasn’t doing anything well. Another said she was in survival mode. Another said that she sacrificed her physical and emotional health.

Despite these challenges, it was surprising to me to learn that the families in this study sent their children back to care as soon as it reopened. I expected that fears about COVID and issues of affordability and accessibility might cause families to delay their return. But many felt their children had to go back to what they had known. One mother said her child needed to return because of his mental health. Another parent felt torn about returning and nervous about COVID, but believed the potential exposure was worth it because her child needed an outlet, socially and mentally. Another felt her daughter needed the normalcy and education that she couldn’t get with a baby brother at home.

The first few months of the pandemic brought into the spotlight how hard—near impossible—it was to both work from home and care for young children. The parents in this study told me about their struggles in trying to do both. Going forward, we need a new work culture that is more flexible. Businesses need to ease output expectations, incorporate more paid family leave programs, and implement innovative accommodations for their employees with young children.

When child care programs reopened, most of the families I spoke to went back to the child care they used before the pandemic, even though it was often more than they could afford and led them to use a patchwork of care arrangements to meet their needs.

When child care programs reopened, most of the families I spoke to went back to the child care they used before the pandemic, even though it was often more than they could afford and led them to use a patchwork of care arrangements to meet their needs. Child care needs to be affordable, accessible, and meet the needs of working families. We need to advocate for federal and state funding specifically for child care. We also need to tend to the mental toll the pandemic has taken on families’ lives. Exhausted parents and their children need to be provided with mental, emotional, and trauma-related support. Parents can only parent when they themselves are provided with the care they need.

Wendy Wagner Robeson, Ed.D., is a senior research scientist in the Work, Families, & Children Research Group at the Wellesley Centers for Women. Her work is focused on child development, early childhood care and education, child care policy, school readiness, literacy, and language.

A woman graduates from college and starts her first job, earning about the same as the male colleague who sits next to her. She gets promoted a few times, her salary increases, and in her late 20s, she gets married. Her husband gets a job offer in a new city, they move, and she takes a slightly lower-paying job. In her early 30s, she has a baby, and then another baby in her mid-30s. She decides to cut back her hours (and thus her pay) in order to spend more time with her children. My research shows that this is the point in women’s lives at which the gender pay gap widens.

Fast-forward 15 years: the woman’s children are growing up and will soon be headed off to college, and she is eager to ramp her career back up. What happens to the gender pay gap now?

Today is Equal Pay Day, a day that symbolizes how far into the year the average woman in the U.S. must work in order to earn what the average man in the U.S. earned the previous year. Equal Pay Day for black women is August 13, for Native American women it’s October 1, and for Latina women it’s October 29. Women on average earn $0.82 for each dollar earned by a man; black women earn $0.62, Native American women earn $0.57, and Latina women earn $0.54. The gender pay gap has slowly narrowed over time, but hasn’t budged much over the past 15 years. Globally, the gap isn’t expected to close for another 257 years.

But we are learning that the story of the gender pay gap is a complex one. We now know that male and female college grads start their careers earning nearly the same salaries, but end up with a substantial gap by age 45. By the time college grads reach their peak earnings, men earn on average 55 percent more than women. Less than a third of this gap is caused by differences between the jobs in which men and women work, though women are certainly overrepresented in lower-paying sectors and occupations such as teaching, nursing, and social work — the usual “pink-collar” jobs. Much of the widening of the gap comes from married women: their earnings grow much more slowly with age and they see little benefit from job-hopping compared with men and unmarried women. And when women become mothers, they are more likely to move into part-time positions, take time off, and work fewer hours than men, even in full-time work.

This paints a bit of a dire picture. Things begin to turn around for women, though, once they reach their late 40s and 50s: the pay gap begins to narrow again. For example, among more recent generations of college-educated women, the gap starts shrinking when they reach their late 50s. This happens as women increase their work effort relative to men once their children leave home.

There are still more questions to be answered before we can fully understand the causes of the gender pay gap, and how policies might help close it. For example, how much of the gap is contributed by dual-career considerations, where a family has to optimize around the primary breadwinner? Can public policies help to better share the burden among working spouses? An improved understanding might help us determine whether policies such as father quotas in parental leave might be part of a solution.

We are slowly gaining a clearer picture of how the gender pay gap evolves over the course of our lives. As our research continues, this picture continues to come into focus.

Sari Pekkala Kerr, Ph.D., is a senior research scientist and economist at the Wellesley Centers for Women. Her studies and teaching focus on the economics of labor markets, education, and families.

A few days ago, my eyes fell upon an online post discussing recent studies that showed how unpredictable work schedules in low-wage industries, especially food and retail, are really bad for families. The article highlighted that some practices, such as last-minute notices, on-call shifts, irregular and/or variable work schedules, etc., which are common in many industries in the U.S., harm workers, especially women who care for children.

My colleague, Senior Research Scientist Sumru Erkut, Ph.D., and I had just written about that same topic, as we continue to explore cross-industry relevance with our recent study on women’s leadership in the theater field. Through our interviews, surveys, and conversations at conferences, women had shared with us the challenges they faced in their lives when they wanted to rise to a leadership position in the theater. Our piece, published in Harvard Business Review, showed how some of the theater field’s practices, such as unpredictable scheduling of rehearsals and auditions, the 70-hour tech weeks before a show goes live, and extensive travel demands to get national visibility, all require work-life balance provisions that most workplaces currently have not yet put in place.

Even in this 21st Century, we have not yet come to accept that parenting is a shared component of our human condition. Every industry employs parents who are trying to balance their work obligations with their family roles. In fact, even non-parents can be called into a caregiving role, for example when their ageing parents need help. Gone are the days when a two-parent family could live on a single paycheck and when family roles were clearly divided. Therefore all of us, across gender and age, would benefit from a variety of workplace supports that accommodate our multiple roles as modern human beings.

The business argument for implementing work-life balance policies is fairly clear: these supports will help us stay better focused on our jobs’ priorities and be more productive, because we will be assured our home life is protected while we work. And, these policies will go further than just supporting us while we care for others. I remember the story a theater-study interviewee shared of how a policy change in one particular theater to make schedules a bit more predictable was received with gratitude by non-parenting colleagues: they now could more easily schedule every-day necessities, like medical or dental appointments.

Even though women and their allies have been calling for changes in workplace policies for decades -- and while some were indeed made -- we still have quite a way to go.

In the U.S., parental leave is still largely unpaid, financially penalizing those who start a family, and partially causing the gender pay gap, which becomes a lasting disadvantage for women’s economic security. Once past the period immediately following the birth of a child, working parents still face several more hurdles to be able to balance their family and their work obligations. Not only is the cost of good quality care astronomical, child care centers or other child care providers are organized along schedules that may not align with those of parents who need access to that child care. Public schools are equally uncoordinated with parents’ employment reality. Many workers have weekend duty or work overnight shifts, again most often in lower paying industries. However, there are almost no providers that take in children over the weekend or for overnight care, and most organized care requires a family to enroll with a predictable schedule for an extended period of time.

Thinking back on the findings in our women’s leadership in theater study, we identified that the hurdle to upward mobility among caregiving women is not the lack of a mother’s ambition or her creativity toward addressing those roadblocks, but rather the virtual absence of any workplace provisions. Indeed, women are just as intentional and strategic about their upward mobility as men are, and just as ambitious for that top spot. But, because caring for others, especially for children, is still predominantly a woman’s job, a working mother faces discrimination, lack of willingness to make any adjustments, and forced invisibility, expressed in statements like “I don’t think [women] aspire for that type of leadership role given their family situations,” which we heard in our theater study.

This mothers’ day, let’s honor all mothers in our lives in two ways. First, let’s pledge to share caregiving responsibilities equally in our homes, not just for that one Sunday, but for the rest of the time our loved ones need support. And second, both respect working mothers’ second shift as much as we do her employment contributions, and help advocate for change in policies at work to make that second shift easier to coordinate for all working parents. Showing children how families can be built with intentional gender equity is a crucial gift to our society’s future parents. Indeed, when our children in turn become leaders, their belief in work-life balance provisions will inform their future company policies toward fairness.

Ineke Ceder is a research associate at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, where she has been involved since the 1990s on projects that focus on race/ethnicity, sex education, child and adolescent development, and women's leadership. Her work described above is based on the research she conducted with Sumru Erkut, Ph.D., on women's leadership in theater.