No magical unicorns

Claire Caine Miller had a good article When Family-Friendly Policies Backfire last week which I discussed in They Are Incompatible Goals. She’s on a roll with another article this week, The 24/7 Work Culture’s Toll on Families and Gender Equality. Both the headline and the substance of the article highlight the ambiguity of Gender Equality. Does Gender Equality mean that everyone works under the same rules even if that means there are identifiable differences in the outcomes based on the behaviors, actions, and choices of the individuals? Or does it mean that the rules are rewritten so that everyone has the same outcomes regardless of their behaviors, actions, and choices? Most Americans are comfortable with the former but not the latter whereas most totalitarians and SJWs are pursuing the latter and want to undermine the former.

I am in the one law for all camp and believe that most of the disparate outcomes are a consequence of choices around family structure rather than gender discrimination. Single parent families, two parents, one working full-time, one at home full-time; two parents, both working full-time; two parents, one working full-time, one working part-time, etc. There are all sorts of family structures and each has advantages and disadvantages, rewards and risks. There is no one right size fits all.

The consequence of these differences in family structures show up the most in those industries which are most unstable, changing the fastest, most responsive to customer needs, and most competitive – think banking, finance, consulting, law, accounting.

The biggest obstacle to women in joining the highest ranks of the business world is a lack of family-friendly policies. That, at least, has been the conventional wisdom in recent years, and it has been embraced by progressive companies that offer flexible schedules or allow people to work from home.

But some researchers are now arguing that the real problem is not the lack of family-friendly policies for mothers, but the surge in hours worked by both women and men. And companies are not likely to want to adopt the obvious solution.

The pressure of a round-the-clock work culture — in which people are expected to answer emails at 11 p.m. and take cellphone calls on Sunday morning — is particularly acute in highly skilled, highly paid professional services jobs like law, finance, consulting and accounting.

Offering family-friendly policies is too narrow a solution to the problem, recent research argues, and can have unintended consequences. When women cut back at work to cope with long hours, they end up stunting their careers. And men aren’t necessarily happy to be expected to work extreme hours, either.

[snip]

The study examined a global consulting firm, which was not named. The firm, where 90 percent of the partners were men, asked the professors what it could do to decrease the number of women who quit and increase the number who were promoted. In exchange, the academics could collect data for their research. The firm was typical in that employees averaged 60 to 65 hours of work a week.

There is a lot of good material in the article though there is a fair amount of blather as well. I do not know which firm sponsored this study but the issues are familiar as I was a partner in such a firm which has had a multi-decade commitment to addressing gender and work-life issues.

Miller seems instinctively to keep trying to cast this as a gender issue when it is an issue of choices and consequences. Do you want to work in the fashion that warrants the top 1% of income earners status (lots or hours, lots of risk, lots of consequences, on call, all the time) or do you want to work in a fashion that allows you to spend time with the family? They are not easily compatible goals, so you have to make a choice. The reality is that family units structured as one full-time and one stay-at-home (regardless of gender) win this competition much more often than those who split the difference with both working full-time or part-time. Volume and flexibility are the deciding factors in this competition and one structure delivers that more often than the others. If it is the woman who is full-time career, and her husband is the stay-at-home, she is as likely to win as men in the same position. Gender doesn’t matter.

And yes, men dislike the burdens and trade-offs as much as the women.

In the study of the consulting firm, which included in-depth interviews with 107 employees, men were at least as likely as women to say the long hours interfered with their family lives, and they quit at the same rate. One told the researchers: “Last year was hard with my 105 flights. I was feeling pretty fried. I’ve missed too much of my kids’ lives.”

Yes, the 105 flights are hard, but you earned $500,000. If you want to work less and spend more time at home, do so. But know that you are going to earn less as well. People make these sorts of decisions all the time.

The inclination to view this as a gender issue rather than a choices issue is hinted at in the formulation of these two paragraphs. First Miller tries to introduce gender differences as an explanation of outcomes.

Men and women dealt with the pressure differently. Women were more likely to take advantage of formal flexible work policies, like working part-time, or to move to less demanding positions that didn’t involve serving clients or earning revenue for the company. Decisions like these tended to stall women’s careers.

Yes, these decisions do stall careers because when you work fewer hours, work more inflexible schedules, you are simply unable to add as much value to your client and employer. Your productivity goes down and therefore your compensation goes down or your advancement slows. Not because you are a woman, a man would suffer the same consequences, but because your productivity has declined.

Miller then tries to make it look like men are getting away with something. But the give-away is in the last sentence.

Men either happily complied, suffered in silence — or simply worked the hours they wanted without asking permission. About a third of them, according to another paper about the same firm by Ms. Reid, would leave to attend their children’s activities while staying in touch on their phones. They also developed more local clients to reduce travel or informally arranged with colleagues to cover for them. Decisions like these tended to get men promoted.

Men engaged, put up and shut up or they did what they wanted but compensated by increasing their productivity anyway by bringing in more clients. Increasing productivity is what gets men promoted. It’s what gets anyone promoted.

There is an ethos in academia, the left and among social justice advocates that sees the patriarchy, stereotypes and discrimination everywhere and wants to make all disparate outcomes the consequence of nefarious misogyny. Most big firms, in my experience, work very hard to make it as easy as possible for everyone to get ahead. They have a vested interest in helping employees increase their productivity. But you can’t wish that productivity into existence. Different people under different circumstances make different assessments of career risk, value different outcomes in different ways, and are more or less willing to confront real trade-offs. These are not company issues, they are people issues that yield real world outcomes.

Even though I think Miller keeps getting lost in the SJW woods, she uncovers interesting research and has good information. For example,

The challenge of juggling work and family was not always the dominant explanation given for why few women reached the top echelons of business. Another analysis led by Harvard Business School researchers tracked stories about gender and work in the national and business press from 1991 to 2009. Until the mid-1990s, most focused on sexism and harassment. Then they began focusing on women’s exclusion from the “old boys’ network.” Around 2001, the main theme became children hampering women’s career success.

The academic researchers are confronting the same dilemma that Claudia Goldin has bumped up against. It is not bad faith actions that are leading to disparate outcomes, it is perfectly rational good faith decisions on the part of both employees and employers. To the researchers, this conundrum means that society itself has to change.

The researchers said that when they told the consulting firm they had diagnosed a bigger problem than a lack of family-friendly policies for women — that long hours were taking a toll on both men and women — the firm rejected that conclusion. The firm’s representatives said the goal was to focus only on policies for women, and that men were largely immune to these issues.

[snip]

It is not necessarily surprising that companies prefer to focus on relatively narrow fixes like family-friendly policies, not more broadly on the culture of overwork. They would have little incentive to encourage their employees to work less. And, of course, people who work at these companies chose high-powered careers and are paid well in exchange.

I suspect that comment “that men were largely immune to these issues” is simply wrong either on the part of the researchers or Miller. All professional services firms that I know about, which is virtually all of the big ones, are perfectly aware of the burden of a high stakes career and would never claim that men are immune from those burdens. That characterization is almost certainly from a third party not deeply familiar with the industry.

The truth is that “people who work at these companies chose high-powered careers and are paid well in exchange.” It takes a lot of personal risk, effort and effective decision-making to function in high pace, high risk, high demands industries and the rewards are commensurate. If you want more balance (less productivity), then choose differently. Many do. But don’t expect something for nothing. And certainly don’t expect companies to respond to the recommendation that they not work their employees as hard in such a demanding environment. I can well imagine how the executives of the firm heard the researches findings. The babble fish translated it as, “We have identified the source of your problems. You don’t have a magical unicorn.”