Women at Work - If We Want Equity, Work Needs to Be Less Greedy

0:00E.B., you seem to always be reading a book. Yeah, let's see. I recently finished Hamnet, which I loved. Me, too. So good. So good. And I'm reading the love songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, which I'm also loving. He's also a very talented designer, if you didn't know. Did not know that. And at the same time, I'm reading this new book about the real housewives, which is unputdownable.

0:29You're reading the full gamut of literature. I love it. I also know you fit in some economic history recently. You read Claudia Golden's career and family. I sure did. It's a very informative 20th century US history. And it really deepened my understanding of the different and difficult trade-offs that women have had to make and continue to have to make just because we want to work.

0:58or do more in life than just work. For many women, that more has been marriage, motherhood, or the classic combo, both. But during most of the last century, discriminatory laws and hiring policies, plus stricter gender norms left women who wanted more with limited employment options. Since then, laws and policies have advanced and norms have loosened.

1:24Women today can sustain two time consuming undertakings, career and family, but at a cost. The cost shows up as the gender earnings gap. Female college graduates earn less over the course of their careers than their husbands and male colleagues do. Claudia says the majority of the earnings gap doesn't come from women entering lower paying occupations and it doesn't come from organizations paying women lower salaries for equal work.

1:55The majority of the gap comes from greedy work when firms incentivize their employees to give themselves over 110% to their jobs. So an employee who is willing to work at all hours in the evenings, weekends, vacations, is on call at the office, is the worker who gets big rewards. These rewards can be disproportionate to the amount of time put in.

2:24meaning that doubling the number of hours more than doubles the earnings. And another complication is that working more now will mean that you get the big rewards later. You make partner, you get tenure, you get that important first promotion. So for two educated, ambitious parents, what Claudia sees happening is that one person stays with the greedy job and the other person cuts back her hours.

2:54or moves to a more flexible firm. And let me just underscore that it's usually the woman who does that. These concessions that college educated women are making today are really just the latest version of the sacrifices that college educated women have been making for a hundred years. As an economic historian, Claudia tracked the trends generation by generation. So, Amy, what are those generations? Let me go through them.

3:23Claudia divides them into five groups. Group one graduated from college in the first two decades of the 20th century and they generally had a family or a career. Group two graduated between 1920 and 1945 and had a job then a family. Group three, these are the women of the 1950s who had a family and then a job.

3:49Many of them were teachers, nurses, librarians, and administrators. Group four, of which Claudia is a member, graduated from college in the 1970s and had a career and then a family. Many of these women got graduate degrees, married later, invested more in their careers earlier, and had fewer children. And group five, that's you and me, Amy.

4:18tend to have a career and a family. We're the generation that's asking the question, can we have it all? Really trying to understand how to do both of those things to our fullest capacity. I find these different groups really helpful in terms of putting my own struggle around equity and my relationships and my life in context. It's easy to focus on how hard we have it at the moment.

4:47But I think seeing how things have shifted over time, I'm not going to say they've gotten easier necessarily, but they're different. I do feel encouraged that there can be major shifts in the way that we approach these issues of equity. Yeah. In my conversation with Claudia, we focused on some of the more recent shifts, including the shifts that are going on today. Yeah. I am wondering how my generation, if we will want career and family or if...

5:16we might choose one or the other and how as a group, things will shape up for us. Yeah. So's Claudia and she's been collecting that data. It's just that it takes time for those decisions to play out. Your generation needs to have the opportunity to make the decisions and that's still in the future. Yeah. Don't be interesting to see. So I want to make three points before we jump into the conversation with Claudia. The first is that she studied only women in the U.S.

5:44The second is that she studied mostly white women because she was limited by the data she could get access to. And that does concern her. And then finally, she defines caregiving as motherhood. A family is defined for her by having children. And I'm sensitive because A, I don't have kids. And I know a lot of women who are caregivers for elder members of their family. Okay, with all that out of the way, here's my conversation with Claudia. Why is it so hard to achieve career and family equity even within an equitable relationship? Equity is a decision. And in some sense, it's not hard. You can make a decision if you want an equitable relationship. I can make a decision that I want.

6:45a house in Santa Monica. The problem is the expense. So say that there are two parents of young children. At least one of those parents is going to be on call at some point. Couple equity as a decision would be that they'll switch off. That's equitable. They'll both be on call on different days. But then they will both have to take jobs that enable that type of flexibility. And if it's the case that flexible jobs pay less than the less flexible jobs, that would be the cost. I was very interested, as I read your book, that you identified certain types of jobs as just more equitable across the board. Pharmacists, no matter the gender, all tend to earn the same amount.

7:43male lawyers tend to earn more than female lawyers. So why is it better to be a pharmacist? No one says it's better to be a pharmacist and no one's saying that that's the only reason to go into an occupation. But the reason that occupation tends to be very equitable is that it moved from being an occupation in which there were a lot of owner operators to ownership is corporate, and the pharmacists are the workers. Some of them are supervisors and managers, but they are doing jobs that are extremely difficult. We depend on them. Yet they are, by and large, very good substitutes for each other. So that allows for a much greater level of flexibility. That's right. All we need is

8:41one really good substitute. You can pass on your chore to someone else and it's done almost as well as if you did it. Certainly in healthcare, there's been rapid growth in groups because it's good for the doctors and it's good for the patients. Pediatricians, they work in groups and when their clients show up and the child shows up, they've seen this pediatrician before. It may not be the one that they saw two months ago when they fell, but it's the one they're going to see today when they fell, and that may be the one they saw a year ago when they fell. So those are substitutes. They may not be perfect substitutes, but they're pretty good substitutes. Contrast that to a consulting team in which you have an engineer, a lawyer,

9:35the staff person, you have the accountant, you have a team of individuals who come together because they are different. So teams are of two types. Teams of substitutes and teams of compliments. If one of the reasons that pharmacists have so much flexibility is that they can substitute easily for each other, What is it that you see among lawyers say or consultants that makes that more difficult? So in some sense, the firm, given the incentives, can always find a way to have good substitute. Sometimes it involves a certain amount of redundancy in the firm. It involves a certain amount of training. But if the stakes are high enough, the amount

10:27that you have to pay the individual is high enough, there'll be an incentive to figure out how to create more flexibility. You know, Claudia, when we talk about the conflict between work and family these days, a lot of the time we're talking about taking care of your parents rather than kids. And you mentioned elder care a few times in the book.

10:55What else do you know from your research about the impact that a woman's care for her parents might have on her earnings through her career? So we have students who study this often using data sets that are highly specialized. And so there's one called the Health and Retirement Study. One of our students, Karen Chen, used these data to show that Medicaid regulations regarding the payment for home health care aids freed up the time of daughters more than anyone else. So when these home health care aids could be paid for doing things in the home that the daughters had been doing, it's sort of no surprise perhaps that the daughters

11:48had the greatest change in their employment. So they were able, for example, to go from part-time work to full-time work, and they earned more. And of course, if they could anticipate that they might have taken on loads and jobs that were more remunerative before. So yes, we have evidence about this. Let me say one word about the older women.

12:17in the labor force. And what I'm going to say has not gotten enough play, which is that we know, for example, that despite the fact that this group is taking care of their parents, women 55 years and older had enormously large increases in their labor force participation and employment from the 1990s to the most recent period that I looked at which was 2015. This increase was all full-time work. It was not that women were coming back into the labor force because they had some hit to their retirement earnings. These were women who had careers and wanted to extend their careers. So this is sort of my generation moving into their

13:12late 50s, then early 60s, then late 60s, just continuing with their highly productive careers. So in fact, despite the fact that the daughters have been pulled out a bit, women from 55 and on have actually been the only group of women that has increased their labor force participation in the last 20 to 30 years.

13:41Well, that is really interesting. So let's project forward to our hypothetical group six, women born after 1978. What are you learning as you talk through your research findings with the women that you teach who are not 40 yet, who haven't quite coalesced into a group that way? What are you learning about them?

14:07I can say to them the lessons that they can learn from their immediate predecessors are that clearly the age of first marriage has increased and increased and increased and marrying later or coupling later leads to better and more long-lasting relationships. We know that. A second thing that we can say to them is that having children in one's late 30s and early 40s, Canon does happen, but it's risky. And doing that better cements your careers, but not entirely. I can also say to them something that a student once said to me, which is coupling or marrying a person who wants what you want is the best bargain you can ever make in life. In addition,

15:04Life is long and careers will likely extend into your 60s and your 70s and they needn't be linear. I mean my career has been completely linear but I know that there are lots of happy happy people who've had very very nonlinear careers.

15:27And finally, I would say that many aspects of the labor market will seem to make couple equity very expensive. Let's talk about the pandemic. You were working on this book as the pandemic was really sinking its teeth into all of us. How do you think that's affecting the trends that you've noticed? So there are several ways in which...

15:57it has one of the biggest impacts of the pandemic was the fact that children didn't go to school. And so what is going to happen as not only are the parents at home working but the kids are at home learning. So the ability to have work from home was a great boon to many and Today it is one of the aspects of the pandemic that we're probably going to carry with us. And one of the silver linings is that it can add flexibility to the workplace in many ways and bring down the price of flexibility. So some of the greatest decreases in the cost of having flexible work Some of it is going to be brought down because of work from home, but some of it is related to just this technology that we've all learned to use of having remote everything from meetings to committees, one-on-one, telemedicine, for example. So, you know, think about it. If the contract with a supplier in Beijing can be done remotely, if the M&A in Tokyo can be done remotely,

17:19if all Pacific and Atlantic flying can be grounded, then more women can take these often very lucrative jobs that previously they said, I can't take this because I can't do the traveling. Right. Well, I hope that that silver lining holds. Well, there's a second part of the silver lining, which is that WFH might be good for everyone.

17:48like one or two days a week I mean that's that's sort of pretty amazing but we've also as a nation realized that caregiving is very important I mean the fact that we are now as a nation talking about universal preschool is remarkable we were not talking about that as a nation we were talking about that at the state level sometimes at the local level, we should be talking about universal pre-K, which is educational, as it's not babysitting. We should also be talking about a more unified after-school set of programs. I once had one of my seniors try to write a senior thesis on after-school programs in the US, and it's such a crazy quilt that

18:46we gave up after a while, we need something that is more unified, if not across states, at least within states. So there are many discussions going on that we have not seen in America since World War II. In World War II, women were not in the labor force to a great degree. We needed to get them in the labor force quickly.

19:15And in 1943, an act that set aside money for infrastructure called the Lanham Act was repurposed to have nursery schools and after-school programs, both of them. And that brought women into the labor force. Now, fast forward, women are almost 50% of the labor force. And we now realize once again, It's not that we want to bring them in. We want to make certain that they stay in and stay productive. Because it's an economic necessity for all of us. Exactly. Claudia, this has been fascinating. And, you know, once again, you helped me think so much more clearly about matters involving, you know, the wage gap and career and family. Thank you. Well, thank you, Amy.

20:17So at the very beginning of this interview, Claudia says that equity is a decision, and it comes at a price, it comes with a cost. And Amy, I'm wondering, here you are, you've got a career, you've got a 14-year-old daughter, how did that hit you? It gave me chills, truthfully, because it is a decision, and it's a decision I personally have to make and have had to make at every step of My career I mean starting with who I'm choosing to couple with right as Claudia says the decision who to marry and We never had explicit discussions about having an equitable marriage. I regret that actually I wish we had not because it's not equitable, but I think it would have helped us Lay the groundwork, but it's a decision and it's not even the decision you make at the beginning of the coupling it's a decision you make every month every quarter that

21:18we have to consider what this will do to both of our careers, what this will do to our child's future. And it's not easy in the system that we most of us live and work in, makes it very difficult. And that's the expense I think she's talking about, the cost is that because we don't have jobs that are typically flexible, because we don't have policies that provide early childhood care, Right, because of all of that, that's where the cost comes in because you have to make the decision every step of the way and you have to decide who's going to incur the cost. And someone is always going to incur the cost. Does anybody want to do greedy work? I wouldn't want to do that in my career. And I feel like a lot of my peers feel the same way where we want to have the flexibility. But do you feel like you and your careers wanted that greedy work? You wanted to be able to do that.

22:15Mean yes, I think I mean In theory I wanted all of that I wanted work that paid well. I wanted it to be interesting. I wanted it to be Engaging I wanted to have an impact on other people and Even before I was married or had a kid. I wanted it to be flexible Yeah, like I wanted to be able to take the afternoon off to go see a movie mm-hmm with a friend I wanted to be able to drop everything to go help my mom if she needed it. Like I wanted all of that, but I didn't, I mean, Claudia really helps crystallize all those trade-offs that I think I didn't ever quite understand I was going to make or have made or needed to make. Yeah, I'm right there with you. I never even thought about that. I never, I mean, well, first of all, I never even thought of something called greedy work until I read Claudia's book. So that was eye-opening, but

23:12It never occurred to me that I wouldn't have to work very, very hard to move ahead and to keep learning and to feel challenged. But there was a moment when I realized that the work was very greedy because I was letting it be greedy, that I was working 100 hours a week in my first job, partly because there was a lot of work to do, but partly because I never knew when to stop. Yeah. And if your male counterparts are able to work 100 hours a week, then you have to be able to work 100 hours a week if that's like an expectation of the workplace. Yeah. That's true. Although I have to say my first job, I was the first one in and the last one out quite frequently. So that was my decision. Yeah. Go Amy. And to be fair, we both had models of where our mothers were workaholics. I think that's fair to say. Totally. My mother is and was too. Yeah. And so I think we had models that showed and to be fair, they're

24:11generation or groups, as Claudia calls them, for exactly the reason you're saying, Emily, that because their male counterparts could put in all this time, they felt they had to. And so much of the work in my mother's business and in advertising took place outside of office hours, the client dinners, the trips that are very greedy of time and other resources. And if you aren't willing to do them, you're not going to move forward. Right. Can we pause on the greedy work thing for one moment? Just because when I hear that word, I keep thinking, who's being greedy? Yeah. It's the employer who's greedy, right? Who wants as much time as possible from the employee. It's the employee who's greedy because they want more work for more pay, for more work, right? And then it's also just society is greedy of like,

25:04trying to take as much out of us, like extract as much. Suck all the life out of you. Exactly. It's so funny because I didn't think to personalize it because I think work itself is greedy and that it's our responsibility to say enough already. Right. You know, I'm not going to work all weekend and then figure out how not to work all weekend. Yeah. Well, and that's what you're saying, what your peers want for not to feel greedy. Right. Right. I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't feel the way that me and some of my friends do, but I have friends in all different fields and I think in general it's like we talk about how unsustainable it is to work in a way where you know you have to stay long hours and you have to work on weekends and you have to be available all the time constantly checking email on your phone even when you're like having dinner with friends. That's like not the lifestyle that that I want or that they want or that we think we need to

26:03meet. For me, it's like, I don't feel like greedy work is something that I want to engage in. But I might want a partner who wants to engage in greedy work because I might want to reap the benefits of having a partner who has a high salary. So I can work part-time and then be an artist. But I get that. And I think that's what Claudia was documenting, which is that it's very hard for a couple with children to both have greedy work. They both have greedy jobs. Yes. So that I think is connected to this idea of substitute. Yes, definitely. And the idea that some professions there's more, she didn't use this word, but sort of fungibility. Like someone could just, if you need to step out for whatever reason, someone will come in and be able to do it. Right. And she talks about that.

27:00In her book, I understand from a skills perspective or capability perspective or know how. And an information perspective. Yes, right. So everyone's going to have that information. I mean, I'm curious, how substitutable do you all feel right now? At least with creative careers. And I feel like you both have creative careers as well. In creative careers, I feel so close to the work that like I could be substitutable, but it wouldn't be my work. It wouldn't be.

27:29the work that I would create. So they'll design a layout and they could design it just as well, but it wouldn't be the layout that I would design. They could write something, but they wouldn't write it exactly the way either of you would write it or wouldn't have the perspective. So I see something a little bit more challenging about trying to figure that out with a creative job. I wonder what you both think. One of the hardest things for me to grok, as I've taken on more and more responsibilities that I have to learn to delegate more and to let other editors edit the way they're going to edit. And no two editors are going to edit this exactly the same way. And to understand the difference between good and mine. And I've had to give up my instinct or I'm trying to, to make everything mine. So in the process, it has occurred to me

28:28The less the work that I oversee bears my thumbprint, the more substitutable I am. And I also know intellectually that there are 15 people on staff who could take my job and do great at it right now.

28:51But I don't like to admit that it kind of breaks my heart Do you say that even on your behalf I'm my I'm because I'm so defensive of your ego right now. I was like no Yeah, I'm also like no yeah, because I feel like the perspective that you bring is not the perspective I'm defensive maybe and I hear you and I'm like that's right. I want Emily to design the layout for the piece I'm working on right now because I know she'll do a great job And yet, I also have to ask how much have we layered our ego into this? So much. Well, you know, she kept bringing up doctors. I remember the first time that a doctor whom I had never met came in to give me a checkup because his partner was out, the one whom I had seen. And I thought, well, this can't be right. I mean, who are you? And then I realized.

29:47You know, my doctor barely knows me because, thank goodness, I've rarely ever needed that doctor except for checkups. Right. And then I realized, well, you know, this new guy, he's just going down the same checklist as my regular doctor was. And that's when I realized, ah, maybe it doesn't matter so much. Right? I think about there's aspects of my job that are completely fun to blend and there's evidence.

30:13of that because I will take some leave occasionally to work on my book or whatever. And there's- You sure want your authors to say, oh, I really missed you. I know. I do. I want my authors to say they miss me. I want everyone to say, thank God you're back. It's amazing that we've built, according to Claudia, like we've sort of built the economy on this idea. Yes. And it's so limiting to women and men who want flexibility.

30:41So I am thinking about what it would be like to have a substitute in my position. And if that were something that I could do, if there was like a second designer who was working on the same exact things as I am or knew exactly how to do it, I could imagine taking two week long vacations and not giving it a second thought. Right.

31:02Or maybe even taking a sick day. Yeah. Exactly. Not having it, not working while laying in bed. Yeah, not worrying about that. Which is, I think the thing many of us do. I mean, I think it would take a lot of extra effort. So that would be someone I'd have to communicate with regularly. I'd have to document the work I'm doing. I'd have to give them access to my email or like, I just think it would require a lot of redundancy that we're not.

31:31Used to mm-hmm. You know I was in a job sharing situation for six months months We both worked three days a week so we had one day where we overlapped and then two days and It did require we had to be in communication all the time You know the handoff day was always a little complicated But the truth was that it was much harder for the people around us to handle than it was for us. People around us just sort of either wanted one of us to do something specific or were confused about who to reach out to or... Well, there's the relationships, right? Which are not fungible. But the other thing for organizations is this kind of arrangement you've just described does carry an administrative burden, right? Yes. And I think a cost, right?

32:20They were paying two people to work three days a week instead of one person to work five days a week. There is a cost to that at the organizational level that I think many companies are not willing to do. I'm just imagining myself having an understudy for my job. And how nice it would be. Oh my gosh, that's perfect. That's the metaphor. We all need an understudy. Two of us for every one of us that exists.

32:48I love theater. So like if you study playbills, there are people who are in the actual play, so the main cast, they are understudies for other main parts. So it's not like you'd have to bring in someone to pay them and never to never actually do the work. You could have people who were understudying other people. Yeah. And that principle of redundancy is important in operations, right? Yes. Always knowing that if you're out sick that someone could step in and take care of the deadline stuff for you, right? Yeah. Yeah. You are a genius animal. Understudies. Period. A genius of organizational design. Well, I'm sure our overlords won't brace us approach. So if we know that Claudia, what her research shows is that this is one of the ways to achieve equity, particularly between men and women.

33:42or in marriages, what's holding us back from doing it? I mean, what's holding organizations back? Building more flexibility into the work models? Yeah, or having understudies or having substitutes. I'm not sure I agree with the premise of your question, because I do think there's a lot of cross-training that goes on. Obviously, it depends on the organization. Sure. And in the nature of the work. But taking on more people is taking on more cost and more administrative burden.

34:12And for the longest time, efficiency was the rule of the day, right? Think of how we worship productivity, the P word, right? So I think the answer is bound up in those areas of priority. I do wonder how much the focus on productivity and efficiency at an organization level has really made this idea even more out of reach.

34:40Well, and then also flexible capacity, that if we need someone to take some of Emily's work off her plate, let's just hire a contractor, right? So I mean, that's how companies do this in certain moments, right? It occurs to me that we are, we're still talking about what we first started home at, which is the cost. Is there is going to be cost to achieving equity?

35:08and who's going to incur that cost. And I think right now, what we see at a societal level, according to Claudia, is that women are incurring that cost. And we're talking about, could organizations bear some of that cost? So wonder if our concept of having it all is ever going to evolve. You know, I mean, this is the question of fulfillment for me. One of the things that kept gnawing at me, and Amanda, our producer, was that it seemed like the total picture required children.

35:38And if you've decided not to have kids, is that a cost to you? Well, it sounds like it's actually a boon. There is this societal expectation, especially for straight women, that you are going to have children. And that it's just the natural course of things. And no one talks about these costs. Like, wouldn't be amazing if my OBGYN was like, oh, you're considering having a child? Have you thought about the cost to your career?

36:05But no one says that. Have you done a cost-benefit analysis? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I remember holding my tiny baby. I think my husband was like going out to meet friends or something, and I had gone nowhere. I had been home, barely sleeping, taking care of this baby. He was doing a lot, but at that point there's a limit to what he can do. And I remember thinking, this is the most unfeminist thing I've ever done. I have tied myself.

36:34to this being. And it's going to limit my options. It's going to introduce inequity in my relationship. And society will see me differently. It was a little terrifying. It really challenged your sense of yourself. That's right. And my sense of my future. What will I be able to do? How will I be able to do it? How much will it cost? So Emily, Claudia described five distinct groups. I am squarely in group five. Amy.

37:05Gee, you are in group five. Emily, you're in the next group. And I wonder how your notions of family, career and fulfillment are gonna be different from ours. So I haven't decided about family yet. I haven't decided if I'm gonna have children at this point. But something that stuck with me that she said was that coupling with someone who wants what you want is like the best bargain you can make in life.

37:34that's stuck with me and I think that that is something important that I will think about. Wanting to like have the lifestyle that I want and being with somebody who's going to enable me to have that. My mother was kind of a workaholic like you guys described about your moms. She worked two full-time jobs growing up for a long time so she worked many and now she's retired but she has like four new jobs in retirement. She really has four jobs she's so busy she's busy. She's retired but she has not stopped working. Yep and so I want a little bit more balance in my adult life when I couple. I would like to be able to have a career because it's still important to me and I still look up to my mother for being very career focused. I would also like to have the flexibility to explore other things because I do, you know, I've talked about my side hustles and like my side gigs and my hobbies and those are things that I want to explore and things that I want to spend time on and work really hard in.

38:32but they're really of no benefit to a family or to a workplace. They're really just of benefit to me and myself development. So I want to have kind of a life where I could have a good career. I want to have a partner who lets me do whatever I want and I want to be able to develop myself. Like I want to just have the time and the space to continue to develop myself.

39:01health-wise and hobbies and my side gigs So I always want to make space for that and that's what I think is most important to me that I'm able to have a career that lets me do that What you just described I think was a clear articulation of what's missing from the fulfillment model of the career family trade-off, which is that for women having a career or having Family is in service of other people. Yes, what's missing in the fulfillment model is Serving yourself. Yes. I want to be very selfish. Right. And we do make up all these narratives about my careers, about me and my family. You know, like, there's truth to that. I'm not denying that. But I think ultimately we're not talking about the fulfillment of our own growth. Yeah. Just something that you want to do for yourself that doesn't really affect anybody else outside of yourself unless you want it to. What if the measure of equity in a relationship

39:58Is how much time each person has to give to their own interest? Well, I'll tell you I think that That's such a great question because I don't think it'll add up to 100. No, that's right. I don't I think that you you will have a Different set of interests and different needs that will require different resources including your time Then your partner mm-hmm. It's never 50 50, right mm-hmm And I just come back to the beginning of our conversation that equity is a decision. Yes. And I think we can add to that it's a negotiation. And we've talked about that over and over on the show. And if there's one thing I hope we've all learned is that you cannot let those decisions be made for you. That's right. That's our show. I'm Emily Caulfield. I'm Amy Gallo. And I'm Amy Bernstein. Our editorial and production team is Amanda Cursey, Maureen Hope, Rob Eckhart,

40:59Erica Truxler, Tina Toby Mack, and Eleni Matta. Robin Moore composed the theme music. Email us at women at work at hbr.org and subscribe to our newsletter by going to hbr.org slash newsletters. Thanks for listening.