Getting Pushed Out

~ Laura

Because you all aren’t being as good as clicking on links as you used to be, I’m going to embed a video that Charli used. Just in case you missed it.

"Mothers aren’t opting out of the workforce. They are being pushed out."

Yes. Does your workplace offer childcare? I was chatting with a buddy last week about this. She works as a drug counselor in a major New York hospital. It offers childcare, but it so expensive that only the doctors can use it. Most workplaces, even universities that could employ students in the service, do not offer childcare.

Does your job or your husband’s job enable you to take days off to mind a sick child? What happens when schools close? How many families use all of their vacation days to deal with this school/childcare gap? What happens to mothers in single, male-dominated fields? Are they able to keep up? What happens when a child needs extra care? How much are you paid compared to your less encumbered workmates? What happens to the kids when the parents are freaked out, stressed out, and pissed off?

When I finish teaching in May, I may come back to a book manuscript that has been put on hold for way too long.

Published by Laura

7 thoughts on “Getting Pushed Out”

  2. I’m going to blog this, though I can’t blog everything. Certainly, we have a pretty flexible schedule. I had plenty of sick time at my job that I could take either for myself or when my kids were sick. I worked a flexible schedule for a while (7-3 a couple of days a week), but the reality is, sick days and flextime barely scratch the surface. Honestly, if I could have worked from home (I was offered 1 day a month), that would have helped. For example, it would have been nice if I could have left the office every day at 2:30, been home in time to meet the kids and while I’m helping him with homework, I could continue to check email, work on projects, etc. More than likely, I’d only need to put in a couple of hours. I was working more than 40 hours anyway.
    I think what really needs to happen is for the workplace to focus less on face time and more on productivity and results. And to recognize that different people are going to produce at different rates at different times in their lives. This allows for everyone to go through life changes without having to worry about “keeping up”. So, there’s a couple of guys producing like crazy because they’re single or have a spouse at home who doesn’t mind keeping the home fires burning over the course of a 60-hour work week. Not everyone needs to live up to that standard. I saw this even in my former department. Women and men without obligations at home work ungodly hours and then the rest of us were judged for not working those hours. Not directly always, but indirectly. You know, not given the good projects, not put on the good committees, passed over for promotion because we’re seen as “not committed enough.” Bleh.
    Another thing that pisses me off is that people have no idea how much work it is to take care of kids and a household. I am floored by the fact that I’ve been spending all day doing just that and I used to squeeze that in in a few hours after work and on the weekends. Can we just value that work already? How about a freaking tax break? Ugh. K–sorry to dump on your blog, but this has been an issue for me for *years*!

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  4. Amen to what geekymom says about productivity vs. face time. Currently my work is less transparent than it used to be (more meetings, more managing others), but while my kids were very small it was maximally transparent — I was judged by the number of systems I kept stable and the new features I was able to code. As a result no one cared about my specific work hours. Frankly they didn’t even really care about the volume of hours, as they knew that my 40-hour weeks were accomplishing as much as the 60-hour weeks of my disorganized colleagues.
    This fact has been and remains the cornerstone of my entire career, the thing that has allowed me to flourish as a professional in combination with parenthood.
    I think such transparency is less common than we’d like it to be because, for the boss, it’s more difficult to do. The fallback of every bad manager is to judge people by face time. You don’t have to actually understand the work or develop metrics. You just check to see whose car is still in the lot.

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  5. My very hard-working German brother-in-law explains the difference between German and American corporate vacation schedules like this: the Germans work at work and get six week vacations, while Americans go to work to hang out. That doesn’t explain how even more laid-back Europeans get six week vacations, but I thought I should mention it.

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