Evidence-based parental-leave policies won’t fix everything, of course, because women’s unpaid workload doesn’t begin and end with newborn babies, and the traditional workplace is tailored to the life of a mythical unencumbered worker. He – and it implicitly is a he – doesn’t need to concern himself with taking care of children and elderly relatives, of cooking, of cleaning, of doctor’s appointments, and grocery shopping, and grazed knees, and bullies, and homework, and bath-time and bedtime, and starting it all again tomorrow. His life is simply and easily divided into two parts: work and leisure. But a workplace predicated on the assumption that a worker can come into work every day, at times and locations that are wholly unrelated to the location or opening hours of schools, childcare centres, doctors and grocery stores, simply doesn’t work for women. It hasn’t been designed to.
Some companies do try to account for the hidden male bias in the traditional workplace and work day. Campbell Soup offers on-site after-school classes and summer programmes for employees’ children.104 Google offers a stipend for takeout meals in the first three months after a baby is born, subsidised childcare, and has included conveniences like dry cleaners on its campus, so employees can do their errands during the workday.105 Sony Ericsson and Evernote go further, paying for their employees to have their houses cleaned.106 Workplaces in the US increasingly provide dedicated spaces for new mothers to breast-pump.107 American Express will even pay for women to ship their breastmilk home if they have to travel for work while they are breastfeeding.108
But companies that remember to account for women are exceptions. When Apple announced its US HQ in 2017 as the ‘best office building in the world’, this state-of-the-art office was slated to include medical and dental treatment, luxury wellness spas – but not a child daycare centre.109 Best office in the world for men, then?
The truth is that around the world, women continue to be disadvantaged by a working culture that is based on the ideological belief that male needs are universal. The vast majority of American homemakers (97% of whom are women) in a recent poll110 indicated that they would go back to work if they could work from home (76%) or if the job offered flexible hours (74%) – rather suggesting that while the majority of US companies claim to offer flexible working,111 the reality is somewhat different. In fact the number of flexible workers in the US fell between 2015 and 2016 and several major US companies are rescinding their remote work policies.112 In the UK half of employees would like to work flexibly, but only 9.8% of job ads offer flexible working113 – and women in particular who request it report being penalised.
Companies also still seem to conflate long hours in the office with job effectiveness, routinely and disproportionately rewarding employees who work long hours.114 This constitutes a bonus for men. Statistician Nate Silver found that in the US, the hourly wage for those working fifty hours or more – 70% of whom are men – has risen twice as fast since 1984 as hourly pay for those working a more typical thirty-five to forty-nine hours per week.115 And this invisible male bias is exacerbated in certain countries by tax systems that exempt overtime hours from tax116 – a bonus for being unencumbered117 that contrasts sharply with the tax relief on domestic services being trialled in Sweden.118
The long-hours bias is particularly acute in Japan where it is not unusual for employees to stay in the office past midnight. This is in part because promotion tends to be based on hours worked, as well as the length of time an employee has spent at a company.119 It also doesn’t hurt to take part in ‘nomunication’, a play on the Japanese word for drinking (nomu), and the English word communication.120 Technically of course women can do all these things, but it’s much more difficult for them. Japanese women spend an average of five hours a day on unpaid labour compared to men who spend about an hour: it’s clear who will be free to impress the boss by staying in the office till late, followed by back-slapping drinks at a local strip club.121
Women’s unpaid workload is compounded in Japan by the two-track career options available in most big Japanese firms: career-track and non-career-track. The non-career-track option is mainly administrative, offers few opportunities for advancement, and is known informally as the ‘mommy’ track – because ‘mommies’ don’t fit into the kind of work-culture that is required for someone on the career-track.122 Combined with the impact having children has on a woman’s chances of promotion (dependent on her ability to demonstrate loyalty through consecutive years worked at a single company), it is unsurprising that 70% of Japanese women stop working for a decade or more after they have their first child, compared to 30% of American women, with many remaining out of the workforce forever.123 It is also unsurprising that Japan has the sixth-largest gender gap in employment and the third-largest gender pay gap in the OECD.124
Long-hours culture is also a problem in academia – and it is exacerbated by career-progression systems designed around typically male life patterns. An EU report on universities in Europe pointed out that age bars on fellowships discriminate against women: women are more likely125 to have had career breaks meaning that their ‘chronological age is older than their “academic” age’.125 In an article for the Atlantic, Nicholas Wolfinger, co-author of Do Babies Matter: Gender & Family in the Ivory Tower, suggested that universities should offer part-time tenure track positions.126 Primary carers can go part-time, while remaining on the tenure track (in effect doubling their probationary period), with the option of going back to fulltime when they can. But while some universities do offer this option, it is still rare and comes with all the poverty problems associated with care-induced part-time work elsewhere.
Some women have taken matters into their own hands. In Germany, Nobel Prize-winning developmental biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard set up a foundation when she realised how disadvantaged her female PhD students with children were compared to their male counterparts.127 These women were ‘committed researchers’, and their children were in fulltime care during the day. But this wasn’t enough to level a field so in thrall to long-hours culture: when childcare ended for the day these women were once again encumbered. Meanwhile, their male and childless female colleagues were ‘squeezing in extra reading or research’. And so these women, committed researchers though they were, were dropping out.
Nüsslein-Volhard’s foundation aims to put a stop to this leaky pipeline. Honourees receive a month stipend that they can spend on ‘anything that alleviates their domestic load: house-cleaning services, time-saving appliances like dishwashers or electric dryers, babysitters for nights and weekends when the daycare center is closed or unavailable’. Recipients must be pursuing graduate or postdoctoral work at German universities. And crucially, and unlike the gender-neutral tenure extension for US academics who take parental leave, they must be women.
Ideological male bias doesn’t simply arise at a workplace level: it is woven into the laws that govern how employment works. For example: what counts as a work expense. This is not as objective or as gender neutral a decision as you might think. The expenses that a company will allow its employees to claim back will generally correspond to what that country’s government has decided counts as a work expense. And this in turn generally corresponds to the kinds of things men will need to claim. Uniforms and tools are in; emergency day care is out.128