“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” -Jack Welch
Never has the topic of integrating work and life been so important to me as it is right now. Having given birth to my son a little over year ago, I am challenged by the public-facing commitments and the private world I need to prioritize. Every day seems like a colossal battle between two important conflicting needs. Work and Home.
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For me, there is no such thing as work-life balance. I see failure in a metaphor that suggests a measuring scale staged to compete life with work. One can never balance the scale into equal parts through distribution of time, effort or energy. Caring for my son takes immense amounts of mental energy and time, and work, sometimes has to wait. Sure, I feel the pressures of falling behind and not doing enough because it looks like every other mom has it together, is on top of it, and can do it all.
And there is the other problem—we are consciously or unconsciously caught in the cultural trap that measures success through money. Therefore, working 100 hours with robotic ambition seems impossibly charming. We applaud stories of the sleep deprived executives working tirelessly to build the next Google. Or the off-the-cuff remarks that we must choose only 3 from the 5 choices: friends, family, work, sleep or fitness. We glamourize women that seem to “do it all.” We talk about “working mothers” as opposed to “working fathers,” and what does that mean anyway? The acquisition of Zen-like balance perhaps?
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Yes, we may as individuals be able to work and raise children, even maintain a social life and look great, but that is never an easy task and it takes great effort to make all of those things work well enough. Sacrifices must be made—that is not to say that we can’t make some, most or all of those sacrifices with acceptance or even joy. Yet the struggle to find balance with the perfect job, perfect husband, perfect kids, and maybe that one perfect dog seems unreasonable.
Our epistemology is based on setting up binary oppositions, always citing one in positive light and the other in negative (man/woman, work/home, day/night, sun/moon, reason/chaos, I/other), with women often aligned with the negative and passive side of the binary structure. In this case bread-winning is seen as masculine and care-giving as feminine, as per our traditional gender roles. And, unfortunately, society idolizes the masculine.
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It is forever the task of feminism to get beyond the male/female binary which legitimizes stereotypes. If men do not want to discuss work life balance maybe it is because that juggling act is not usually theirs to perform, a fact which leaves a lot of men aggrieved and missing out on their children’s lives. Men may be recompensed for their gender role financially and in terms of power, but in other ways they pay dearly.
In her Ted Talk Ann-Marie Slaughter, writer of Unfinished Business, which was re-released in 2016 in paperback containing a new afterword, said,
‘I suggest that real equality, full equality, does not just mean valuing women on male terms. It means creating a much wider range of equally respected choices for women and for men. And to get there, we have to change our workplaces, our policies and our culture.’
There is absolutely no question that structural barriers exist, that companies do not offer creative workplace solutions to allow for joint parental arrangements, and that most of the caregiving falls on women. There is no question that true equality would make work-life less of an issue for both partners.
The task of changing “workplaces, our policies and our culture” may be a slow drudgerous struggle but some companies have figured it out. Patagonia has a 100% mom retention rate, and an onsite child care program that allows parents to have quality time during working hours. Work-life integration is not only for parents—Patagonia encourages employees to get active and take the time to enjoy doing whatever they want. The attention to work-life has tripled the company’s profits, so it appears work-life integration is great for the bottom line.
The big question is: if we have models of success, why are we not using them? If you have the answer to this, email me. In the meantime, I plan to follow Patagonia’s lead and create opportunities for work-life integration.