How Much for a Personal Serving of Work-Life Balance?

By Gigi DeVault (Munich)

I was doing fine until I released the whale bath toy into the bubbles from the Jacuzzi jets. I was fulfilling a working mother’s recurring dream. It goes like this: I slide into the frothing water—my shoulders are the tip of a languorous berg. I pour edelweiss nectar from the two delicate bottles of St. Germaine nabbed from the mini-bar; the faux cut-glass catches the glow of flickering tea lights lining the tub. Over the rim of my glass, I can see the rainbow-colored lights of the Santa Monica pier framed by the window of my upgraded suite. My colleagues are tucked away in a utilitarian hotel in downtown Los Angeles. This is my alone time, when for one brief interlude before the phone next rings, life can be perfect. Except that, the floating rubber bath toy brought an image of my daughter’s sweet face into my inner sanctum. “Mine, Mommy,” she would say, scooping up the bath toy in her dimpled three-year old hand.* Then there is a knock on the door. “Housekeeping.” Even here, hiding on the beach, I am found.

And what about the person with the disembodied voice that calls out to me on the other side of the door? If her life is as busy as mine, will she find a way to retreat and claim some blissful time alone? I want it to be so.

Is work-life balance just another one of those luxuries we covet – like the items in the Desire & Acquire exclusive shopping service accessed through the American Express Departures magazine? “In many ways, yes,” wrote Lisa Belkin in her New York Times column, Motherlode. “Only those with both financial security and some control over their work lives”—Belkin’s readers insist on this distinction— “have the freedom to recalibrate it.” Just what is required to recalibrate one’s work life?

A study jointly released in January of this year by the Center for American Progress and the Center for WorkLife Law reports that work-life conflicts are not well-resolved for American working women, regardless of how they attempt to parry the workforce dragon. Joan Williams and Heather Boushey, the authors of The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict: The Poor, the Professionals, and the Missing Middle [PDF], make salient the reasons why discussions about work-life balance cannot be had without considering the context of economic strata that workers inhabit. The report explains why configurations of work-family conflicts for poor working women, middle-class working women, and professional women, call for different solutions.

Elite Group Legitimately Captures Time for Relaxation

In a recent article in the New York Times about the pros and cons of business travel for working mothers, Lisa Foderaro provided readers with over a half-dozen examples of professional working women living some version of my hide-away in a five-star on the Santa Monica beach. Foderaro featured an elite group consisting of a portfolio manager, a business owner, a financial services marketing / business development lead, a managing director for a bond insurance company, a publicist, and an executive director of a nation-wide non-profit—who, by the way, is married to a venture capital finance consultant whose flexible schedule allows him to travel with his wife and toddler son. Master organizers all, these women have figured out how to keep things running smoothly at home in their absence, and how to make maximimum use of the non-working moments of their away-time. However, Williams and Boushey would say that this is only part of the professional working women’s story. Essentially, the women in Foderaro’s article captured down time on company time because, today, the firm owns you while you are in transit. The electronic devices these women tote can be likened to the electronic monitoring device worn by Martha Stewart while under house arrest. Professional women keep within range.

Our white-collar professional enjoying high-end hospitality and the diligent hotel housekeeper are more alike than different in their ability to address work-life conflict. The economic reality, as expressed by Nancy Folbre in Economix, is that “Paid work is a stiff aspect of daily life and an unyielding necessity for people who pay their own bills.” Each woman is held captive by the nature of the work she does and by her desire to keep her job. Sure, the professional woman can demand perks like flexible hours and paid leave from her employer. But the reality is that the long hours she must put in mock the existence of those benefits. She dare not take advantage of benefits that could make her appear to be less dedicated or focused on her job.

Keeping Family Needs Off-Stage

Chances are, the hotel housekeeper I conjured while fighting guilt in the Jacuzzi falls into the category of poor working women, whose jobs are characterized by inconsistent scheduling, tight supervision, and little opportunity for overtime or promotion. The hotel housekeeper cannot negotiate for the flexible work benefits that she so desperately needs. And when this hard-working woman uses the word flexible, she is wondering if her back will hold out so that she can still pick up her grandchildren when she retires—if she can retire.

Professional women may have options and leverage unavailable to poor working women, but neither worker can truly “afford” the risk to job security that family life demands. But what about the group labeled “the missing middle” in The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict ? Although the working women in this group make up about 50% of American families, they are the least likely to benefit from employment law and child-care policies. Unlike their European counterparts, families who fall in the middle have few social policies to support maternity / paternity leave or childcare subsidies—flexible work arrangements that, in other countries, may not come with the hidden cost of job retention issues or the opportunity cost of being overlooked for promotion. The collective voice of this missing middle is not heard as stridently or often, as the voice of poor working women. Attention often comes pejoratively to poor working women. Belkin notes in Motherlode that the missing middle is less often featured in the news for some tragic, desperate act of “neglect” of their children precipitated by an incomplete safety net.

You Won’t Get Slack Time If You Slacken Your Pace

The U.S. President’s report Work-Life Balance and the Economics of Workplace Flexibility [PDF] brings into clear focus the work-life balance disparity [PDF] among families in different educational and income-based strata. Generally, working mothers segue more often between paid jobs and unpaid responsibilities (what economists refer to as nonmarket work) than working fathers. Yet, according to the Economic Advisors’ report, it is men who tend to have slightly more workplace flexibility than women, ostensibly to deal with nonmarket work. Increased workplace flexibility may also result in better rested workers who can spend more time with their children.

A poll conducted in 2008-9, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being survey, explored the degree to which Americans feel rested and found that women, individuals with the lowest income, and/or with minor children were the most likely to report that they did not feel well rested. Men, individuals without children at home, and the wealthiest survey participants (earning $90,000 or more annually) were the most likely to say that they felt well rested. Women, particularly with lower incomes, are less likely to feel rested than men, whether or not they are parents. A range of variables correlated with income impact the degree to which a woman with a lower income can resolve her work-life conflict. In her article on the study, Catherine Rampell notes, “Daily stress, poorer physical health, greater financial worry, and lower job satisfaction, erode a poor working woman’s reserves.” Is it any wonder that feeling rested can be a marker for the level of work-life balance a woman achieves?

You Only Get What You Can Afford

Belkin notes that the income cutoffs in these studies on work-life conflict are less important than a “recognition that no one single group has more of a claim on these challenges than any other — it is no more or less important for professional parents to feel secure about who takes care of their children while they work as it is for poor parents.” This conceit is the foundation of a new policy campaign in Washington, D.C.

According to Sloan Workplace Flexibility 2010, the number of American children whose parents are working full-time has doubled from the one-quarter mark since 1968 to nearly one-half. Workplace Flexibility 2010 is a national campaign to promote a comprehensive set of policy solutions designed to increase access to flexible work arrangements for this growing segment of Americans. Critics of the campaign have expressed concern that “flexibility” can read “vulnerability to pay cuts.” The confluence of a new openness to flexible work arrangements and the global economic crisis has resulted in a downward trajectory of paid employee work time. German workers have a word for it—Kurzarbeit, literally “short work.” Certainly policy efforts to strengthen employer and government attention to workplace flexibility would be good, but such changes need to simultaneously address family-responsibility discrimination.

As policies generated by the Workplace Flexibility 2010 report take root, and women increasingly feel that Big Brother “has their back,” there may not be a sea change, but the landscape will have been noticeably altered. Professional working women are increasing the press for arrangements to balance family and work obligations, over time; their efforts may exert an influence that reaches across the fabric of working America. In their book, Womenomics, broadcasters Claire Shipman and Kay Katty wrote about the impact professional women have on the corporate bottom line and candidly give advice on trade-offs that may be had to construct a more balanced work life.

Do working women in America ever really receive a personal serving of work-life balance? Can work-life balance be given to a woman, in the form of a legislative gift, all shiny and new, wrapped like a Bergdorf-Goodman package? Or must a working woman carve out her own personal serving of work-life balance, conspicuously wielding a shiny Wüsthof in front of her fellows, her boss, and the human resources department? Shipman and Katty say that women have to ask for what they want. That is well and good, but were it not for promising national policies like those being developed under the aegis of the Council of Economic Advisors, work-life balance would likely continue as the currency of professional women lucky enough to negotiate from a position of power.

*The author is compelled to point out that the 3-year old has just turned 33. The mother’s guilt she remembers from that glorious day of escape from work and family is as fresh as the ocean breeze caressing sunbathers on any given summer day at that southern California hotel. But it was worth it.