Being a Working Mother During COVID-19

“What are you reading currently?” I was asked this week by someone who I was executive coaching. I laughed and said if I am lucky, I get to read magazine articles online late at night. Because, as many of you know, reading a whole book would be a pipe dream for any working mother during COVID-19, particularly a parent of small children in this stay-at-home, work-at-home, school-at-home era that will clearly last the rest of 2020 and probably into 2021. Small children need you in a way older children do not and therefore as much as we wish to ignore this fact, babies and anyone under eight or nine are the working parent’s career disabler this year.

It is hard to be everywhere at once. Can we truly have a professional career this year and school and care for our kids at home? Are men having to ask themselves the same question, or is it primarily women who are being adversely affected? That is the litmus test for equality. An important caveat is there are really great men who are stay-at-home dads all of the time and should get more recognition than they do, same as stay-at-home mothers. Both roles deserve a medal, but to also say that this not about what went before in an imperfect world, but about the impossible pressure points of the new reality of the dual roles of full-time employee and full-time parent at once.

The New York Times writes that COVID’s sociological effects may even have scarred a whole generation of women and the underlying conditions such as the motherhood penalty versus the fatherhood bonus and good old fashioned ongoing wage and promotional gaps, along with the continued implicit belief that men belong at work or as leaders whereas women are there by choice somehow, has no doubt created the perfect storm.

The double bind for women lies in too much work to get humanly done in one day. Then there is the other tricky side of the coin, which shows that women are getting furloughed or fired in bigger numbers, and not hired this year at the same rate (for example in STEM jobs and technology firms) in the first place, leaving them helpless to a “whoever works gets priority to be-left alone to work” paradigm. Default career of teacher then begins for so many women who just feel that they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t in this new decade of unplanned disruption.

But, for those who are dual career households with kids, some men in super liberal as well as conservative neighborhoods are still playing golf in the afternoons in couples where women are putting in double or triple shifts between their job and kids. This is not a political-party-led values divide for once, because the inequality of the division of labor and the mental load continues for republicans and democrats alike when it comes to working women and specifically working mothers. Women’s work has returned as the elephant in the room, turning back the clock to gender roles we thought we had ditched. Some advice columns implicitly suggest this is the way it is and to accept it, while others – which is the camp I am in – suggest this is a good time to rebalance it. Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live) and one of the leading thinkers on this topic, suggests the following tips in her Harper’s Bazaar article:

1. Make the Invisible Visible
2. Believe All Time Is Created Equal
3. Focus on Your Why
4. Make Time for Planning
5. Own Tasks From Start to Finish
6. Focus on Fairness, Not 50/50
7. Modeling Matters (Including Out of Office Responses)
8. Burn Guilt and Shame
9. Be a Cultural Warrior (Care About Care)

Sociologist C. Wright Mills famously said, “Private troubles. Public issues.” Any issue that has appeared on our radar this year or ever, when it comes to experiencing what seems like personal or interpersonal challenges, is debated as individual choice or character traits, when it is always systemic and societal. The Lean In book and movement is a great example of how it was interpreted as a choice to do so, and completely missed the social constructs piece altogether.

Of course, the one choice that you do have is to collude or not collude with the way it has been. However, if it was that simple, we would all start the revolution today at work and home.
Sexism, much like racism, is a personal behavioral choice, but it is the other person and actually the system (how it runs) that has to mostly change for complete change. Flawed systems are not just based on sexist or racist people.

But, in the interest of looking at what you can do today, start with you. The organizational psychologists amongst us would argue Lewinian theory that states behavior is a function of both your personality and the environment you are in. Understand what works for you and map out not the world, but your world to understand the levers of getting other people to do better. What are the norms in your house or office around how things get done and who does them?

Now for the big stuff: deconstructing all the elements that have led to most women having massive amounts of internalized misogyny. Developmental psychologists Kegan and Lahey, in their book Immunity to Change, explore “mental complexity” and the holding of very competing beliefs at the same time (easier said than done, as cognitive dissonance is real and worldview is strong and unshakeable by mere facts) to understand that your truth is just your subjective truth based on the incumbent ideas of what is what. Whether at work or at home, the genome starts somewhere. Check your constructs, what have you been told that has been molded into your core beliefs?

How is that working out for you? No one says you have to keep doing it this way.

Nicki is our Head Coach and organizational psychologist. She will be guest coaching (virtually) at Working Mother magazine’s annual Multicultural Women’s National Conference this year. If you want a free exploratory session with Nicki, book here.