The Myth of Balance

Two recent articles point out the impossibility of achieving balance in career and family for women.

• Part-timers fail at work, home
• Accepting the Unacceptable

You simply can not be in two places at once¹.

However, the way societies treat "part-time workers" is outrageous and perhaps something we can rectify.

Here's the money quote from the first article:

Part-time employment has failed to deliver either at home or in the office, with large numbers of white-collar workers suffering career burnout and family stress.

Those hit hardest are women professionals who had looked to part-time work as a way of balancing family responsibilities and working life.

But a report to be published today says many part-time professionals are being confronted with reduced incomes, career dead-ends and the inability to find enough family time.

The second article is even more depressing.

The problems with part-time work are compounded by the way men reduce the number of hours they work at home by MORE than the number of hours their partners reduce their paid work hours². So these women end up doing more work for less pay because they work "only part-time".

Until our entire society changes its attitudes, which I doubt will happen anytime soon, let's just agree to go easier on ourselves.

I think that many part-timers have already accepted the raw deal. Why else would studies repeatedly show that mothers who work part-time enjoy higher mental health than other mothers?

(Mothers who stay home full-time experience the highest stress and enjoy the lowest mental health with mothers working full-time in between. Mental health appears to peak at around 30 hours per week of paid work.)

If women who work part-time outside the home have the longest combined workday of all mothers, why are they the happiest?

One of my friends explained the paradox, "Perhaps it is because we don't expect things to be equal."

We haven't failed. Society has failed us.

Digression:
After Mark wound up his post-doc and before he started his first "real" job, we took a three week self-supported bicycle tour through France. One night, we met an older American couple dining at a neighboring table at a restaurant in Bonnieux. We had a wonderful chat about travel, work, career and family.

She had always worked full-time because science majors earn more than philosophy majors (even with gender discrimination). Anyway, the husband worked part-time while the children were young. For the most part, they were content with the way their children turned out. They were also content with their career choices and had visited an enviable list of places.

They both agreed that the most disappointed people were the women who stayed home full-time to raise children. They both saw in the children of SAHMs a high degree of self-centeredness and a sense of entitlement. They told horror stories of children demanding that their parents throw elaborate and expensive weddings or send them to expensive private colleges when the parents had no retirement savings.

"So what did those parents do?" I asked.

"They took out home equity loans and then sold their homes in NY and moved to Florida." They were simply too poor to continue to live in NY after their children were done with them.

Think of part-time work as asset allocation for time. The chances of both your career and home life tanking at the same time is smaller than if you put all your eggs in one basket.

[1] Unless you are a quantum mechanical state function under very specific laboratory conditions)

[2] This finding came from a published time use survey several years ago. The men self-reported how they spent their time. However, in studies that used self-reported time diaries in conjunction with observers in the homes, professional men were shown to over-report the time they spent on housework.