By the end of the day, 24 October 1975 came to be known by Icelandic men as ‘the long Friday’.1 Supermarkets sold out of sausages – ‘the favourite ready meal of the time’. Offices were suddenly flooded with children hopped up on the sweets they had been bribed with in an effort to make them behave. Schools, nurseries, fish factories all either shut down or ran at reduced capacity. And the women? Well, the women were having a Day Off.
1975 had been declared by the UN as a Women’s Year, and in Iceland women were determined to make it count. A committee was set up with representatives from Iceland’s five biggest women’s organisations. After some discussion they came up with the idea of a strike. On 24 October, no woman in Iceland would do a lick of work. No paid work, but also no cooking, no cleaning, no child care. Let the men of Iceland see how they coped without the invisible work women did every day to keep the country moving.
Ninety per cent of Icelandic women took part in the strike. Twenty-five thousand women gathered for a rally (the largest of more than twenty to take place throughout the country) in Reykjavík’s Downtown Square – a staggering figure in a country of then only 220,000 people.2 A year later, in 1976, Iceland passed the Gender Equality Act, which outlawed sex discrimination in workplaces and schools.3 Five years later, Vigdís Finnbogadòttir beat three men to become the world’s first democratically elected female head of state. And today, Iceland has the most gender-equal parliament in the world without a quota system.4 In 2017 the country topped the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index for the eighth year running.5
Iceland has also been named by The Economist as the best country to be a working woman.6 And while this is of course something to celebrate, there is also reason to take issue with The Economist’s phrasing, because if Iceland’s strike does anything it is surely to expose the term ‘working woman’ as a tautology. There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.
Globally, 75% of unpaid work is done by women,7 who spend between three and six hours per day on it compared to men’s average of thirty minutes to two hours.8 This imbalance starts early (girls as young as five do significantly more household chores than their brothers) and increases as they get older. Even in the country with the highest male unpaid working time (Denmark), men still spend less time on unpaid work than women in the country with the lowest female unpaid working time, Norway.9
Whenever I raise the issue of the unpaid-work imbalance between men and women, I am invariably faced with the comment, ‘But, surely, it’s getting better? Surely men are gradually doing more of their share?’ And at an individual level, sure, there are men who are doing more. But at a population level? Well, no, not really, because it turns out that the proportion of unpaid work men do is remarkably sticky. An Australian study found that even in wealthier couples who pay for domestic help, the remaining unpaid work is still distributed at the same male to female ratio, with women still doing the majority of what’s left.10 And as women have increasingly joined the paid labour force men have not matched this shift with a comparative increase in their unpaid work: women have simply increased their total work time, with numerous studies over the past twenty years finding that women do the majority of unpaid work irrespective of the proportion of household income they bring in.11
Even when men do increase their unpaid work, it isn’t by doing the routine housework12 that forms the majority of the workload,13 instead creaming off the more enjoyable activities like childcare. On average, 61% of housework is undertaken by women. In India, for example, five out of women’s six daily hours of unpaid labour are spent on housework, compared to men’s thirteen minutes.14 It’s also rare for men to take on the more personal, messy, emotionally draining aspects of elder care work. In the UK up to 70% of all unpaid dementia carers are women,15 and female carers are more likely to help with bathing, dressing, using the toilet and managing incontinence.16 Women are more than twice as likely as men to be providing intensive on-duty care for someone twenty-four hours a day, and to have been caring for someone with dementia for more than five years.17 Female carers also tend to receive less support than male carers so they end up feeling more isolated and being more likely to suffer from depression – in itself a risk factor for dementia.18
Men, meanwhile, have carried on engaging in leisure pursuits – watching TV, playing sports, playing computer games. US men manage to find over an hour more spare time per day to rest than their female counterparts,19 while in the UK, the Office for National Statistics found that men enjoy five hours more leisure time per week than women.20 And an Australian study found that what little leisure time women do have is ‘more fractured and combined with other tasks’ than men’s.21
The upshot is that around the world, with very few exceptions, women work longer hours than men. Sex-disaggregated data is not available for all countries, but for those where the data exists, the trend is clear. In Korea, women work for thirty-four minutes longer than men per day, in Portugal it’s ninety minutes, in China it’s forty-four minutes, and in South Africa it’s forty-eight minutes.22 The size of the gap varies from country to country (the World Bank estimates that in Uganda women work an average of fifteen hours every day to men’s average of nine hours), but the existence of a gap remains more or less constant.23
A 2010 US study on the imbalance between the amount of unpaid work done by male and female scientists found that female scientists do 54% of the cooking, cleaning and laundry in their households, adding more than ten hours to their nearly sixty-hour work week, while men’s contribution (28%) adds only half that time.24 The women in their data set also did 54% of parenting labour in their households, while male scientists did 36%. In India, 66% of women’s work time is spent on unpaid labour, while only 12% of men’s work is unpaid. In Italy, 61% of women’s work is unpaid compared to 23% of men’s. In France, 57% of their work is unpaid compared to 38% of men’s.
All this extra work is affecting women’s health. We have long known that women (in particular women under fifty-five) have worse outcomes than men following heart surgery. But it wasn’t until a Canadian study came out in 2016 that researchers were able to isolate women’s care burden as one of the factors behind this discrepancy. ‘We have noticed that women who have bypass surgery tend to go right back into their caregiver roles, while men were more likely to have someone to look after them,’ explained lead researcher Colleen Norris.25
This observation may go some way to explaining why a Finnish study26 found that single women recovered better from heart attacks than married women – particularly when put alongside a University of Michigan study27 which found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women. An Australian study similarly found that housework time is most equal by gender for single men and women; when women start to cohabit, ‘their housework time goes up while men’s goes down, regardless of their employment status’.28
The Economist isn’t alone in forgetting about women’s unpaid workload in their discussions of ‘work’. When business magazines like Inc publish think-pieces telling us that ‘science’ tells us ‘you’ shouldn’t work more than forty hours a week,29 or when the Guardian informs us that ‘your job could be killing you’ if you work for more than thirty-nine hours per week, they aren’t talking to women, because for women there is no ‘if’.30 Women do work well over this amount. Regularly. And it is killing them.
It starts with stress. In 2017 the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) released a report on stress in the workplace which revealed that, in every age range, women had higher rates of work-related stress, anxiety and depression than men.31 Overall, women were 53% more stressed than men, but the difference was particularly dramatic in the age range thirty-five to forty-four: for men the rate was 1,270 cases per 100,000 workers; for women it was nearly double that, at 2,250 cases per 100,000 workers.
The HSE concluded that this disparity was a result of the sectors women work in (stress is more prevalent in public service industries, such as education, health and social care), as well as ‘cultural differences in attitudes and beliefs between males and females around the subject of stress’. These may well be part of the reason, but the HSE’s analysis is sporting a pretty dramatic gender data gap.
Since 1930 the International Labour Organization (ILO) has stipulated that no one should exceed forty-eight hours a week at work, by which they meant paid work.32 Beyond this number of hours workers start incurring health costs. But there is a growing consensus that things may be a little bit more complicated than that.
A 2011 analysis of data collected on British civil servants between 1997 and 2004 found that working more than fifty-five hours per week significantly increased women’s risk of developing depression and anxiety – but did not have a statistically significant impact on men.33 Even working forty-one to fifty-five hours seemed to increase the probability of mental health problems in women. This was in line with a 1999 Canadian study34 and a 2017 analysis35 of six years of data from the Household Income Labour Dynamics of Australia Survey, both of which found that women had to work far fewer paid hours than men before their mental health started to deteriorate.
But it’s not only about mental health. Swedish studies have found that moderate overtime work increases women’s hospitalisation and mortality rate, but has a protective effect for men.36 A 2016 US paper on the impact of long work hours over a thirty-two-year period found a similar gender disparity.37 Working moderately long hours (forty-one to fifty hours per week) was ‘associated with less risk of contracting heart disease, chronic lung disease, or depression’ in men. By contrast, such hours for female workers led to consistent and ‘alarming increases’ in life-threatening diseases, including heart disease and cancer. Women’s risk of developing these diseases started to rise when they worked more than forty hours per week. If they worked for an average of sixty hours per week for over thirty years, their risk of developing one of these diseases tripled.
So, what’s going on? Is this all proof that women are in fact the weaker sex?
Not exactly. In fact, the Australian study found that although the average man could work substantially longer hours than the average woman before his mental health was negatively impacted, there was one group of workers for whom the gender gap was much narrower. These workers are called the ‘unencumbered’, that is, workers with little to no care responsibilities. For the unencumbered, both men’s and women’s work-hour thresholds were much closer to the forty-eight hours stipulated by the ILO. The problem is, women aren’t unencumbered. It’s just that the work they do is invisible.
When Ryan Gosling thanked his partner Eva Mendes at the 2017 Golden Globes for her unpaid work, acknowledging that without it he would not be on stage accepting an award, he marked himself out as a rare man.38 Far more usual is the impressively unperceptive man Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman wrote about in 2018: ‘“I have kids and I work full-time,” one boss crossly told a friend of mine who asked to have Fridays off. “Yes, and your wife quit her job to look after the kids,” my friend couldn’t quite bring herself to reply.’39
This man simply couldn’t see – or perhaps didn’t want to see – all the unpaid work that gets done around him. The unpaid work that enables him to have kids and easily work full-time in paid employment. It doesn’t occur to him that the reason he doesn’t need Fridays off is not that he’s better than his female co-worker, but rather that, unlike him, she doesn’t have a full-time wife at home.
Of course most male bosses in heterosexual relationships won’t have a full-time wife at home, because most women can’t afford to quit work entirely. Instead, women accommodate their care responsibilities by going part-time. In the UK, 42% of women compared to 11% of men work part-time, and women make up 75% of part-time workers.40 And part-time work is paid less per hour than full-time work – in part because it’s rare that a high-level post is offered as a job-share or with flexible working hours. Women end up working in jobs below their skill level that offer them the flexibility they need41 – but not the pay they deserve.42
In Scotland in 2016 the average hourly gender wage gap was 15% – but this average hid the substantial disparity between full-time and part-time work.43 For those in full-time work the hourly gap went down to 11%, but the hourly pay gap between men working full-time and women working part-time was 32%. In 2017, median hourly pay for full-time employees across the UK was £14 per hour,44 compared with £9.12 for part-time employees.45
Some call women’s segregation into low-paid work a choice. But it’s a funny kind of choice when there is no realistic option other than the children not being cared for and the housework not getting done. In any case, fifty year’s worth of US census data46 has proven that when women join an industry in high numbers, that industry attracts lower pay and loses ‘prestige’,47 suggesting that low-paid work chooses women rather than the other way around.
This choice-that-isn’t-a-choice is making women poor. A recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study found that the gender pay gap in hourly wages is substantially higher in countries where women spend a large amount of time on unpaid care compared to men.48 In the UK, women make up 61% of those earning below the living wage,49 and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that the gender pay gap widens over the twelve years after a child is born to 33%, as women’s careers – and wages – stagnate.50 The US pay gap between mothers and married fathers is three times higher than the pay gap between men and women without children.51
Over time, these pay gaps add up. In Germany a woman who has given birth to one child can expect to earn up to $285,000 less by the time she’s forty-five than a woman who has worked fulltime without interruption.52 Data from France, Germany, Sweden and Turkey shows that even after accounting for social transfers that some countries employ to recognise the contribution women make through their unpaid care work, women earn between 31% and 75% less than men over their lifetimes.53
This all leaves women facing extreme poverty in their old age, in part because they simply can’t afford to save for it. But it’s also because when governments are designing pension schemes, they aren’t accounting for women’s lower lifetime earnings. This isn’t exactly a data gap, because the data does mostly exist. But collecting the data is useless unless governments use it. And they don’t.
Largely on the advice of international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the last two decades have seen an increasing global shift from social insurance to (often privately managed) individual capital account schemes.54 The payments a pensioner receives are directly based on their past contributions and the number of years during which the person is expected to collect benefits. This means women are penalised for the following: having to take time out for unpaid care work; early retirement (still a legal requirement in certain countries and professions); and for living longer.
Other policies simply benefit men more than women. These include Australia’s recent tax concessions for pension funds (men are likely to have a higher pension pot),55 and the UK’s recent shift to auto-enrolment. As with many pensions around the world, this policy makes the standard error of forgetting to compensate women for the time they have to take out of the paid labour force to attend to their unpaid care load. As a result, women ‘miss out on vital contributions to their pension’.56 More unforgivable is the British system’s failure to account for the fact that women are more likely to have several part-time jobs in order to combine their paid and unpaid workloads.57 In order to qualify for the auto-enrolment pension, a worker must earn at least £10,000 a year. But while many women do earn past this threshold, they earn it from multiple employers – and combined earnings are not counted towards the threshold. This means that ‘32% or 2.7 million employed women will not earn enough to benefit from auto-enrolment compared to 14% of employed men’.58
A counterpoint is provided by Brazil, Bolivia and Botswana, which have achieved close to universal pension coverage and smaller gender gaps ‘thanks to the introduction of widely available non-contributory pensions’.59 Women in Bolivia are credited with one year of pension contributions per child, up to a maximum of three children. As a side benefit (and a more long-term solution to the problem of feminised poverty), pension credits for the main carer have also been found to encourage men to take on more of the unpaid care load.60 Which raises the question: is women’s unpaid work under valued because we don’t see it – or is it invisible because we don’t value it?
Alongside addressing male bias in pensions, governments must address feminised poverty in old age by introducing policies that enable women to stay in paid work. That starts – but certainly doesn’t end – with properly paid maternity leave.
EU countries with comprehensive support for working parents have the highest rates of female employment.61 Numerous studies world wide have shown that maternity leave has a positive impact on women’s participation in the paid labour market.62 This impact is seen not only in the raw numbers of women employed, but also in the number of hours they work and the income they earn. It has been shown to be particularly beneficial for low-income women.63
There is a caveat, however: not all maternity-leave policies are made equal. The length of time and the amount of money on offer matter. If women aren’t given enough time off, there is a risk they will leave the paid labour force entirely,64 or transition to part-time work.65 When Google noticed that they were losing women who had just given birth at twice the rate of other employees, they increased their maternity leave from three months at partial pay to five months at full pay. The attrition rate dropped 50%.66
With the exception of the US, all industrialised countries guarantee workers paid maternity leave,67 but most countries aren’t hitting the sweet spot either in pay or the length of leave allowed. And they certainly aren’t hitting them both together. A recent Australian analysis found that the optimum length of paid maternity leave for ensuring women’s continued participation in paid labour was between seven months to a year,68 and there is no country in the world that offers properly paid leave for that length of time.
Twelve countries in the OECD offer full replacement wages, but none of these countries offers more than twenty weeks, with the average being fifteen weeks. Portugal, for instance, one of the countries that offers 100% replacement wages, offers only six weeks of leave. Australia, by contrast offers eighteen weeks of maternity leave – but at 42% of earnings. Ireland offers twenty-six weeks – but at only 34% of earnings. For women in these countries the full length of time they’re technically allowed to take off can be, as a result, academic.
British politicians like to boast (particularly in the run-up to the EU referendum) that the UK offers a ‘more generous’ maternity leave than the fourteen weeks mandated by the EU’s 1992 Pregnant Workers Directive.69 This is technically true, but it doesn’t mean that women in the UK get a good deal in comparison to their European counterparts. The average length of paid maternity leave across the EU is twenty-two weeks.70 This figure hides substantial regional variation in both pay and length. Croatia offers thirty weeks at full pay, compared to the UK’s offering of thirty-nine weeks at an average of 30% pay. In fact a 2017 analysis placed the UK twenty-second out of twenty-four European countries on the length of ‘decently paid maternity leave’ it offered its female workforce (1.4 months).
And now that Britain is leaving the EU, the country is likely to fall even further below its European neighbours. Since 2008, the EU has been trying to extend its maternity-leave ruling to twenty weeks on full pay.71 This proposal was stuck in stalemate for years, and finally abandoned in 2015 thanks in no small part to the UK and its business lobby, which campaigned strenuously against it.72 Without the UK, the women of the EU will be free to benefit from this more progressive leave allowance. Meanwhile Martin Calla-nan (now a Brexit minister) made a speech to the European Parliament in 2012 in which he included the Pregnant Workers Directive in his list of the ‘barriers to actually employing people’ which ‘we could scrap’.73
For some women in Britain, no maternity leave at all is already a reality, because the Pregnant Workers Directive doesn’t cover female politicians. Women in the national Parliament have access to maternity leave, but there is no provision for them to vote without turning up in person. Technically, women on maternity leave can make use of a system called ‘pairing’, where one MP is matched up with an MP who would vote in the opposite direction, and neither vote. However, in July 2018 we saw just how inadequate this solution is, when the Conservative MP Brandon Lewis, who was paired with the Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson, mysteriously ‘forgot’ he was paired when it came to two crucial Brexit votes that the government won by an extremely narrow margin.
But bad as this is, it’s even worse in local government. Under Section 85 of the Local Government Act 1972, ‘if a councillor does not attend council for six months, they lose their position unless the authority has approved their absence’. You might hope that an approved absence would include maternity leave, but a report commissioned by women’s charity the Fawcett Society found that only twelve councils (4%) in England have a formal maternity leave policy, and although some have informal arrangements, three-quarters offer nothing at all.74 And so, as a result of policies which forget that half the population can and often do give birth, women lose their jobs.
In 2015, councillor Charlene McLean had to stay in hospital for months after she gave birth prematurely. Despite having remained in contact with the council, and having been informed she had normal workers’ rights, when she returned to work she was told she would have to stand for re-election because she had been off for six months. Even after what happened to McLean, Newham Council did not change its rules to account for women’s bodily realities, instead simply opting to ensure that all expectant mothers received the right information about their lack of rights.75 The following year Brigid Jones, a Birmingham City councillor, was told that she would have to step down from her role as cabinet member for children’s services if she became pregnant.
Things are worse for women in the US, which is one of only four countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee at least some paid maternity leave.76 The Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees twelve weeks of unpaid leave – but, amongst other restrictions you are eligible only if you have worked for a business with at least 50 other employees for the past twelve months.77 As a result, even unpaid leave is only available to 60% of the workforce.78 There is nothing to prevent the remaining 40% of US women being fired. And of course the number of women who can afford to take unpaid leave is lower: one in four American mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth.
For some US women the gaps are filled in at a state or industry level. In January 2016, President Barack Obama gave federal workers six weeks of paid care leave,79 while four states (California, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey, along with Washington DC) now offer paid family leave, funded through employee social insurance.80 Some women are lucky enough to work at companies that offer maternity leave. But even with these gaps plugged, around 85% of US women have no form of paid leave.81
There have been various failed attempts to address this through legislation, a recent one being Trump’s proposal in the 2018 federal budget to pay new mothers six weeks of unemployment benefit.82 This did not pass, but even if it had, the length allowed and the amount paid would not be sufficient to impact on women’s participation in the paid labour force. And this is something that the US badly needs, as, in contrast to other industrialised nations, US women’s paid labour force participation is actually decreasing – with a 2013 study finding that the lack of family-friendly policies accounts for nearly a third of the discrepancy.83
And so the US government continues to attempt to find ways to fix this apparently intractable problem. The latest wheeze, however, provides little more than another example of how gender-blind policy can unwittingly discriminate against women.84 As I write in 2018, Republicans in Congress are getting excited about the idea of letting people collect social security benefits early to pay for maternity leave – and then delaying their retirement payments to offset the costs. It’s easy to see why the idea is attractive: it comes without a cost, at least to the government. But it is far from cost-free to women. The gender pay gap and the time women take off to care for children already results in lower social security benefits for women, a problem this policy will exacerbate.85 And given women live longer and spend more of their later years in ill health they arguably need more money for retirement, not less.86 As a result, the main impact of this policy would be to compound the problem of feminised old-age poverty.
US universities provide another example of how gender-blind leave policies can end up discriminating against women. US academics in the tenure-track system have seven years to receive tenure after getting their first academic job or they’re fired. This system is biased against women – especially women who want to have children, in part because the years between completing a PhD and receiving tenure (thirty to forty) coincide with the years these women are most likely to try for a baby.87 The result? Married mothers with young children are 35% less likely than married fathers of young children to get tenure-track jobs,88 and among tenured faculty 70% of men are married with children compared to 44% of women.89
Universities have done little to address this – and even those that have tried, have often done so in gender-blind ways that may end up exacerbating the problem they were trying to solve.90 In the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of US universities adopted what was intended as a family-friendly policy: parents would receive an extra year per child to earn tenure. But it isn’t gender-neutral ‘parents’ who need this extra year. It is specifically mothers. As the University of Michigan’s Alison Davis-Blake drily noted in the New York Times, ‘giving birth is not a gender-neutral event’.91 While women may be (variously) throwing up, going to the toilet every five minutes, changing nappies or plugged into their breast pump during this extra year, men get to dedicate more time to their research. So instead of giving a leg up to parents, this policy gave a leg up to men, and at women’s expense: an analysis of assistant professors hired at the top fifty US economics departments between 1985 and 2004 found that the policies ultimately led to a 22% decline in women’s chances of gaining tenure at their first job. Meanwhile men’s chances increased by 19%.92
The analysis came in a working paper and the totality of its findings have been challenged93 – but given what we already know about the disparity between mothers and fathers gaining tenure, and given what the data tells us about who actually does the care work (not to mention the gestating-and-giving-birth-and-breast feeding work) there seems little reason not to make such policies dependent on who is actually carrying the child, and/or who the main carer is. To date, this has not happened.
This is not to say that paternity leave is not important. It certainly is. Beyond the simple matter of fairness (fathers should have the right to be involved in their children’s lives), the data we have shows that properly paid paternity leave has a positive impact on female employment. At close to 80% by 2016, Sweden has the highest female employment figures in the EU.94 It also has one of the highest levels of paternity-leave uptake in the world, with nine out of ten fathers taking an average of three to four months’ leave.95 This compares with a more typical OECD level of one in five fathers taking any parental leave at all – falling to one in fifty in Australia, the Czech Republic and Poland.96
This disparity is unsurprising: Sweden has one of the most generous (and, when it was introduced, innovative) paternity-leave policies in the world. Since 1995, Sweden has reserved a month of parental leave (paid at 90% of earnings) exclusively for fathers. This month cannot be transferred to the mother: the father must use this leave or the couple lose it from their overall leave allowance. In 2002, this increased to two months and in 2016 it was further increased to three months.97
Prior to the introduction of the ‘use it or lose it’ leave for fathers, only about 6% of men in Sweden took paternity leave, despite the fact that it had been available for them since 1974. In other words, men didn’t take the leave on offer until forced to by the government. This pattern has been repeated in Iceland, where the introduction of a ‘daddy quota’ doubled the amount of leave taken by men, and in South Korea, where the number of men taking leave rose more than threefold following the introduction in 2007 of a father-specific entitlement.98 Proving, however, that no good data goes unignored, in 2015 the UK government saw fit to introduce a shared parental leave policy with no allowance reserved exclusively for men. Predictably, the take-up has been ‘woefully low’, with just one in a hundred men requesting leave in the twelve months after it was introduced.99
The introduction of a daddy quota has not been a marked success in Japan, but this is in no small part due to a design that doesn’t account for either the gender pay gap or women’s bodily reality. While fathers have two months reserved for them out of a possible fourteen months of shared leave, after the first six months of leave, pay decreases from two-thirds of the parent’s salary to just half. Given that women need to recover from pregnancy and giving birth, and may be breastfeeding, they are most likely to take leave first, leaving the higher earner (Japanese men earn on average 27% more than Japanese women) to take the biggest salary hit.100 It is unsurprising, therefore, that only 2% of Japanese men take the months they are entitled to.101 Japan’s extreme work culture likely also plays a part here – in a country where even holidays are frowned on, fathers report being shamed and penalised at work for taking parental leave.
It is worth persevering, however, because the benefits of policies that enshrine in law equal parental responsibility for a child that, after all, two people have created, are long-lasting. Men who take paternity leave tend to be more involved in childcare in the future102 – perhaps explaining why a 2010 Swedish study found that a mother’s future earnings increase by an average of 7% for every month of leave taken by the father.103
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 full-time 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 full-time 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
In the US, what is an allowable work expense is decided by the IRS, which explains that ‘Generally you cannot deduct personal, living, or family expenses.’129 But what counts as a personal expense is debatable – which is where Dawn Bovasso comes in. Bovasso is one of the few female creative directors in US advertising. She is also a single mother. So when her firm announced that it was hosting a directors’ dinner, Bovasso had a decision to make: was this dinner worth the $200 it would cost her for a sitter and travel?130 Bovasso’s male colleagues on the whole had to do no such mental accounting: yes, men can be single parents, but they are a rare beast. In the UK, 90% of single parents are women.131 In the US the figure is over 80%.132 In Bovasso’s case, her male colleagues were able to just check their calendar and accept or decline. And most of them accepted. In fact not only did they accept, they also booked the hotel next to the restaurant, so they could drink. And unlike her sitter, this cost was claimable on company expenses.
The implicit bias is clear: expense codes are based on the assumption that the employee has a wife at home taking care of the home and the kids. This work doesn’t need paying for, because it’s women’s work, and women don’t get paid for it. Bovasso sums it up: ‘You can get $30 for takeout if you work late (because your wife isn’t there to cook you dinner) or $30 for Scotch if you want to drink your face off, but you can’t get $30 for a sitter (because your wife is at home with the kids).’ In the event, Bovasso was able to get her company to cover the cost of her childcare – but as she points out, ‘these have been exceptions I’ve had to ask for’. Which is women all over: always the exception, never the default.
And in any case, not all employers will grant these exceptions. The Fawcett Society’s 2017 report on local government in England and Wales found that despite regulations dating from 2003 that call for ‘all councils to offer an allowance to cover the caring costs that councillors incur when fulfilling their role’, in reality, provision is patchy.133 Some councils don’t reimburse caring expenses at all, and most that do only pay a ‘contribution’. Rochdale Borough Council’s scheme ‘pays just £5.06 per hour, and specifically states that it is “a contribution rather than full reimbursement of carers’ expenses” – although this important caveat is notably not made for travel expenses’. Adding to the sense that this is a matter of priorities rather than resources, most local-government meetings take place in the evening (when childcare is most likely to be needed), and although it is standard practice in many countries from the US to Sweden for councillors to remotely attend or vote at meetings, current law does not allow for this cheaper alternative.
It is abundantly clear that the culture of paid work as a whole needs a radical overhaul. It needs to take into account that women are not the unencumbered workers the traditional workplace has been designed to suit, and that while men are more likely to fit into this automaton ideal, increasing numbers of them no longer want to. After all, it is simply a fact that none of us, including businesses, could do without the invisible, unpaid work carers do. So it is time to stop penalising them for doing it. Instead, we must start recognising it, valuing it, and designing the paid workplace to account for it.