Lay down at five, jump up at six, and start all over again
’Cause I’m a woman! W-O-M-A-N, I’ll say it again.
—“I’M A WOMAN,”
Lyrics by Jerome Lieber
I RECENTLY GAVE A speech at the Massachusetts Conference for Women, and the speaker who preceded me explained that women must be deliberate when negotiating with male colleagues because men aren’t as skilled at multitasking as women are. In my head, I thought, Women can’t multitask, either. That’s a delusion.
It’s a delusion many people share, and there are hints of truth in it. I used to put multitasking on my résumé under “Special Skills.” It wasn’t until I read the actual research proving that the human mind can’t truly do two things at once that I started to doubt my own abilities. Some animal brains can multitask, like the pigeon’s, but the human mind falls short of the pigeon’s on this one very specific skill. What we do is not work on two things at once but rapidly switch from one task to another. That’s our form of “multitasking.”
I have talked about multitasking before in connection with conversation, as the attempt to both talk with a friend and check your email inevitably leads to distraction and reduced intimacy. But the main reason we try to multitask is because we believe it’s more efficient and ultimately increases our productivity. As our obsession with hyperproductivity has increased, so has our belief that we are able to multitask and that it helps us get more done in less time.
The truth is wholly the opposite in almost every circumstance, if neuroscience is to be believed. In study after study, we’ve found that we are slower at completing tasks when we switch from one activity to another than we are when we simply repeat the same activity. In other words, if you shut down every tab of your browser, mute your phone, and close your email inbox, you’ll finish the memo you’re writing in significantly less time.
Switching back and forth is not efficient. The more complex the task we are switching to, the longer it takes our brain to adjust. The accumulated cost can be so high that the American Psychological Association recommends that we “choose strategies that boost [our brain’s] efficiency—above all, by avoiding multitasking, especially with complex tasks.”
For people like me who spent years doing not two things but three or four things at once, the news is even worse. Research shows that people who think of themselves as “heavy multitaskers” are worse at distinguishing between useful information and irrelevant details. We also tend to be less organized mentally (it’s chaos up there) and have more trouble switching from one task to another, not less. Practice at multitasking makes us less perfect.
And here’s the worst news of all: “Heavy multitaskers” have the same trouble sorting through information and organizing their thoughts even when they aren’t multitasking. This suggests that repeated attempts to make your mind do something it’s not designed to do can actually do damage to your gray matter. The psychologist Clifford Nass of Stanford told NPR that people who multitask often “are worse at most kinds of thinking not only required for multitasking but what we generally think of as involving deep thought.” Over time, Nass said, “their cognitive processes were impaired.”
Here’s a wrinkle, though: Women may actually be better at multitasking than men. This is the kind of nuance that I love about science: Women aren’t good at it; they’re just generally better than men. An interesting experiment conducted in Switzerland suggests that estrogen may help women’s brains better handle the rapid switching from one task to another.
Keep in mind that we’re not talking about complex activities. The researchers asked participants to walk on a treadmill while identifying the color in which some words were printed. Women under the age of sixty performed better than men and older women. When the older women and men were asked to concentrate on the assigned task, the coordination of their swinging arms, something we rarely think about consciously, decreased. The right arm slowed dramatically, and it’s important to note that the swing of the right arm is controlled by the same side of the brain involved in sorting words and colors: the prefrontal cortex. Researchers noted that estrogen receptors are probably also located in that part of the brain, and so the presence or absence of estrogen could explain the difference in performance between men and postmenopausal women.
Those results are not conclusive, of course, but they are suggestive. And we can add that study to other research into gender differences, including an experiment carried out in Russia. Scientists put 140 people through a number of relatively simple cognitive tests, all related to switching tasks and focus, and they discovered that women had to put in less mental effort in order to multitask. Svetlana Kuptsova, one author of the study, said the results “suggest that women might find it easier than men to switch attention and their brains do not need to mobilize extra resources in doing so, as opposed to male brains.”
So when it comes to simple tasks (note: writing emails and talking on the phone or checking your social media are not simple tasks), women might be better at switching back and forth than men. It’s also true that neuroscientists don’t condemn as harshly the practice of trying to do two uncomplicated things at the same time, like talking on the phone while folding laundry. But, and this is a big but, when it comes to more complex tasks, including most of the things we do while on the job, there’s no evidence that women are better at multitasking, and there’s plenty of evidence that trying to do it is really terrible for your brain.
The issue of multitasking is gendered because women, in my experience, are more likely to think they’re good at multitasking and much more likely to spend their days trying to do too many things at the same time. So let me add yet one more data point to this discussion: Women are probably more damaged by the belief that multitasking is not only possible but good for productivity.
The sociologist Barbara Schneider and her colleagues wanted to figure out if multitasking was stressful for most people. She discovered that men were more likely to think multitasking was pleasurable but were also less likely to engage in it. Women reported multitasking for nearly fifty hours a week and it stressed them out. The group that was most stressed by trying to do multiple things at the same time was mothers.
Men said they felt relieved when they headed home from work, but women felt the opposite. Some women even referred to the hours just after work as “arsenic time.” “Because the first thing that they had to start worrying about was getting dinner, interfacing with their kids, dealing with all of the household chores that needed to be done,” Schneider told NPR. The research clearly shows stress rises as women walk through their doors, knowing they must not only continue to respond to work emails but also handle personal administrative duties in the place that is supposed to be a haven. They may be mentally running through a list of tasks that need to be accomplished before they can really relax.
Even when they’re at work, women tend to put more pressure on themselves. Data collected by the Captivate Network shows men are 35 percent more likely to take a break while on the job, “just to relax.” Men are also more likely to go out to lunch, take a walk, and take personal time during working hours. Melanie Shreffler, director of the Cassandra Report, told Forbes, “These women worked like crazy in school, and in college, and then they get into the workforce and they are exhausted.”
So if there is a gender difference, it may be less about biology and more about women’s reluctance to relax, combined with societal pressures to do more work around both the home and the workplace.
Although women have been working for millennia, they first began to flood into the workplace in the 1970s. That era is often referred to as the “Quiet Revolution,” and the revolution is still going on nearly a half-century later. Women not only made up much larger portions of college classes during the seventies (they now outnumber men among college graduates) but also began to take jobs in fields that were once almost exclusively male, like law, medicine, and engineering.
Women were taking jobs that required long hours away from the home. They started refusing to quit their jobs when children were born and refusing to leave work early every time a kid got sick. Not coincidentally, many people in industrialized nations started to warn about the dangers of “the Latchkey Generation.” That’s what they called Gen X kids, those born between 1961 and 1981, like me.
By 1994, more than half of kids under eleven years of age had mothers in the workforce, and many people assumed that was a dangerous thing. The economist Sylvia Hewitt, who wrote the 1991 book When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children said, “Child neglect has become endemic to our society.”
The “latchkey crisis” became a national scandal in the United States. Voices in politics and the media shamed women who held full-time jobs, claiming their selfishness was endangering the well-being of an entire generation. Many workers responded by cutting back their hours or leaving their jobs entirely, and most of those workers were mothers.
In the 1990s, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild was studying a Fortune 500 company that prided itself on its progressive work policies intended to promote a healthy work-life balance among employees and allow workers to spend plenty of time with their families. In the first chapter of the book The Time Bind, based on her observations at that company, she describes the home life of Gwen Bell, who worked in the PR office. While the men in the executive offices proudly boasted about being “sixty-hour men” (named after how many hours they worked a week), “Gwen’s stories are more like situation comedies: stories about forgetting to shop and coming home to a refrigerator containing little more than wilted lettuce and a jar of olives, stories told in a spirit of hopeless amusement.”
Gwen, like so many of her coworkers, was aware of the possibility to enroll in flex-time, or to request fewer hours. But there was an unspoken assumption that someone who worked fewer hours was not dedicated to the company and not interested in promotion. In nearly every case outlined in Hochschild’s research, home life gave way to work. “The more attached we are to the world of work,” the sociologist concluded, “the more its deadlines, its cycles, its pauses and interruptions shape our lives and the more family time is forced to accommodate to the pressures of work.”
To be fair, very few of the employees at that company ended up using the benefits offered in order to strengthen work-life balance, which is the big surprise in Hochschild’s research. Only one man chose to use his paternity leave, for example, and fewer than 3 percent of workers with young kids opted to put in part-time hours.
Most of the time, in many countries, when there are issues with a child, it is the mother who adapts her work schedule to accommodate the kid’s needs and not the father. That’s begun to change, but it still falls overwhelmingly on moms to handle childcare crises.
Research shows that when men watch their children, they often end up doing the more enjoyable activities, like taking kids to soccer games, while mothers tend to do more of the cleaning, cooking, and logistical management. Also, men’s chore lists often include things that are done on an occasional basis, like getting oil changes for the car or mowing the lawn. Mom’s list typically includes tasks that need to be done almost daily.
In a sane world, expectations of parents (and mothers especially) would have gone down when they had to spend forty or more hours at a job instead of in the home. Instead, the standards for what constitutes a good parent (at least among the working class) rose. In an op-ed called “Why Is Everyone So Busy?” staff writers at the Economist noted that “the rise in female employment also seems to have coincided with (or perhaps precipitated) a similarly steep rise in standards for what it means to be a good parent, and especially a good mother.”
Macaroni and cheese out of a box was no longer good enough. Instead, it had to be a recipe pulled from Pinterest that uses organically sourced ingredients and promises to keep your kid’s brain healthy. Grind your own coffee beans, use BPA-free plastic, supervise their internet usage, and create cute videos with your kids to share on social media.
There was simply too much to do. Instead of deciding to do less, many moms believed they could solve home problems the way they solved issues in the office. They were swayed by the appeal of efficiency and productivity in the workplace and began to bring those values into family life. More hours would mean higher quality, right? So putting in more hours with your kid would result in a happier, smarter, more successful child. No more latchkey kids. Between the years of 1986 and 2006, the number of children who said they were under surveillance at all times doubled.
While women were taking jobs at record numbers, so-called helicopter parenting began to spread throughout the United States. The term helicoptering was first used in a 1969 book called Between Parent and Teenager by Dr. Haim Ginott. It was a problem in the 1960s, but that problem has worsened in recent years, as parents have striven to prove their jobs are not getting in the way of being good parents. At this point, 30 percent of job recruiters say they’ve seen parents submit a résumé for their kid, while one in ten have had parents try to negotiate salary or benefits for their adult child.
On the surface, helicopter parenting seems to be the opposite of efficiency. It requires a larger investment of time and energy from parents. Why would someone addicted to efficiency spend more time doing something?
However, the goal of overparenting is to guarantee that you raise a healthy and successful child. It relies on checklists and catalogs of items your child “needs” to have a good childhood. In terms of productivity, the child is the product and the parent sometimes goes overboard in trying to make that product the best one on the market.
The cult of efficiency rests on the belief that following a rigorous schedule of activities will improve your life. In parenting, that rigorous schedule often includes debate teams and gymnastics and piano lessons and organic applesauce and top-of-the-line running shoes. It also involves doing battle for your kids and clearing obstacles that might otherwise delay them or slow them down.
A mom and dad in West Virginia filed suit against their daughter’s school because she turned in her biology project late and received an F. More and more college professors say parents are contacting them to argue about their kids’ grades. Some parents call their kids at college to wake them in time for their classes.
A third grade teacher told this story about an interaction with the mother of one of her students: “[She] came to my room when I was alone and tried to physically intimidate me into changing her child’s grade. When I showed her the grade books and reminded her that I’d been trying to talk to her about her daughter not meeting grade-level standards, she took my grade book and put it in [her] bag, with me trailing behind her [as she] marched down to the principal’s office to prove me wrong. Luckily, the principal was supportive of me, but my relationship with the parent deteriorated after that. It made it very hard to work with the little girl, who was sweet, but wasn’t learning to read.”
Writing your kids’ book reports, arguing about their grades, and calling their teachers requires a great deal of energy and time. But it’s not, I think, accomplishing what parents hope. Overparenting may feel like a good use of time, but it does not ensure success for your child. Most of the time, it does the opposite.
A large majority of current college students report feeling overwhelmed. Kids with helicopter parents are significantly more likely to suffer depression, and there’s a strong link between a highly structured childhood and a lack of executive-function capabilities. Children with helicopter parents often struggle to develop self-reliance and resilience. They have simply been too often protected from adversity.
Overparenting, to me, is a classic example of a misguided strategy. It happens when a parent is determined to ensure their kid’s future in what they believe is the most efficient way possible: checking those boxes on the “good childhood” list. Unfortunately, this is not just wasted time and energy. This is energy invested in accomplishing something only to find you’ve accomplished the opposite of what you wanted. You didn’t nurture a successful adult; you made it more likely your child would not be prepared for the pressures and responsibilities of adulthood.
This discussion often becomes gendered because women assume an outsize portion of childcare duties in just about every industrialized nation. Gender also affects just about any discussion of working hours and productivity.
Many people believe the wage gap between women and men can be explained by the longer hours that men work. It’s true that in the United States at least, men stay on the job for about forty minutes longer than women every week. If you include in your calculation only people working full-time, men work about 8.2 hours per day versus 7.8 for women, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor. Keep in mind, though, that men are more likely to take breaks and go out to lunch.
If we were to compare only work habits, we might believe men are more obsessed with efficiency and productivity than women. We could conclude that men have been more affected by pressure to constantly improve than women. But that would be inaccurate once the full picture is considered. Women report spending at least an extra half hour every day on housework, whether they have children or not.
If you add in the extra time spent working on chores, the difference between the genders disappears. In fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, working moms spend eighty minutes longer every day taking care of kids and households, while dads typically spend almost fifty minutes more than moms watching TV or doing other enjoyable activities.
There are heartening improvements. Current research shows men are doing twice as much at home as they used to, but women are still taking care of the majority of household duties and childcare. In other words, men are doing more on average but are still not doing as much as their partners.
In order to accomplish all of their assigned duties, between work and home, women have doubled down on the efficient techniques they believe have helped them on the job, like multitasking and rigorous scheduling, checklists and meetings, and keeping a tight rein on the number of social activities they commit to during their off-hours.
Interestingly, India is ground central for many of the changes I’m discussing here. The rapid growth in IT jobs there, combined with new expectations that IT centers be open and responsive twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, has put incredible pressure on all workers. The number of single parents is on the rise and nuclear families are mostly disappearing, so work-life balance has become an area of concern.
A study from two researchers at India’s Anna University in 2010 found big differences between the genders in handling increased pressures at work. Apparently, when companies institute policies to strengthen work-life balance, men benefit more and see a larger decrease in stress. As the report says, “Men feel more satisfied when they achieve more on the job even at the cost of ignoring the family.”
Women are not imagining the extra pressures put on them, and even if they do naturally feel more responsibility to take care of kids and home, it’s impossible to tell how much of that is innate and how much is the result of centuries of gendered expectations. The end result, though, is that women struggle with a heavy weight of expectation and it’s less acceptable for them to take breaks or engage in hobbies that might relieve that pressure.
A report from the New York Times on the “motherhood penalty” began with the following stark sentence: “One of the worst career moves a woman can make is to have children.” Women, on average, take a 4 percent hit on their earnings after having a child, while men typically see a 6 percent increase, even when researchers controlled for education, experience, and hours worked.
Moms are also less likely to be hired and to be viewed as competent; the bias swings the other way for dads. One sociologist ran an experiment at Cornell in which researchers sent hundreds of fake résumés to real employers. All of the résumés were exactly the same, except that some said the applicant belonged to a PTA, implying that person was a parent.
Dads were more likely to get a callback than childless men, while the chances that a mom would get a call dropped by 50 percent. Another related study showed moms were offered the smallest salary compared to other applicants: $11,000 less than women with no kids and $13,000 less than dads.
So it’s no surprise to me that women have come up with coping strategies both at work and at home, trying desperately to meet the outsize expectations placed on them. Working women are, on average, doing more work (and less enjoyable work) for less pay and less praise. What’s more, when they complain about feeling overwhelmed, they’re told to “lean in.”
Lest it sound like I’m talking about women in general and not myself, let me assure you that I have been as prone to overscheduling as any other parent. I was a single mother for most of my son’s life, and I was bound and determined to make sure that he had a good childhood regardless of my income or family status.
I would rush home from work, feeling guilty because I had to stay late to cover a press conference, pick him up from afterschool care, and rush off to the library for story time or to symphony hall for a kids’ concert. I had a chart where I kept track of all his behavior and awarded him a star when he was polite all day or finished his homework before dinner.
I had plenty of work to do at home, writing scripts and editing audio interviews, but it waited until my son went to bed. I was getting five hours of sleep, on average.
One weekend, when I’d packed a picnic lunch and loaded our bikes into the car, I asked my kid what he wanted to do after visiting the park. “Can we just not go?” he asked.
I was honestly astonished. All of the trips to museums and the science center were for his benefit, not mine. When I was exhausted, I would still put a smile on my face and drag my tired self to the zoo so that he could be stimulated and not sit at home doing nothing.
When he pushed back, though, I had a flash of insight. I was trying to make sure he didn’t suffer for my long hours by forcing him to put in long hours.
“I just want to do nothing,” he said. “I just want to sit and play with my robots.”
My son doesn’t remember that exchange, but I sure do. It was a wake-up call for me, a sure sign that I’d been concerned more with my checklist than with my son’s mood. We stayed home that entire weekend, watching movies, eating popcorn, and playing board games.
When it comes to obsession with productivity and efficiency, I am inclined to believe that women are more obsessed than men, in general. Women are expected to multitask, a habit that increases stress and is ultimately damaging to a person’s cognitive abilities. At home, they are often the administrators, keeping track of toilet paper and laundry detergent, scheduling doctors’ appointments and haircuts, doing the all-too-often unnoticed labor of emptying the dishwasher and folding clothes. Women are even expected to be the nurturers at work, whether they have kids or not. Women are disproportionately expected to remember birthdays, for example, and to organize parties or remember to buy coffee for the breakroom.
Unfortunately, many of the strategies we employ in order to conquer our long lists of duties are counterproductive. We may think we are practicing self-care when we limit the number of social activities we engage in, but three hours spent at home answering email and scanning social media feeds is not relaxing to the brain or body. In fact, those activities are quite stressful. Going to the coffee shop and chatting with friends for a couple hours will leave you feeling refreshed and upbeat; the time you spend surfing the web will exhaust your brain and deplete your resources.
Because we’re tired, we often double down on the very habits that exhausted us in the first place: email instead of phone calls, getting up earlier in order to get things done before work, buying a new productivity journal, listening to a podcast that promises to “hack your anxiety.”
I want to be clear that I’m not pointing the finger at women and saying, “What you’re doing is wrong.” Lord knows, the last thing any of us needs is to be shamed and blamed any more than we already are. When I talk about women who overschedule and doggedly pursue the dream of ultimate efficiency and productivity, I’m talking about myself, and I’m exhausted enough as it is. I don’t need anyone telling me I need to do more.
It’s not that our habits and strategies and “leaning in” are wrong, but that we tend to lose sight of what we’re trying to achieve and simply focus on getting through our to-do lists. We are proud not of the ultimate goals we attain, but of how hard we are on ourselves and how many tasks we can accomplish in a single day. I asked a friend how her weekend was, and she replied that it was wonderful and then followed with a long list of all the stuff she had done. “There’s only one thing left on my list,” she crowed, “and I can get that done tonight. I’m almost at To-Do List Zero.”
All of us, both men and women, are subject to an unnatural pressure to constantly work harder and better. We are all caught in a system that demands ever greater improvements in efficiency. It’s not easy for anyone; no one gets a free pass. All workers check email on the weekends and while we’re sick at home or on vacation.
I believe, however, that the system demands even more of women than it does of men. In general, men see home as a place for relaxation and look forward to the end of the workday, but for many women, the workplace is less complicated and fraught than the home. A study from 2012 found that working moms are less stressed than stay-at-home moms and in better health, both physically and mentally, than those who work part-time or not at all. Home is no refuge for women.
So, my advice to women is this: Be kinder to yourself. Working longer hours is not likely to bring you significant bumps in pay, but it will take a toll on your well-being. Answering emails in your off-hours is having a more damaging impact on your life than you realize, and a cupcake that has a messy smear of frosting on the top usually tastes just as good as one that is carefully decorated following a YouTube tutorial on baking.
Existing disparities in pay and promotion are not due to a lack of work on the part of women; they are the result of centuries of discrimination and bias. Fathers are more respected, mothers are less so. You will not change that by working fifty-hour weeks or keeping productivity journals; true change will require new policies and procedures.
Both men and women need to step off the treadmill that’s taking us nowhere, but for women the urgency is even more intense. Lean out, ladies.