“Many times these policies are on the books, but informally everyone knows you are penalized for using them,” said Joan C. Williams, founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, referring to the array of flexible work arrangements some employers offer. “I invented the term ‘flexibility stigma’ to describe that phenomenon. Recent studies have found is that it is alive and well, and it functions quite differently for women than it does for men.”
For some women, it gives employers a reason to view them through the lens of motherhood, prompting the strongest form of gender discrimination. Mothers are seen as less competent and less committed to their work, she said, citing other studies. But more surprising is that men who seek work flexibility may be penalized more severely than women, because they’re viewed as more feminine, deviating from their traditional role of fully committed breadwinners.
That may at least in part explain why using flexible work options — which include telecommuting, compressed work weeks and sharing jobs among employees, to name a few — has been slow to catch on, even though more organizations are offering them (at least on paper). Employers have increased options to help workers manage the time and place they work, from 2005 to 2012, according to the Families and Work Institute’s 2012 National Study of Employers. But employers have cut back on alternatives that would enable employees to spend significant amounts of time away from full-time work, like career breaks or moving from part time to full time and back again.
A group of researchers recently examined the stigma of workplace flexibility from all angles in a series of studies published on Friday in The Journal of Social Issues, co-edited by Professor Williams and others. Among other things, the researchers examined the effect of men taking leave after the birth of a child (they were more likely to be penalized and less likely to get promoted or receive raises), as well as the reasons some professional women decide to leave work after having children (working reduced hours resulted in less meaningful work assignments). They also looked at how the perception of women using flexible arrangements differs across class lines: affluent women often receive the message that they should stay at home, while poor women are more likely to hear that they shouldn’t have had children to begin with.
“These studies show that deep-rooted cultural values intertwining work devotion and gender identity drive the flexibility stigma,” said Professor Williams said.
But it is clear that many American families crave flexibility, especially as traditional gender roles of mothers and fathers continue to blur. A study by the Society for Human Resource Management conducted in 2008, the most recent data available, found that 34 percent of human resources professionals polled indicated an increase in requests for these arrangements compared to the previous year.
The reasons are fairly obvious, as more Americans chase the elusive work-life balance. Nearly equal shares of working mothers and fathers report that they feel stressed about juggling work and family life, a recent Pew Research Center analysis found. But while working fathers placed more importance on having a high-paying job, the study found working mothers were more concerned with having a flexible schedule.
In fact, it’s possible that more women would be working if they had such arrangements available to them, and that they felt comfortable using. The share of working-age American women in the work force has been on the decline relative to other developed countries, a phenomenon tied at least in part to those countries’ rapid expansion of family-friendly policies, according to a study by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, both professors of economics at Cornell, published in February.
In 1990, the United States had the sixth-highest share of women in the work force among 22 developed countries, with 74 percent of women aged 25 to 54 working. But by 2010, the share of American women working dropped to 17th place, with slightly more than 75 percent of women working compared to 80 percent outside of the country, the research found. They estimate American women’s participation would have been 82 percent if they had access to the other countries’ policies, which include a right to part-time work. “Maybe we have reached a maximum and we can’t go any higher,” Professor Blau said, referring to the percentage of working women. “But this suggests we could go higher if we worked on these work-life balance issues.”
Flexibility does potentially present a double-edged sword, at least as far as women’s advancement goes. Long, paid parental leaves and availability of part-time positions may encourage women who would have otherwise been more committed to working to take those part-time or lower-level jobs, Professor Blau explained. And employers, in turn, may be less likely to promote or put women in higher positions if they think they are going to take advantage of flexible arrangements. As it stands now, women in the United States are more likely to work full time than in other developed countries and they are more likely to be in higher-level positions.
“If you have a very extensive network of these family-friendly programs, it can encourage women to take a more traditional role,” Professor Blau said. “It’s an issue of balance. If you don’t have adequate arrangements, then it’s very hard for women to maintain their attachment to the labor force and for employers to invest in the women’s skills.”
But it’s also an issue of perspective. For women to be able to take advantage of these arrangements without judgment, men need to use them freely, too. But that requires viewing men not solely as breadwinners, but as individuals who also have the same choices as women.
“Not only have we put women on the mommy track, we put dad on the daddy track,” said Kenneth Matos, an organizational psychologist and senior director of employment research and practice at the Families and Work Institute, a research group. “We tend to talk about what happens to women, but we don’t talk about what happens to men and we wonder why women are stuck.”
After all, as Professor Williams explained, pressures on men haven’t changed. “Feminism is all about choices — well, choices for whom?” she asked. “Even feminism is putting pressure on men to live up to the ideal of work devotion. So long as that is the state of play, nothing is changing for men. And if nothing is changing for men, nothing is changing for women.”
Both inside many companies and at the national level, workers largely have been left to sort these issues out on their own. But some places are beginning to take cues from other countries that have already carried out national policies to protect workers who want more flexible arrangements. Last month, Vermont passed an “equal pay” law that, among other things, provides employees with the right to request flexible working arrangements and protects them from retaliation for asking. The law requires employers to listen to workers’ pleas twice a year, though they aren’t obliged to grant any requests. “This law is modeled after similar laws in the U.K. and Australia,” said Cary Brown, executive director of the Vermont Commission on Women, “and we believe it’s the first of its kind in the United States.”
Still, most workers still remain at the mercy of their managers. “It is not systematic and it is not reliable and for a lot of people, it depends on whether your supervisors are sympathetic,” said Ariane Hegewisch, a study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “But you have no guarantees.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/your-money/the-unspoken-stigma-of-workplace-flexibility.html?partner=rss&emc=rss