PAUL RYAN AND JOE BIDEN: UNLIKELY ALLIANCE OF WORKING FATHERS
The more men ask companies for family time, the more all workers will benefit
US politicians Paul Ryan and Joe Biden recently did something remarkable. They talked about the time they reserve for their families. Whether or not you believe them, it is significant that they chose to cite family obligations publicly — particularly because they are career-driven, and because they are men. It can hurt men’s careers in the short term. But in the long term, if more prominent men talk about family, it could reduce the stigma significantly.
Biden said family demands in the wake of his son’s death had taken too much time for him to run for president. Among the conditions that Ryan set in seeking the role of House speaker was preserving time with his family in Wisconsin: “I cannot and I will not give up my family time.”
The politicians acknowledged something every US parent knows. It’s challenging to combine work and family in the modern American economy. But in politics as well as business, it’s often taboo to talk publicly about it — especially when you are trying to get a new, bigger job. “Spending more time with my family” can often be code for leaving a job for reasons someone doesn’t want to name, like being fired.
In some ways, Ryan and Biden have an easier time talking about family because they are men (and highly successful men). When women mention family, research shows, they tend to be immediately discounted as being uncommitted to their work, and penalised in pay and promotions. When men talk about having children, they are generally rewarded, with higher pay and better jobs.
But as soon as men start asking for accommodations — say, not spending as many days on the road, as Ryan requested — they tend to be penalised, too, research shows. The fatherhood bonus is based on the notion that fathers are extra-committed to work because they have a family to support. If they give any indication that they might prioritise family, they tend to be treated like mothers, and penalised. It’s known as the flexibility stigma.
“Men are required by the culture to be these superheroes, to fulfil this devotion and single-minded commitment to work,” said Mary Blair-Loy, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, who researches these issues.
Flexibility — and the lack of it in most jobs — is the main driver of the gender wage gap. The gap shrinks when workers are given more control over when and where their work gets done, according to research by Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard. Ryan, for instance, said he would “make up for” travelling less by doing other things.
Even men in high-powered jobs take advantage of flexible time away from the office. They generally just don’t tell anyone about it. They tend to walk out unnoticed, join conference calls from the car or respond to email at home. Women are more likely to use official flexibility policies or ask their
Men are required by the culture to be these superheroes
bosses for permission to leave early once a week for a child’s soccer game. When men go to the same soccer game, they often don’t ask permission.
One way the flexibility stigma would be reduced is for men to ask for it as often as women do — and for non-parents to ask for it as well, for elder care and other reasons — so that mothers, and a few fathers, aren’t the only ones penalised.
The men who ask are “just as much groundbreakers as we were”, said Anne-Marie Slaughter, president of the New America think tank and author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family. She suggested that a younger generation of men, of which Ryan is a part, might do more of that.
Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive who wrote Lean In, wrote this week that she gave Ryan “the Lean In award of the day”.
“We need work to work for parents — and having leaders who weigh responsibilities as fathers as much as their responsibilities to their jobs shows all of us what is possible,” she posted on Facebook.
Some Democrats and advocates have noted that Ryan has voted against policies that would give more people flex time, like paid leave bills. Defenders of Ryan say he is requesting time only on the weekends.
For working parents in high-powered jobs in which flexibility is not always an option — as it won’t always be for Ryan — something has to give. In the case of Ryan, who lives in Washington during the week, his wife, Janna, a tax lawyer, stays home with the children in Wisconsin. That is a more traditional arrangement. Less traditional is for women to have the high-powered careers and for men to be the primary parents. Yet more examples of that might also eventually play a role in reducing the family stigma.
Mary Dillon, chief executive of Ulta Beauty, a chain of cosmetics stores, said recently at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit that she has four children and that her husband is the lead parent. Republican politician Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, who has three children, said her husband also stays home. When audience members — other female senior executives and politicians — were asked to signal if they also had a stay-at-home partner, dozens of hands went up.