Pop culture
Some post-pandemic working fathers expect companies to prioritize their families
Today’s job-seeking fathers don’t necessarily ask their interviewer — and themselves — the same questions their counterparts did 20 years ago, according to Joanne Davidson, a Boston-based career consultant and former HR specialist for Sprint and AT&T. “Maybe about five or 10 years ago, the questions changed,” Davidson says. “Men began asking some of the questions women would usually ask — overtime, working weekends, the possibilities of leaving the office for an hour or two to catch a child’s play at school — and to be honest, it forced open a lot of eyes. It made HR departments stand up and take notice that they’d need to address their working men, especially their working fathers.”
Len Stoltz, an accountant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, agrees. “I wouldn’t take a job if I knew it would keep me away from my family for an extra 20 or 30 hours a week,” he says. “I’ve lived that life already. I’ve done the 60-hour work week and the 10- or 12-hour workday, only to come home to have a late dinner, and then sit in front of my computer until midnight. I’m never doing that again.”
Stoltz says he thinks a dose of sexism helped cause his extra workload. “I had female co-workers who were better
at their jobs than I was, but my boss had the mindset that when they went home, they would be spending time with their children,” he says. “And if there was extra work that needed to be done, he’d give it to one of the men.”
A new generation
Stoltz says those after-work projects led to several missed baseball games and a fair amount of arguments with his wife. “She used to get on me about it but I would always counter with a ‘look how nice this house is. We wouldn’t be able to have a house like this if I didn’t work these hours.’ Now I realize that was pretty sexist, especially since she was working, too.”
Stoltz’s change of heart came after a conversation with an unlikely source: his father. “My dad was an ironworker and took every single hour of overtime he could get. He was
gone at night, he was gone on Saturdays and Sundays,” he says. “We barely saw him.”
Stoltz always thought his father considered those extra hours a badge of honor — “the immigrant working to
provide for his family” — but soon realized he was wrong. “My dad showed up to watch my youngest daughter in
a school recital and I wasn’t there. I was still at work,” Stoltz says. “He called me and raised holy hell. I mean he screamed at me for 10 minutes straight before he let me get a word in.”
A subsequent conversation revealed that his father was never happy with the extra hours he had to put in but felt compelled to work overtime whenever asked so he wouldn’t lose his standing in the union or come up short financially. “But he told me that he misjudged it. He told me that we already had everything we needed and that he should have been there more often,” Stoltz says.
A few days later, Stoltz gave his two-week notice. “My boss tried to talk me out of it and told me that I could work
a regular nine-to-five like everyone else but that’s not how these things work,” he says. “When a culture is established,
it’s practically impossible to change that culture.”
Slow and steady
Davidson says that most shifts within any organization take time, pointing out that a company’s culture can be in a state of flux as some of the decision-makers struggle to adapt to new ways of thinking. “So much depends on the individual. I think there are female managers who are skeptical of men who request a flexible schedule to
accommodate their children because, for years, there were plenty of guys who took shots at women who had to leave their desks to pump their breast milk or who took all of their allotted maternity leave. All those little snide remarks stick with people, even if they won’t admit it,” Davidson says.
Sam Rinaldi, a retail store manager in Chicago, says if there are hard feelings and unfair perceptions, men only have themselves to blame. “For years, men viewed themselves as the last domestic option. Kids are sick and
wife is out of town? Call mom. She’s not available? Call the mother-in-law. Then call your sister, then a family friend, then a neighbor,” Rinaldi says. “Now, they fire off an email at 6:30 in the morning and tell their boss ‘hey, my daughter
has a fever. I’ll be home with her if you need me.’ Before, men didn’t consider it their responsibility to fix things within the family. That was their wife’s job.”
COVID-19 changed that perception as well. “When parents spend time with their kids, working from home, everything is on the table,” Davidson says. “A lot of fathers — and mothers, if we’re being honest — learned that they
can do their jobs and help out at home, all in the same day. It’s not always perfect and some days work better than others, but after COVID, people realize that it’s possible.”