Hours worked each year up significantly since ’79
well-intentioned answer is to give women benefits, but it actually derails women’s careers. The culture of overwork affects everybody.”
The study examined a global consulting firm, which was not named. The firm, at which 90 percent of the partners were men, asked the professors what it could do to decrease the number of women who quit and increase the number who were promoted. In exchange, the academics could collect data for their own research.
The researchers, who included Irene Padavic of Florida State University and Erin Reid of Boston University, concluded that the problem was not women’s competing demands, but that “two orthodoxies remain unchallenged: the necessity of long work hours and the inescapability of women’s stalled advancement.”
The study is being released as partofHarvardBusinessSchool’s new gender initiative, led by Ely, to use empirical evidence to discuss gender issues in business and society.
The time Americans spend at work has sharply increased over the past four decades. We work an average of 1,836 hours a year, up 9 percent from 1,687 in 1979, according to Current Population Survey data analyzed by Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. Reasons include a more competitive and global economy and technology that enables people to work at any hour and location.
High earners (though not the highest) work the most. Earners in the 60th to 95th percentiles workedabout2,015hoursin2013, up about 5 percent from 1979. Those in the bottom20th percentile worked far fewer hours (1,497 a year), but their hours increased the most, 20 percent from 1979.
For low-wage earners, the problem is not too many hours, but too few. Their schedules are oftentoounpredictable,andtheir wages have been rising only modestly. For many workers, a lack of parental leave or child care can create additional strains.
For elite workers, the challenge is the conflict between modern family life and a work culture in which long hours have become a status symbol.
In the consulting firm study, which included interviews with 107 employees, men were at least as likely as women to say hours interfered with family life, and they quit at the same rate. One told researchers: “Last year was hard with my 105 flights. I was feeling pretty fried. I’ve missed too much of my kids’ lives.”
Men and women dealt with the pressure differently. Women were more likely to take advantage of formal flexible work policies, such as working part time, or move to less-demanding positions that didn’t involve serving clients or earning revenue for the company. Decisions like these tended to stall women’s careers.
Men happily complied, suffered in silence or simply worked the hours they wanted to without asking permission. About a third of them, according to another paper about the same firm by Reid, would leave to attend their children’s activities while staying in touch on their phones. They also developed more local clients to reduce travel or informally arranged with colleagues to cover for them. Decisions like these tended to get men promoted.
When women tried the same strategy, it usually didn’t work. When a man left at 5 p.m., people at the office assumed he was meeting a client, Reid said. When a woman left, they assumed she was going home to her children.
Underlying this disparity are deep-seated cultural expectations about how men and women should act. Men are expected to be devoted to their work and women to their family, as Mary Blair-Loy, a sociologist at University of California, San Diego, has described in her research.
These expectations were reflected in the interviews done at the consulting firm.
“What do I want people to worry about when they wake up first thing in the morning?” one male partner said. “For project managers, I want them to worry about the project. Women are the project manager in the home, so it is hard for them to spend the necessary time, energy and effort to be viewed here as senior leaders.”
Theresearcherssaidthatwhen they told the consulting firm they had diagnosed a bigger problem than a lack of family-friendly policies for women — that long hours were taking a toll on both men and women — the firm rejected that conclusion. The firm’s representatives said the goal was to focus only on policies for women, and that men were largely immune to these issues.
Juggling work and family was not always the dominant narrative explaining why few women reach the top echelons of business. Another analysis led by Harvard Business School researchers tracked stories about gender and work in the national and business press from 1991 to 2009. Until the mid-1990s, most focused on sexism and harassment. Then they began focusing on women being excluded from the “old boys’ network.” Around 2001, the main theme became children hampering women’s career success.
It is not necessarily surprising that companies prefer to focus on relatively narrow fixes such as family-friendly policies, not more broadly on the culture of overwork. They would have little incentive to encourage their employees to work less. And, of course, people who work at these companies chose high-powered careers and are paid well in exchange.
Yet some professions that also had around-the-clock hours have figured out alternatives. Certain doctors have begun working in shifts, so patients see whoever is available. Some law firms are beginning to share workinasimilar way. At the Boston Consulting Group, one team gave everyone one weeknight off while others covered for them, and the practice spread through the firm.
“Is it really necessary for people to be on call 24/7? The answer is increasingly no,” Ely said. “These professions are beholden to the whims of the client, and every question has to be answered immediately — but it probably doesn’t.”