Coupledom in Lockdown
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While many of us have been focused on improving gender balance at work over the past decade, this Covid crisis is revealing our unfinished business – gender balance at home. Many working women assumed they married egalitarian men, with a clear shared-parenting, two-career contract. But take away the central pillar holding the deal together (aka school) and witness the burst pipe of women leaking from the workforce.
On one level, this is simple, rational economics – the less-well-paid partner stops working. Since women are, on average, both less well paid and a few years younger than their partners, this usually means the ladies are doing the leaving. On another, it also reflects the reality of power dynamics at home. As I’ve written before, most men are willing to support their wives’ careers – until it impinges on their own. So for some couples, there’s no discussion about who’s going to bite the career-sacrificing bullet. What makes this crisis different, and the ‘national emergency’ Kamala Harris is calling it, is that it’s hitting everyone. At the same time.
Covid and its collection of challenges seem curated to test couples and precipitate them into a wide-eyed re-evaluation of their vows. Lockdown is the ultimate couples stress test. We aren’t meant to be shut up with our ‘better halves’ for months at a time. What better way to discover and be disappointed by their darkness – or just their short fuses? Lawyers are seeing dramatic increases in covid divorces. And it’s happening on a global scale. Add a couple of young kids, take away school and day care options and you multiply the challenge ten-fold. This is delivering the perfect storm for even the most rock solid of families. For single parents, it long ago shifted to sheer survival mode.
So Who’s to Blame?
The sad thing is that most of the women I see in my coaching are blaming themselves. They’re burning out at record rates, caught between the absurd expectations of our times, with kids, partners and bosses all tugging at their psychological skirts. Many may blame their husbands for being forced out of work, in a slow-burn sort of resentment for an unwilling sacrifice that will resurface later, often once the kids are grown and gone. Some couples simply don’t yet have the relational competence to cope with crisis. Good marriages don’t just take love, they take skill.
Yet despite the media’s seeming preference for women-as-victim narratives, many couples have honed their cooperative balancing acts. The majority of couples are surviving, some are thriving – carving up the day and the bedroom in taking-turn blitzes at working and parenting. More men than ever before have discovered the joys and challenges of ‘working from home.’ Some have even become comfortable with their toddlers erupting into their zoom windows. The discomfiture of the BBC announcer whose kids interrupted his report seems of another era – yet it was just three short years ago. We have been humbled into publicly acknowledging our shared secret: we have families.
One of the key survival skills for couples in this mess is not to blame themselves – or each other. And to lower our expectations, even if our bosses haven’t. The priority is to get through this alive. Period.
What’s A Nice Company To Do?
Some are blaming employers for not doing enough. But employers during the crisis did something that women have been asking them to do for decades. And they did it in a matter of weeks. They embraced real flexibility. They let people work from home. Over 70% of knowledge sector firms introduced childcare plans. Some let kids and schools come to work. There are even signs that they borrowed some leadership skills from the stereotypically female side of the management playbook. Even McKinsey is pushing ‘compassionate leadership.’ Many managers and leaders empathised, listened, communicated, raised issues of mental health – often for the first time. Those who didn’t, like the macho CEO of KPMG, Bill Michael, who told his teams to ‘stop moaning’ were summarily fired (and replaced with two women). The workplace will be forever changed – and more flexible – because of this crisis. And that’s good news for parents of every gender.
But the fundamental support structure enabling half the human population to work isn’t private sector employers. It’s government. And the US is famously disinterested in government support systems for families. Which the Biden / Harris team are now addressing.
What Do We Do With the Kids?
The elephant in the room is – and always has been – ‘what do we do with the kids?’ Two-career couples are built on institutional systems, usually provided, more or less generously, by governments, to care for their children. The number of two-career couples is at historic highs (78% of millennial couples vs 47% of Boomers) as the days of surviving on a single income fade into a dim memory.
Most of the media reporting on women’s backward slide into the 1950s is American, the only developed country on the planet with no federally-subsidised maternity leave. Let alone parental leave. In France, by contrast, daycare is plentiful and full-time school starts at age three. Not to mention Sweden, where months of parenting leave are reserved to men – to use or to lose. Countries that ignore children will always be bad for women. Nuclear families will never be enough to manage life’s inevitable crises. It takes a village some famous women have noted.
The biggest change in the Biden government’s plans, writes the New York Times, “is how the idea of a monthly child allowance treats children — not as just a private responsibility but as a societal good, deserving of unqualified public support, no matter their families’ income or employment.”
Kamala Harris knows the US needs to updates national policy to the reality of modern families. The falling trend of American women’s participation in the labour force pre-dates the Covid crisis. It’s been declining for years as the lack of support for working families and the conservative backlash against working women chipped away at America’s one-time lead. There were more women working in famously-sexist Japan before the crisis than there were in the US. This has finally been recognised by no less than Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed, publicly connecting the dots between public policy, women and work.
And that may finally be the salutary lesson from this crisis. If countries want women working and babies born (aka healthy labour forces and replacement-level birth rates), you need to design it in. Otherwise, women will vote with their wombs and walk out of the workforce.
This crisis is a global report card of how we are doing at every level. And the answer is, better in some countries, companies and couples than others. Women are like the canaries in the mine, revealing the health of the whole. But for those caught in lousy contexts, remember these few things:
Sanity Savers
1. This is not about you. Or your partner. Understand the above. There are bigger forces at play that make this moment untenable. Lower your expectations of yourself and your (once)-loved one. I used to challenge women with the 80/20 rule. During Covid, lower it to 50. Get half of everything done – and congratulate yourself for the achievement.
2. Time off is OK. Ignore the shrill voices screaming that a break is career suicide. Because of longer, healthier lives, careers are stretching to 50 years and more. Taking a year or two off is no big deal, especially if it allows you to accomplish other goals – like maintaining a healthy family. Strong families and relationships are the foundations of strong careers and happy lives and shouldn’t be seen to be in opposition. It’s about different priorities at different phases. Pace yourself and play a long game.
3. Contract With Your Boss – Negotiate and clarify expectations with your boss. Be transparent about constraints and clear about what you can and can’t do. Deliver on what you promise but don’t promise what you can’t deliver. They are trying to cope too.
4. Elect More Women – If you want policy making that integrates design thinking around women, families and children, elect more women (or run for office), and lobby to promote more gender balance at work – and at home. We’ve just discovered how much work there is still to do there.
