Your coworker with a 3-year-old leaves at 5:30 every evening, while
you stay until 7:30 (at least). You're asked to take a weekend shift or
field Saturday conference calls because everyone else on your team has
kids they need to spend time with. When an issue needs to be troubleshot
after six, you are somehow always the only one available, and it's made
clear that your date plans are not a priority.
If this sounds like you, you may be the victim of what a recent Marie
Claire article calls "the newest form of workplace discrimination:
single women who carry an undue burden at the office, batting cleanup for their married-with-kids coworkers."
The way writer Ayana Byrd describes the phenomenon, as employers have
gotten used to working parents leaving at a reasonable hour and not
working weekends, they've also gotten used to single staffers,
particularly single women, picking up the work that employees with kids
won't get to. The result for those single women is no personal life,
which limits both their overall well-being and their ability to meet a
prospective spouse and have children of their own.
Even if single men face the same dilemma -- the article, titled "The
Single Girl's Second Shift," doesn't really go into that -- it's easy to
see how single women are especially vulnerable to it. The
most popular job for American women as of 2010 is still secretary/administrative assistant,
which has been a top ten job for women for the last 50 years. We're
historically conditioned to think of female workers as those who support
other workers. At the same time, women have just been told resoundingly
to "
lean in"
to their careers -- to be as ambitious as they can, which can very
easily translate into saying yes to whatever project is handed to them.
Byrd's piece bears a few overarching messages. One is that employers
need to remedy the blatantly unfair practice of assigning some
employees more work and longer hours based on their marital status and
whether they have kids. Another is that this "second shift" -- an
allusion to the title of
Arlie Hochschild's watershed 1989 book
on how working mothers also do the majority of domestic chores in their
households -- is indicative of a workplace culture that no longer
believes anyone deserves relaxation or fun for their own sakes. As Kat
Stoeffel at The Cut pointed out, the women courageous enough to go on
the record in Byrd's article as wanting to work less
all said they want time off for self-improvement.
The third and pretty explicit message is that women need to say no to
the extra work, and while this last directive sounds empowering, parts
of it are problematic.
For one thing, saying no to what you're assigned simply isn't
possible in some cases, especially in a fragile economy with high
unemployment. Some of the recommended strategies for saying no may not
be practical either. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the
Center for Talent Innovation,
formerly the Center for Work-Life Policy, suggested seeking out a
childless senior woman to advise you on how broach the issue with your
boss. But what if there is no such person, or what if she never felt
like she was in a position to push back, either?
Another issue is the way career consultant Liz Ryan described the
second shift to Byrd, as though it's somehow women's fault. "No one
respects the people who are slaves to the job," she told Byrd. But when
you push back, "Be prepared to show that your work won't suffer," the
article advises. Stoeffel at The Cut added that if you don't push back
and work longer hours without being paid more, "You're a sucker."
Did you get all of that? Ask not to work as much and make sure you're
not seen as someone who works all the time, but produce the same
quality and/or amount of work. So the message to stand up for yourself
gets transformed into, "Get the same amount done in less time, because
no one likes someone who looks like she's trying too hard." That sounds a
lot like yet another manifestation of the cultural allergy to female
strivers that has affected women across fields, from
Anne Hathaway to
Kirsten Gillibrand.
Why can't we strike a balance wherein it's acceptable for women to be
visibly ambitious and hardworking and for both women and men to admit
that everyone deserves time to watch Bravo and drink margaritas outside?
We do need increased awareness of unfair demands put on single women
at work, and it may be that change will only come when women speak up
for themselves and "train" their bosses and coworkers to know that they
are not available 24/7. But we also need to be careful not to line the
prescription "do less work" with the message to just make it look like
you're doing less, which could mean hidden hours working at home and
less sleep, and would only make employers think the women they're
overloading can take on more.
As Mika Brzezinski pointed out on HuffPost Live at
The Huffington Post's Third Metric conference, the last thing women need to hear one more time is, "
Make it look easy."
