Why Is Burnout "A Woman's Issue?"
That's how corporate America almost exclusively frames it. But wouldn't it logically be an issue for many people?
Start with this article from Wharton if you’d like. There’s a corresponding video too.
This definitely seems like a pretty important topic, all-in. We know a lot of working people have children, just because your prime working years tend to overlay with your parenting years. We also know some of those people with children and jobs have older parents. We call that “The Sandwich Generation.” Some guy on Medium flamed me the other day for getting numbers wrong about exactly how many people are part of that generation, but hey, we’re all imperfect in some way.
If you are big on the moral panics, well, it’s hard for a family to want to produce 3–4 kids (i.e. “replacement rate”) when there’s a lot of stress, burnout, and everything feels chaotic around them. They’re probably gonna land on 0–2 kids, which ultimately doesn’t help society.
So then you need to ask yourself: OK, whose responsibility is all this? Some people would say “government,” and that’s a logical answer, but government can’t do everything for you and government also mostly rolls over on private sector issues, because they want private sector executives to pay for their next campaign.
So then you’d say “corporations” and/or “private sector,” but those places tend to be focused on productivity (which is increasingly a vague term in the “Knowledge Work” era) and hard numbers like widgets made and sold. They lip-service the fluffy stuff, i.e. engagement and well-being, but it’s not a real priority. Just look at any C-Suite’s calendar and see how often they go to meetings about “well-being.” It’s not much.
As a result, we create this kinda “bootstraps” thing where families have to figure out a lot of stuff themselves: child care costs, how to have both parents on Zoom at once in a smaller space, what a 3:30 p.m. pickup five days a week will do to your career, etc. That’s not surprising, since we do “bootstraps” on almost everything in America, including finances and mental health.
What’s interesting in the Wharton article is that near the bottom, they say the quiet part out loud: 70% of executives they talked to figured caregiving issues were “women issues,” and that it didn’t impact the dragon-slaying men those executives employ. I’d disagree with that. See:
If you are someone’s father, even if the corporate drudgery job you have is paying all the bills, you need to show up as the father, which means caregiving issues are part of your role.
Even if you never do a pick-up from school or whatever, you still should care about caregiving issues in support of your wife or partner.
Etc, etc.
But this executive mindset also makes sense: my wife’s friend was telling her the other day that they list her husband on all day school forms, and the school still calls her (the wife). The husband’s number is right there at the top of the form, and he’s closer to the day care and has a more flexible schedule than the wife. But the school still calls the woman. This stuff is baked in to how we think about roles in the world, and it’s taking a really long time to change. I remember in 2014–2015, when I was first blogging more, there was a slate of articles about the rise of “Mr. Mom” or stay-at-home dads. I feel like Fast Company did a ton on that for about a year. I haven’t seen those articles in a long time.
But look, in a marriage with children (#blessed), caregiving is a two-way, two-person issue. And if you both have some alive parents who are getting older, then it’s definitely a two-way issue.
The thing is, of course, that guys who run companies usually have wives who haven’t worked in a decade or longer and have the dayside flexibility to “provide care” and also, you know, work on their volley game at the club. A stereotype, but often true. So, for a decade or more in their own lives, they haven’t really had to worry much about caregiving stuff. That skews how you think about it in terms of the decisions you make related to your workforce. We can claim all we want that these executives are fucking biz geniuses who understand all the machinations of the market and their people, but they’re usually not — and the more money and power you have, your brain is shifted.
I think a good place for corporate America to start would be to realize that “caregiving issues” are not simply “women issues,” or rather, they shouldn’t be construed that way.
Now, can I see corp America suddenly dedicate a bunch of money and resources to making life easier for parents/caregivers, especially if that means they’ll be unreachable at 3 p.m.? No. That will never happen either. We have an obsession with flawed metrics of productivity and “being present” and that cuts right to maternity leave. Often we’ll give a woman 10 weeks or something, and expect her to be laser-focused when she returns, when she just spent 2.5 months with something she created, and now we think she cares about Larry’s deliverables? It’s comical. But we love the idea of “productivity” and “presence,” so we convince ourselves out of the inherent psychology of everything.
In short, there’s no current answer for caregiver burnout except “Find what works for your family.” But above all, we do need to realize this is a two-way issue that impacts guys too.