Your Bad Work-Life Balance Is Not Your Fault
Our culture is very, very broken
How many hours a week do you work? The average for U.S. workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was 34.4 hours per week in May 2019.
That might not seem like a lot, but compared to workers in other countries, we put in a crazy amount of time at the office. The World Economic Forum reports that Americans work 1,783 hours per year — more than workers in Hungary, New Zealand, the Slovak Republic, Italy, Japan, Canada, Spain, Slovenia, and the U.K., among other countries.
But even determining how much we work is hard, because it’s increasingly difficult to say where work stops and life begins. If you check email after dinner, is that work? If you’re on Slack at your kid’s soccer game, are you working or just checking in? If you’re a marketer, is social media business or pleasure? If you’re an entrepreneur, is the time you spend volunteering part of building your business or part of building your community?
If you’re never really away from work, are you actually living your life? Americans in what used to be called white-collar jobs are increasingly doing two things at once … neither of them particularly well.
The situation is more complicated for working women.
When we talk about work-life balance, we’re usually talking about women. That’s because in most male-female couples, women still do the bulk of the domestic work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that on an average day, 84 percent of women and 69 percent of men report spending time on chores like housework, cooking, or lawn care. Twenty percent of men did housework like laundry or cleaning, compared with 49 percent of women.
It’s so bad, last year one woman in the U.K. posted an ad looking for someone to teach her husband and children how to do chores. Yes, really. Per Quartz:
A Birmingham woman recently posted an ad on a British childcare site looking to hire someone to pick her kids up from school — and also teach them, as well her husband, how to do chores. In the nine years since the birth of her second child, she says, her husband has done no housework. Naturally, she’s worried about the example he’s setting for their children. “We’ve got two sons and I’m worried his bad attitude towards housework, particularly that it’s the job of women in the house, is rubbing off on them,” she writes.
It’s no wonder women still earn less than men, even when we control for factors like job title and education. Not only are women more likely to be responsible for household chores, they’re more likely to be thought of as the person who’s responsible for household chores — in other words, not the person whose mind is on her work. That bias also contributes to depressing women’s pay.
In addition, as Claire Cain Miller recently pointed out at The Upshot, jobs have gotten greedy:
Just as more women earned degrees, the jobs that require those degrees started paying disproportionately more to people with round-the-clock availability. At the same time, more highly educated women began to marry men with similar educations, and to have children. But parents can be on call at work only if someone is on call at home. Usually, that person is the mother.
It’s hard to wow the boss when 40 hours a week is no longer enough…and you have another full-time job waiting for you at home.
So what’s the solution? Beyond working on creating more egalitarian households on the individual level, working families need better social programs to support them. Paid parental leave for both dads and moms, reliable and affordable childcare, and paid vacation and sick time, at a minimum. If you have the time (ha, ha), you might start by advocating for those and supporting candidates who promise to do the same.
But in the meantime, you can give yourself a break, understanding that your work-life balance problems are real, and you didn’t cause them on your own. Blame the culture, not yourself.
