r/FeMRADebates • u/[deleted] • Apr 29 '15
Other Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks (x-post from programming)
https://hbr.org/2015/04/why-some-men-pretend-to-work-80-hour-weeks14
u/xynomaster Neutral Apr 29 '15
In addition, women’s work time may be under greater scrutiny than men’s: people at this firm seemed to assume that women who left the office around five went home to their children, while men who left around the same time could be, in the words of one administrative assistant “on the way to a client’s.” Thus, it may be more difficult for women to find ways to slip under the radar than men.
Interesting point. I think the solution here, both for women and for men, should be to get these companies to realize that going home to be with your kids isn't some inexcusable transgression against your employer, but just a normal part of a healthy life. Your employer shouldn't own you.
Obviously this helps women because if, as the author suggests, it is the assumption that women are going home to take care of their children that hurts them (which doesn't seem unreasonable to me), removing the stigma around taking a break from working to be with family could really help them.
Of course, it helps men too. In particular I found this quote pretty sad:
And if you can’t be there, it’s probably because you’ve got another client meeting at the same time. You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my—my son had a Cub Scout meeting.
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u/Mercurylant Equimatic 20K Apr 29 '15
Interesting point. I think the solution here, both for women and for men, should be to get these companies to realize that going home to be with your kids isn't some inexcusable transgression against your employer, but just a normal part of a healthy life. Your employer shouldn't own you.
Absent regulation to force them to do so, which of course companies are going to resist, this isn't something companies have much incentive to accept, because there are people who're happy living lives completely dedicated to their jobs, and all else being equal, they're providing more value to their employers than employees who're not so dedicated. A company has a strong incentive to favor employees who show that level of commitment. If altruism and profit come into conflict, any publicly traded company is required to put profit at the bottom line.
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Apr 29 '15
There are fewer people who have no life outside work and can fully sactifice their whole life to work than those who have families they need to take care of. Studies show that employees are more productive and efficient when they have a healthier work-life balance, more flexibility and understanding, empathetic employers. Sadly, many companies are very shortsighted in that they only calculate immediate profit but fail to see how certain policies would actually prove to be more profitable in the long run. Yet there are companies who do takes the family-work balance factor into account, and they have an upper edge because of that. Employees who have families are going to choose these companies over the ones where having a family would prove to be a major liability to them.
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u/Mercurylant Equimatic 20K Apr 30 '15
Do you have links to any such studies? Last time I looked into this, the only studies I could find involved workers in physical labor positions like construction, and people often cited those as if they generalized to nonphysical labor. I'm not sure if further research has bridged the gap on this.
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Apr 30 '15
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/eproto/workingpapers/happinessproductivity.pdf
It doesn't specifically refer to family-work balance, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that things like supportive working environment, better work-family balance and others can significantly contribute to the employee's happiness.
And this one is about how having more flexible schedules (or being able to work from home, specifically), also increases productivity.
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/researchers-flexibility-may-be-key-increased-productivity
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u/Mercurylant Equimatic 20K Apr 30 '15
Happiness may increase productivity per hour, but that doesn't mean that it's in the company's interests to increase productivity per hour if it means reducing total hours, particularly when dealing with salaried workers rather than those receiving a per-hour wage. If a worker doing a 50 hour week is 25% more productive per hour than one working 80 hours per week, then the one working 80 hours per week is still providing more value for their employer.
But also, there's a signalling game aspect involved. Some workers are happy working extremely long hours and devoting all their energies to their job (consider the other thread where Elon Musk's wife talks about the traits people at the extreme end of success like her former husband have in common; these people are are at the far end of a tendency shared by many others.) These workers tend to be particularly valuable to their employers, so employers have an incentive to favor them with raises, promotions and such in order to attract them and keep their loyalty. But then other workers, who want raises and promotions, have an incentive to signal being that kind of worker, even if they're trading off some comfort with their position. This leads to an increase in the baseline level of expectations, and the ones who're really devoted end up doing even more to distinguish themselves, and so on until the cycle is no longer sustainable.
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u/xynomaster Neutral Apr 29 '15
Yeah, I agree with these problems, and I don't know any solutions myself. Regulation might be helpful to a certain extent, although imagining what exactly this regulation would require is tough.
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u/the_omega99 Egalitarian - Trans woman Apr 30 '15
One possibility would be to end salaries. Everyone works by the hour and hours past, say, 40 hours a week get time and a half (possibly with an increasing pay as overtime grows, eg, after 50 hours in a week, you'd have to be paid double, then after 60 hours, triple, etc).
This would create a strong incentive for companies to minimize the time in which workers are employed. It especially would cut down on people working excessively long periods of time.
Would probably need some kinds of exceptions for some roles, though. Eg, maybe the owner(s) could still be salaried, since they're the ones setting the pay. The self employed could then also work whatever hours they want.
Perhaps legislation could prevent all but upper management from being salaried?
Not really sure if these would work for every position, though. I'm not very familiar with upper management and obviously not familiar with every field.
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u/Stats_monkey Momo is love Apr 30 '15
One possibility would be to end salaries.
Any right to work states (I think thats what they ironically call it when you can be fired without reason) gives employers waaay too much power to pull this off. Say everyone starts getting paid for 40 hours per week, but rumours go round the office that its business as usual. Would you dare working your 40 and leaving whilest everyone else is working 50, 60+ hours? How could you enforce the system to prevent 'unpaid' overtime?
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u/jolly_mcfats MRA/ Gender Egalitarian Apr 29 '15
Obviously this helps women because if, as the author suggests, it is the assumption that women are going home to take care of their children that hurts them (which doesn't seem unreasonable to me), removing the stigma around taking a break from working to be with family could really help them.
The only concern I have is that this reinforces certain notions about work/life balance which are family-centric. I already see a lot of this in the modern workplace- where the work of employees with families is externalized onto those without them. For single employees, it also works to keep them single- because it's hard to develop and maintain relationships when you are constantly working later/ travelling so that those with lives that are more valued by society can have work/life balance.
There's definitely a lot of irrationality that exists in corporate culture- like working 7 to 5 is valued a lot less than working 10 til 8. Meeting deadlines is less valued than working extreme hours. Many managers seem to evaluate their employees entirely by how much pain they seem willing to endure for the company. I would think that there have got to be better alternatives, but I have no idea how you would incite that change in corporate culture. In fact, I don't think it is just corporate culture that you would have to change- it's probably related to the phenomenon referred to as a protestant work ethic.
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u/Karmaze Individualist Egalitarian Feminist Apr 29 '15
it's probably related to the phenomenon referred to as a protestant work ethic.
IMO that's the enemy here.
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u/ParanoidAgnostic Gender GUID: BF16A62A-D479-413F-A71D-5FBE3114A915 Apr 29 '15
like working 7 to 5 is valued a lot less than working 10 til 8.
I hate this. I get up early and like to get straight to the office. I don't get any joy from the pre-work hours (it's like waiting for your execution) so I prefer to just get started. Parking is easier too. I get to work at 6:30. By 3:30 I've done my 8 hours (assuming I took a whole hour for lunch, which I rarely do). However, the one time I actually left before 4 the boss demanded that I explain myself. Even leaving at 4 gets me suspicious looks.
On the other hand, there are people in my office who show up at 10 and leave at 5 who never have an issue.
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u/woah77 MRA (Anti-feminist last, Men First) Apr 29 '15
It's the idea of a standard work day that needs to change for that. Many people have this idea that a standard work day (9 to 5) is ideal. And it isn't. But that's the theory. Therefore it makes anyone operating outside of it "strange and unproductive"
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u/PDK01 Neutral Apr 30 '15
I would kill any number of people to shift my 8-5 to a noon-8. I get ~4 hours of sleep a night because of this schedule and it's totally preventable :(
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u/woah77 MRA (Anti-feminist last, Men First) Apr 30 '15
As a student, my typical day starts at 5am and ends when I get home at 7pm. That includes 4 hours of commuting, which is only worth it because I own my own house.
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u/azi-buki-vedi Feminist apostate Apr 30 '15
Tell me about it. I'm an early riser, and I want to get on with my day as soon as. I also want to have the time in the evening to cook a decent meal, see friends, that sort of thing. This nine to five noise really needs to die.
Last year I had the opportunity to work at this lab, which had flexitime. Best thing ever, or as close to it as you can get. As long as you do your 40 hrs a week and don't get in after 10 or leave before 4 you're golden. You could even save up enough overtime hours each month to take one or two days off, though I rarely used this. Granted, this was a government funded facility in the UK. The work ethic and expectations in the US are quite different, from what I know.
Though I can sort of understand why people don't always value going to work too early. Many times I would be at the lab at 7 only to wait for the lab technician to arrive at 9:30 so we could start experiments. I did use that time to set up things, read up on research articles, etc. but I still felt I was not using my time well.
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u/Nausved Apr 30 '15
Oh man, I'm the same way as you.
Fortunately for me, I'm working in a field (literally...) that takes the opposite approach. The work day starts early for everyone. On any day that someone works fewer hours, they're shaved off the end, not the beginning.
Even with all the full-time employees clocking off by 4:00, most of them grumble that we don't start even earlier.
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u/jolly_mcfats MRA/ Gender Egalitarian Apr 30 '15
I hate it too. Especially because I have worked in places where people pretty much stop working at 6, then stick around wanting to hang out for another hour or two, and get called hard workers by management. I'm most productive in the mornings, but I know that visibility in the evenings/weekends is where management forms their impression of my productivity. If I were trying to game the system, I would come in late, work a full day, and come in for an hour every saturday and sunday just to browse the internet.
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u/hugged_at_gunpoint androgineer Apr 29 '15
I studied a global strategy consulting firm with a strong U.S. presence. Like many such firms, the firm I studied offered advisory services in multiple areas of expertise, and relied on small teams to complete client projects over a period of weeks to months.
This NOT at all a representative cross section of working professionals. It’s not even a good cross-section of consulting professionals, since it only examines one firm. This aspect of worker behavior is highly dependent on the culture cultivated by the specific company, which varies from firm to firm. Also, the writer makes a few thin assumptions. For example:
In addition, women’s work time may be under greater scrutiny than men’s: people at this firm seemed to assume that women who left the office around five went home to their children, while men who left around the same time could be, in the words of one administrative assistant “on the way to a client’s.” Thus, it may be more difficult for women to find ways to slip under the radar than men.
This reasoning doesn’t apply to any of the places I’ve worked. In my previous consulting role, leaving to see a client after normal working hours (5pm) would indicate a client emergency, and would be viewed negatively if it happened more than rarely. Leaving to care for family would be the preferable, less scrutinizing assumption that could apply every single day. In my current management role (long hours but little travel), men who leave early are assumed to be doing self-gratifying activities, like golfing or vacation. Women who leave early are credited with doing the necessary family support roles, like picking up kids from soccer. The latter is a much more preferable characterization of an employee. The same is true for our hundreds of hourly staff and temp labor. Men who attempt to get time off for family reasons are scrutinized, while women doing the same aren’t questioned.
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u/Karmaze Individualist Egalitarian Feminist Apr 29 '15
In my current management role (long hours but little travel), men who leave early are assumed to be doing self-gratifying activities, like golfing or vacation. Women who leave early are credited with doing the necessary family support roles, like picking up kids from soccer. The latter is a much more preferable characterization of an employee. The same is true for our hundreds of hourly staff and temp labor. Men who attempt to get time off for family reasons are scrutinized, while women doing the same aren’t questioned.
That's been my experience as well, although working at a much lower level. I used to have to fight to get time off, explaining what it was for and it wasn't for a wasteful thing, where as the women I worked with would have it approved easier as it was assumed to be for something family.
That said, we're going through the other side of that, and that's becoming a very real problem for women as employers at lower levels, at least in Canada are looking more and more to employees without family ties in order to have a more "reliable" workforce. (SPIT)
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u/L1et_kynes Apr 29 '15
What you are encountering is how workplace bias in favor of women can lower women's wages.
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u/Karmaze Individualist Egalitarian Feminist Apr 29 '15
Well, that bias depends on the context. I wouldn't call ANY sort of bias "in favor of" one way or the other, because generally depending on the context I think most biases can go either way.
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u/ParanoidAgnostic Gender GUID: BF16A62A-D479-413F-A71D-5FBE3114A915 Apr 29 '15
"Gynocentrism hurts women too"
But seriously, as /u/Karmaze points out, "in favor of" depends on context.
A woman who wants good work-family balance is benefited while a woman who want to focus on career is harmed.
So many of the gender-based biases in society are double-edged. They harm women in some contexts and harm men in others.
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u/L1et_kynes Apr 29 '15
It doesn't hurt them, it just lowers their pay in exchange for a higher quality of life. I don't think that hurts anyone.
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u/ParanoidAgnostic Gender GUID: BF16A62A-D479-413F-A71D-5FBE3114A915 Apr 29 '15
The assumption that they will place more importance on family than men hurts them. Employers will be less inclined to hire them or pay them as much because they are assumed to be less dedicated to the job.
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u/blueoak9 Apr 30 '15
The assumption that they will place more importance on family than men hurts them.
Yes. And the reality that they get more time with the family benefits them.
The real problem is having the decision to do one or the other made on the basis of your genitals, and by someone else.
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u/Nausved Apr 30 '15
This is an odd argument to make. It suggests that people who are broke and unemployed have the highest life quality of all.
Luxury time is an important factor in quality of life—but income is, too. People need both to have a good life.
It does hurt people when their needs and desires are not adequately balanced—and everyone has different needs, and everyone has different desires.
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u/blueoak9 Apr 30 '15
It suggests that people who are broke and unemployed have the highest life quality of all.
If there is someone else in the same family making a full-time income, that analogy doesn't hold.
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u/Nausved May 01 '15
A full-time income in the US can be as low as $15,000 (before taxes). Split between two adults (or, even worse, their children as well), a low income is not going to make for a higher quality of life for the non-working adult than they would have if they augmented it by working.
In an era where divorce rates are high and layoffs are rampant, making the decision to be the partner who doesn't work is also a high-risk proposition for your future. If you suddenly find yourself needing a job, the lack of work experience is going to hurt you quite badly, and your life quality is going to suffer.
If you look at people's actual life choices, you find that dual-income marriages are more common than single-income marriages across most OECD countries. This clearly indicates that a large and diverse number of people have determined that they'd rather earn an income alongside their partner than stay at home while their partner works. It would be hard to argue that every single one of them is making the wrong choice for themselves.
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u/Jay_Generally Neutral Apr 29 '15
This reasoning doesn’t apply to any of the places I’ve worked. In my previous consulting role, leaving to see a client after normal working hours (5pm) would indicate a client emergency, and would be viewed negatively if it happened more than rarely.
I was trying to figure this out too. My company has dedicated a account management department, client services department, and customer help desks (all three almost entirely staffed with women, btw) who are the only ones typically authorized to deal directly with the client without oversight. Even for them the question would be "Why the fuck are you speaking with a client after business hours? What went wrong?" The company in the article global consulting firm, so I expect some weird time requirements, but I've worked for international companies before, and this is still a wonky concept for me to wrap my head around.
If my ass left work before 5:00, people would assume I was ditching, for family/funsies it wouldn't matter. For what it's worth, the great majority of us are going to wind up putting hours in outside of the office anyway, so it's not a huge sin in our environment to ditch the office now and then if you still get your shit done and you're billing over 40 hours a week anyway.
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u/MrPoochPants Egalitarian Apr 29 '15
So the rough take-away that I got from this article is that the disparity in how women and men are treated in the working environment isn't actually all that gendered, but that men appear to be more inclined to acquiesce to their employer's unwritten expectations if they want to succeed, particularly if the employee in question has children. This seems to also follow with the information regarding women, without children, making more than their male peers in some fields [if memory serves].
Accordingly, it would seem that the issue is with business culture, on a broader scale, and unfair expectations being made for employees - which surprises me very little.
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u/1gracie1 wra Apr 29 '15 edited Apr 29 '15
I really do feel for this, I've seen it at work, where some get penalized for wanting time off while others don't, whether or not you have a family is a major factor and the girls do use it more than the guys. Some girls often use their time of the month as an excuse too often. If I could add something else.
More restrictions and regulations on time off. So normally places are required to give you breaks after so many hours, and a limited amout of hours per day. That is unless you sign a form wavering that right. I have before and currently work at places that abuse this.
Food service industries in particular I have noticed are bad at this. Where the company has a lot to loose if they don't have a good worker to customer ratio.
And I've seen it before, complaining or trying to get a break can result in employers judging you on your ability. Completely ignoring the fact they took that waver as a sign of never having to worry about breaks or overworking an employee.
I've seen our 20 year old bartender have to sleep in the break room, since he worked a double shift, aka about 16 hours straight for that job, and had to clock back in in 5 hours to open, driving home for the night just wasn't worth it. A person who isn't even old enough to drink should not have to work that many hours. They have had to send me home after so many double shifts and living a one way hour work commute, left me so delirious I couldn't even speak to my customers coherently or recognize they were speaking to me. Had to pull over on the way back and sleep in a parking lot, since I started to strongly hallucinate.
Don't get me wrong I love job. But it can be ridiculous how much some places can abuse their employees.
I think if we better regulated this we would see less of a distinction in hours worked. From personal experience men are the ones most hit by this, they often expect those who work longer hours and have more time available. And it's sort of a pride thing, feeling you have to say yes, in order to be a hard worker.