work-life balance

Sweden has a long tradition of supporting its citizens with protective regulations and social services, including 480 days of paid parental leave, universal health care, and free higher education.  But now, a new proposal has come forward in the Swedish town of Overtonea: to give municipal employees a paid hour break during the week to go home and have sex.  A recent article in the New York Times explains that the policy, a brainchild of councilman Per-Erik Muskos, could help with the decreasing population in Overtonea, improve marriages, and improve employee satisfaction. 

Muskos’ idea has garnered as much praise as criticism. Many believe that it will encourage single workers to go on dates that will take longer than the one hour. And many wonder how such something like this could be enforced. Others believe that it is an excellent idea, as it will help with work-life balance. Lotta Dellve, sociologist from the University of Gothenburg, believes that her research supports Muskos’ plan. Her findings show that short bursts of physical activity during office hours are correlated with work satisfaction and productivity. Dellve believes that sex can fulfill these needed bursts, but noted that a lot of people might struggle to find the motivation to come back to work. 

“Work-family balance” is a phrase that many of us are all too familiar with, and competition between workplace and family demands are a “given” for many people, but particularly for parents. Flexibility is key—and it’s a luxury that many workers don’t have when office culture and workplace norms prioritize “work” over “family” in self-presentation and conduct.

Research by U of MN sociologist Phyllis Moen and MIT sociologist Erin Kelly, whose work with five coauthors was published in the most recent issue of the American Sociological Review, shows how consciously changing such workplace culture is a win for families and offices, as explored in a New York Times article by Claire Cain Miller.

Miller describes how the team’s innovative experiment simulated a new type of workplace culture for those in the experimental group, while it was business as usual for the control group:

Workers in the experimental group were told they could work wherever, and whenever, they chose so long as projects were completed on time and goals were met; the new emphasis would be on results rather than on the number of hours spent in the office. Managers were trained to be supportive of their employees’ personal issues and were formally encouraged to open up about their own priorities outside work—an ill parent, or a child wanting her mom to watch her soccer games. Managers were given iPods that buzzed twice a day to remind them to think about the various ways they could support their employees as they managed their jobs and home lives.

In the study, both the experimental employees and their children were sleeping better than those in the control group. Employers might also be interested to know that retention rates and desire-to-stay were higher in the experimental group.

Though having management and bosses openly discuss and respect the struggles of work-family balance goes against the grain of office norms, this research shows that these boundaries aren’t doing anyone favors. Shifting toward a conceptualization of this dynamic with vocabularies like “work family fit”—which doesn’t treat work and family as competitors in a zero-sum-game—could help workers and companies alike.

Men and women who are lawyers, consultants, or hold other prestigious jobs find themselves answering late night emails and weekend phone calls. Even when they’re “off the clock,” trying to relax with their families, highly paid professionals often attend to work.

Still, men and women tend to cope with demands for their time differently, and it boils down to men working as much as possible, while women try to negotiate their careers to accommodate rearing their children. Sociologist Mary Blair-Loy from the University of California, San Diego told the New York Times that these differences come from broader, gendered cultural expectations: “It’s not really about business; it’s about fundamental identity and masculinity,” Ms. Blair-Loy said. “Men are required by the culture to be these superheroes, to fulfill this devotion and single-minded commitment to work.” For women, carpool, soccer games, and dance recitals are seen as more acceptable reasons for leaving work, “because they have an external definition of morality or leading the good life, which is being devoted to their children.”

However, being a “good mom” isn’t a “free pass,” and it certainly isn’t a route to career advancement. Coworkers often interpret only working 9-to-5 to mean that a woman is not fully invested in her career. And when the moms put their careers “before their kids”—say, taking calls during a T-ball game or staying at the office until 9pm—they’re likely to lose the respect of their colleagues, judged for bucking others’ ideas of what a nurturing mom really looks like. In careers and elsewhere, cultural tropes, from boardroom bosses to soccer moms, have real consequences.

Who doesn’t love a four (or five!) day weekend? An extra day or two away from the desk means more time for leisure activities and to disengage from work. But Scott Schieman, sociology professor at University of Toronto, warns that consistently short work weeks may not help work-life balance in the long run. In an interview on CBC’s Daybreak South, Schieman said,

I think what we have to really look at are the nature or the demands of the job—and how those demands can either be compressed in particular time periods, or whether they actually need to be spread out, and that’s when you get to some of the cons.

When the same amount of work needs to be done in three days instead of five, it means longer hours. It’s like cramming for a college exam, when it’s physically tiring and harder to process information. Even if three days of intense work seems like a good trade for four days at home, it’s still unlikely that “days off” mean not working, Schieman points out: “What if there’s a deadline, what if there’s an ongoing project? Can you really break from that fully?” Additionally, people with families may find the long hours associated with shorter work weeks incompatible with obligations like carpool, and non-stop work is unlikely to happen in a house with a demanding toddler. Savoring the occasional holiday might provide a better balance, aligning with kids’ school days and taken-for-granted “business hours,” while adding in a “bonus” day of leisure intermittently.

In a June 2012 TIME Ideas column online, author Judith Warner reflects on the recent work of sociologist Andrea Doucet (of Ontario’s Brock University). Warner writes that Doucet’s focus on shifting family paradigms, as well as women’s increasing numbers in the ranks of “family breadwinners” (that is, primary earners in heterosexual relationships), has led the researcher to look for a change from “50-50” thinking to a focus on egalitarianism across the board. This leads to “something more like fairness—or like ‘symmetry’.”

Doucet tells Warner:

My overall aim is for gender equality… but it always bothers me when the measures we use are not quick in synch with how people live their lives… Maybe what we need to change then is that larger set of conditions that allow people to make choices that work.

The problem, the author explains, is that, even though many attempts have been made to create greater equality by assuming the gold standard would be “lives of sameness.” Through a series of rhetorical questions, Warner reasons that Doucet’s concept could open up space for families to define egalitarianism based on their own measures of earning power, love of career, and the rewarding (and annoying) aspects of various tasks that keep a family humming along:

It’s something of a “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” formulation, one that might, for once, just possibly work. Sharing, as opposed to equality.”

The real key here might lie in changing public discussions to reflect the actual lives of families, who are already negotiating, balancing, and flourishing in egalitarian homes. These mothers and fathers, wives and husbands might just need the vocabulary to explain their (gasp!) Marxist micro-communities.

Kudos to University of Illinois sociologist and Council on Contemporary Families head Barbara Risman for putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys, more likely) for CNN.com in an insightful commentary about why it is that the so-called Mommy Wars are a distraction—and how they’re keeping us from truly addressing work-life balance in the United States.

In her short piece, Risman points out just four of the many contradictions between society’s values and actions that put the lie to the valorization of care-giving, using research from sociology and beyond to demonstrate that post-war workplaces don’t (and, quite possibly, can’t) serve millenial families. In one particularly telling example, Risman writes:

Sociologist Mirra Komarovsky pointed out these contradictions back in 1953. She argued back then that if society truly believed caretaking was an important and difficult job, nursery school teachers would rate a salary at least equal to the beginning salary of a street cleaner. Not much has changed since then. As Stephanie Coontz, a historian and co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families, told me: “It’s time for politicians to stop competing over the women’s votes and start competing over who has the best programs to support all parents, whatever their employment status or their gender.”

She concludes with a succinct call to action: “Let’s call a truce on the fictional mommy wars and start a war on workplaces that don’t allow mommies and daddies to live full lives, on the job and at home.”