CAITLYN COLLINS: Work-family conflict
is an issue that plagues mothers across Western industrialized
countries, but it's easier in some places than others
to be a working mom.
The United States is one of two countries
on the planet that doesn't offer paid maternity leave.
The United States and Papua New Guinea
are the only two countries in the world
that don't offer this benefit on a federal level.
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I was interested in understanding
what life was like day-to-day for women
who live in other countries that have
very different work-family policy supports,
and also really different cultural attitudes when
it comes to gender, and work, and caregiving.
Sweden is a country that has 480 days of paid parental leave
for parents, and it's paid out at 80% wage replacement.
And I remember one mom telling me,
I really think this should be a 100% wage replacement.
That is a very big dip in income.
And from an American perspective,
that's comical, because we have nothing.
We have no paid parental leave in our country.
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Here in the US, women were really stressed and exhausted.
And it was obvious on their faces.
Oftentimes, they cried during our interviews.
And they cried most often in response
to one particular question.
I know that everybody has a different idea of what
it means to be a good parent.
But to you, what does it mean to be
a good mother to your children?
And when women broke down in tears
and explained to me sometimes in the conference
room in their office buildings, sometimes in their kitchens
or their living rooms that they felt
they were failing their children.
They're ideal for what it means to be
a good mother felt very far away from their current state.
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We live in a country that deeply values individualism.
And, again, this idea of personal responsibility
is central to the way our country is set up.
The US is one of only a few countries on the planet that
has no federal standard for vacation
and sick days, no paid parental leave,
no universal social insurance entitlement,
no universal health care, no universal child care.
We think of families and of caregiving
as private and personal responsibilities.
Women tended to blame themselves when they struggled.
When we live in a country that says
it's your job to do this on your own,
it's not at all surprising to me that mothers,
when they experience difficulties,
would say things to me like, well, yeah,
if I just got a little more organized,
or if I came up with a better schedule,
or if I just prepared meals more on the weekends for my family,
or maybe this spring break when mothers said,
we're not going to take a trip.
We're going to stay at home and we're
going to reorganize the house to make
things a little less insane.
They put it on themselves to resolve this.
And, again, you cannot fix a social problem with individual
solutions.
Being more organized or efficient
does not bring about the sort of social change
that all women both need and deserve here in the US.
In Germany, and Sweden, and Italy, and, of course,
across many other Western wealthy countries,
these are countries that have come
to the collective consensus that caregiving is, again,
a public responsibility, and the cost and burden of it
should be shared across society.
Children themselves are future workers,
and taxpayers, and citizens, are a public good.
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I think knowledgeable managers who
don't act like this is the first time in the history
of humankind that anyone has ever
had to navigate having a kid and working at the same time
can go a long way toward making working parents feel supported.
If I were a manager, I would think carefully
about implementing policies like paid parental leave that
are gender neutral.
And having a policy on the books is one thing,
but encouraging employees to take them is very different.
And often, that happens by managers leading the way.
And so managers can role model what it means to, for example,
talk about your family day-to-day in the workplace,
and not in ways that are stigmatized.
Managers can role model taking vacation days and sick days.
And, importantly, managers can also educate themselves
about perhaps what policies are already on the books,
but that folks don't often know about until they actually
get pregnant and start trying to navigate
how they're going to make this work for themselves.
We associate success with being fully committed 24 hours a day,
seven days a week to work.
And it shifts the dialogue, the discourse
when someone in a leading position
shows that it can be done a different way that does not
diminish their ability in the workplace.
If there are women listening here
who are working moms themselves, the one message that I would
want them to leave this with is the idea
that their work-family conflict, and their stress,
and their guilt, is not their fault. It is not their fault.
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