Irene Padavic, FSU & Robin Ely, HBS: The Work-Family Narrative as a Social Defense

The following are my notes from Padavic & Ely's presentation at the HBS Gender & Work Conference, March 1, 2013

Women make up only 11% of executive officers in companies. Work-family conflict is the dominant explanation given for this in the media (Ramarajan,McGinn, Kolb, 2012).

McKinsey, Bain, BCG concerned about losses, etc. Women are reluctant to take advantage of flexibility policies.

Invitation from a consulting company to investigate and design intiatives to increase women’s promotion rates and stem the loss of women in associate ranks. But gender can’t be understood alone. The employer was not as interested in hearing about cultural change and norms as about work-family.

Firm’s focus is on supporting women to leave work, rather than to stay.

Why does work-family persist as the dominant narrative and intervention strategy, given its uneven success in advancing women’s careers?

Problem gets translated into one only faced by women. Partners in the consulting firm indict work-family as why women are not coming up through the ranks, and both men and women concur.

100 interviews with women and men of all ranks revealed a different story. The organizational culture exacerbated the problem with unacknowledged time demands due to overselling, over-delivery, and associates going along with overwork in order to stand out (e.g., 100 slide deck, client can’t possibly use all of it, but it gets created and used by associate to stand out as hard working and smart).

Women and men were equally likely to say work interfered with family life. One man burst into tears recalling a missed soccer game, saying he had wanted to quit then and there.

Women and men quit at similar rates. Turnover was high, but contrary to common belief, as many men as women left the firm.

Firm-wide focus on women produced formal work-family accommodations that derailed womens' careers, reifying their marginalization with accommodation and women’s “limitations.”

Successful women at the firm: senior women with children were labled as bad managers, as bad mothers, or as both; men and women who “kill their teams” were described very differently -- the men were described as exacting excellent performance, women were described as bitches. Women partners were viewed as bad mothers and role models, held to much higher parenting standards than the men.

Firm’s focus on work-family (focus on biology of motherhood etc.) put blinders on co so it couldn't see the fundamental work problem that hurt all employees. 

Why?

Padavic & Ely's speculation about resistance:

Social defenses: "Social defenses are collective arrangements—such as an organizational structure, a work method, or a prevalent discourse—created or used by an organization’s members as a protection against disturbing affect derived from external threats, internal conflicts, or the nature of their work (Halton, 1994)." (Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010, p. 47)

The work-family narrative is a social defense.

General problem these employees face: There is no identity other than labor identity. Competition between corporations sets up overselling, and over-demand for this labor identity makes all other identities contingent, subordinate, and stifled (e.g., being a good parent, a life partner, or a citizen), but these identities are important, especially being a good parent, and compelling (example given of a father, with some pain in his voice, describing his daughter's rejection of him at bed-time; momma is wanted because she’s the one who can be relied upon). These feelings set up guilt, denial, splitting, and projection; each gender takes a key part of being a whole human and splits them in two, together they take upon a whole.

Men split off their feelings of deep commitment to the child and project it onto women; that sacred feeling the dad felt when his daughter was born is resolved by knowing someone is addressing it. Men take on committed work role, defending against sadness and guilt with respect to family. Women get an out for a job they don’t fit, a wonderful place to go, a role that the culture tells them it is appropriate.

Hardest task in firm: selling to CEOs. Men do it better than women; women see mismatch between their relational styles and that which the firm reveals and demands. "Women lack what it takes" narrative + work-family narrative leads to women leaving, and not succeeding. Women “can’t be man enough" is the message.

Given the psychological choice between seeing themselves as striving and failing on the one hand, and ratcheting down on the ladder on the other hand, women prefer (and their organizations prefer) the latter view.

Q&A

Table Discussion

Joanne Martin: Psychologizing too much? Structure of financial incentives is to bring in hoards of young people, work them like slaves 70-80 hours a week for cheap, then flush them out before they get too expensive and you need to promote them.

Elizabeth Hansen: Growth the big curse, competition between firms to grow grow grow leads to this overwork.

Me: Not necessarily keeping the best employees, though; this firm might be subject to same pressures as other firms, unaware of this strategy of sloughing off lots of upcoming expensive workers, pitting them against each other, by getting rid of women through work-family narrative. Not an intentional strategy, but one that is financially adaptive; the social defense of splitting off identities may also be a response, coping mechanism, rather than a cause. Ultimate cause economic structures and incentives, ultimate solution probably law like Correll argued. Really need to bring in dual systems theory here to analyze simulatenous affects of capitalism and male dominance; can change from the top – law – or the bottom – econ forces on individual families that makes men do more work in the home.

General Discussion

Ely: this firm came to us with a “gender problem”; didn’t get it, wanted to

Mayra Luiz Castro: Law plays a very important role, but how work is organized might be even more so.

Pam Stone: Extreme hours as disparate impact, framing it that way; job “requirements” are social constructions to maintain status, not real requirements.

[Reminds me of external v. internal control of low v. high strata occs & employees; overlay with dual systems theory; physical v. ideological control]

Pam Stone: long hours overwork the professions, elite [b/c status content, ideological religious devotion to work], class-defining standard of work [and masculinity].

Ella Bell: Moca Moms, elite African American women, came together as organization when they got backlash from Black community to be stay-at-home moms, national organization, meeting, website