The dilemmas of part-time work for women
Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs
SOLUTIONS TO problems often carry unanticipated consequences. This is the case with part-time work in America today. Part-time work can be a reasonable way of dealing with the work-family...
...This is because part-time work, whether of many or few hours, carries serious costs...
...Globalization and competition contribute to the sense of urgency in raising productivity (while keeping the workforce to a minimum...
...Who defines the time of any activity as enough or too much...
...A group of us at the City University of New York Graduate Center have just completed a study of lawyers who work reduced schedules...
...At a meeting I attended last year, called to address growing dissatisfaction among young lawyers, and attended by managing partners of large firms and deans of major law schools, there was a sharp discrepancy in the urgency expressed by the partners and the deans...
...In the deal-making environment of Wall Street, long hours are rewarded with high incomes and bonuses...
...Experienced lawyers who had previously proven themselves now were marginalized...
...Most of the women professionals who have negotiated part-time arrangements are married to men who work full time...
...Yet given the persistence of gender stereotypes, these women must negotiate the conflict between the two thousand to three thousand "billable hours" that define a young lawyer as a real "comer," or the after-hours work demanded of managers, and the rising expectations of "intensive mothering" that the sociologist Sharon Hays has identified as a feature of contemporary American culture...
...It is doubtful that productivity would suffer...
...Clearly, flexible work schedules meet the needs of many dual-career couples...
...The returns in commitment and excellence would far outweigh the inconveniences that industrial and professional managers anticipate...
...They lamented the loss of women's talent from the top rungs of the profession, but didn't think it was their responsibility...
...and workers who have children at home they need to care for...
...Part-time work can be a reasonable way of dealing with the work-family dilemma...
...CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN'S most recent book (with Carroll Seron, Bonnie Oglensky, and Robert Sauté) is The Part-Time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender (Routledge, 1998...
...To what extent are we masters of our time or slaves to others' dicta about it...
...These include part-timers who may put in thirty-hour weeks in government offices or fifty-hour weeks in firms where the norm is sixty or seventy hours...
...The Department of Labor defines part time as anything less than a "normal" thirty-five-hour week, which puts people who work thirty-four hours a week in offices in the same category with those who work fifteen hours a week at McDonald's...
...More and more people are working weekends, holidays, and during hours that others define as leisure time...
...It has been discussed widely in the press, among corporate managers and working people...
...As the United Parcel Service strike in 1997 made clear, many American workers settle for part-time employment when their preference would be for full time and the steadier incomes and benefits that come with it...
...Yet not many individuals take it—fewer than 3 percent of lawyers, for example...
...Think of time as a political category: Who controls it...
...The result is that busy executives, lawyers, money managers, and the myriads of people that support and serve them are feeling high degrees of stress...
...Out of sight often meant "out of mind" when it came to placing an associate on a partnership track...
...BUT SO FAR, many of the available "solutions" are individual ones...
...Able individuals who work productively on the job but are seen as wanting a life of their own face serious sanctions...
...The combination of demographic changes, the pool of talented women, and the needs of the professions—alongside the women's movement's pressure to seek institutional solutions for work-family conflicts—have motivated corporations and law firms to make parttime work available...
...DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 97 NOTEBOOK We determined that many part-time lawyers must either abandon their "solution" and return to full-time work or find themselves in career limbo...
...It turns out that it is not simply the number of hours that is crucial in defining the "real professional" but also the visibility of working late in the day and night and on weekends...
...The inNOTEBOOK crease in hours demanded of lawyers in large firms has set a standard for the profession that affects all lawyers with whom the firms deal...
...The findings of our study of lawyers revealed that individuals who worked what most people would regard as a normal work week— but less than the workaholic time standard of their firm—were stigmatized in both trivial and profound ways...
...Either consciously or unconsciously, organizations put a cap on the careers and numbers of part-timers...
...What do we mean by part-time work anyway...
...To achieve a more equitable workplace, there has to be serious institutional planning to enable working people at every level of the occupational hierarchy to find meaningful work and opportunities for career growth, while also having sufficient "off time" to devote to family and civic duties...
...Working in the law, like working in other spheres today, means facing a set of mounting pressures that stem from the frantic pace of a world in which cell phones, e-mail and faxes, overnight couriers, and air travel have created a twenty-four-hour work day...
...The latter have chosen schedules that set firm limits on the escalating time requirements that come from pressure to increase their "billable hours"— the hours that firms charge to clients...
...Increasingly, support personnel such as secretaries and data processing clerks have to work at times highly uncongenial to family life, while professionals often have no offtime at all, no matter how unsynchronized their schedules might be with those of family and friends...
...Part time is usually not possible for a single mother or a minority lawyer who needs a full-time salary...
...98 n DISSENT / Spring 1999...
...Today, professionals and factory workers bend mind and body to rhythms created by the demands of global markets and intense competition at home...
...Even among trained professionals, long defined as "free" because they presumably hold control of how they spend their time, the demands of the market have overwhelmed their autonomy...
...As with all concepts of time, it depends on the context...
...Voluntary part-time professional work turns out to be a middle-class white woman's option...
...Although the issue of workplace flexibility is commonly couched in economic terms, it is clear that the meaning of time and the economics of work are often socially constructed to maintain old stratification patterns...
...Top-flight lawyers saw the time problem as a "lifestyle" or a "woman's issue...
...This should not be imagined as a "woman's issue," or a "deviant" career path but as part of the normal pace of the life cycle for everyone...
...Because time norms define the professional, alternative schedules mark the person demanding or accepting them as less than professional...
...Real men," in their view, don't work part time and don't work at home...
...Deal makers are requiring undivided time commitments...
...Yet most women with children are in the workforce...
...More than this the quality as well as the quantity of their work is put into question...
...Many of them lost their seniority in times of retrenchment or were fired...
...Part time has become a woman's option and thus has been defined as a "woman's issue," leaving the workaholic model a male model that many men do not care for, but get sucked into...
...And, for the first time, many organizations formally permit it...
...But part-time work is also voluntarily chosen by millions of people—the young who need to combine work with school...
...And, as the New York Times put it recently, a new class of part-time professionals and managers—mostly women—are working "reduced" schedules that run thirty-five to forty hours a week...
...The vast majority of part-time workers are women...
...And many organizations find that they benefit from the contributions of women professionals who deliver excellent work and do not feel justified in making large demands...
...The continuing stereotyping of women's roles and women's character, the pressure on them to bear all the responsibility for home and child care, and the denigration they face when they try to juggle their roles, effectively limit their ability to break through glass ceilings...
...Although both feminists and conservatives defend part-time work as a way for parents to hold a job and also spend adequate time with their children, it is no mystery that they 96 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 are talking about mothers...
...Some were refused business cards with the firms' name, and important meetings were often scheduled on days when they regularly work from home...
...Part-time work is clearly gendered...
...The women, given the poor facilities for child care in this country, and the pressures on them to make minimal use of surrogate care, believe that they must make compromises...
...Even if these professionals agree to be paid disproportionately less money, they find themselves forced "off track" in their careers—it doesn't matter that the reduced schedule is often temporary...
...Working mothers, whether full time or part time, still get a bad rap, as media sensationalists and pop psychologists warn them of "killer nannies" or stress the dangers of failed mother-child bonding...
...They administer "greedy institutions"—as the sociologist Lewis Coser once described organizations that demand total commitment from their members...
...In spite of these problems, many women hope to work part time...
...Managers refused to give them titles appropriate to their seniority...
...They also clearly did not believe that young men starting families should enter into the "lifestyle" debate and share responsibility with their working wives...
...older workers who want to keep their hand in the workplace but also to cut back...
...with few exceptions, it is women who pay them...
...Even those who worked flexible hours—using modern technology to work in home offices, for example—suffered by not engaging in "face time" with their colleagues...
...THE INCREASE in time pressures in the professions and among executives comes at a time when women are flocking into professional and managerial ranks, finally having gained access to career options that men have long enjoyed...
...More women than men are "time deviants," and this fact adds strength to the notion that women are generally less professional...
...These workaholic standards are getting more common in corporate managerial ranks too...
Vol. 46 • April 1999 • No. 2
