US families have largely been forced to figure out how to navigate the pandemic on their own: forming pods to share the home-school and childcare duties, and re-arranging schedules to accommodate competing demands at work and home. But forcing the burden onto individuals masks the role that employers have to play.
“We don’t want this to be a… ‘Women, if you just pull yourself up this is going to be okay!’ [scenario] when in reality, we need to create structures that are equitable,” says Annie Warshaw, CEO and cofounder of Mission Propelle, a Chicago-based consulting agency that specializes in gender equity.
During the pandemic, the primary changes workers have wanted from employers involve scheduling and flexibility, says Warshaw. With many working parents now dashing throughout the day between their laptops and their children’s online schooling, a switch from email to simpler message-based communication platforms like Slack can save valuable time that would otherwise be spent slogging through an inbox. (It takes less time to append a thumbs-up emoji to confirm receipt of a document than composing an email saying the same.)
Schedules that consolidate work meetings into predictable chunks of the day are also useful to parents (and employees without children as well) trying to plan ahead for the week or organise care for their kids. Beyond that, however, companies should also revisit what constitutes a full weekday or workweek, and how they evaluate employee productivity.
“There are only so many hours in the day. If we aren’t going to have childcare indefinitely, saying ‘You can just do your work from 7 pm to 2 am’ is not a sustainable solution,” says Goldstein. Given the high cost of replacing valuable workers, it might be more cost-effective for a company to keep an employee at the same level of seniority and salary but with a reduced hourly schedule.
This is a particularly thorny discussion in professional services like consulting firms and law offices, where billable hours are tied to compensation, advancement and even continued employment. The Northwestern research team went so far as to recommend that companies waive all billable-hours targets attached to bonus pay for female employees with children under the age of 14. They also recommend a government subsidy that replaces 80% of worker pay for employees who need to leave the workforce during the pandemic in order to care for their children, though no major US political party or figure has yet advocated for this publicly.
