Gender balance: stop the slide back to the 1970s

In a week when discrimination—too long ignored—has exploded into the public domain, I’m following up last week’s vlog on the data that shows how badly women are being hit by Covid.

Last week’s video if you missed it:

The question I posed was: how do we address the looming imbalance, where many men emerge from lockdown professionally intact but many women don’t? I have tried to do your responses justice.

Home

As many of you are fast to point out, this starts at home. Alaric Mostyn said that men need to step up and do more. Something I know many of you are nodding at.  But also scratching your head, wondering how that change happens.

Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play (a book based on 500 interviews with couples about how they share the domestic load) sent over her thoughts. She has just conducted an informal survey asking who, during the time of COVID-19, is responsible for the cognitive labour.

“The answer was a resounding ME ME ME”,  meaning over 100 women responded that they were responsible. “Steve is locked in his home office and is dealing with a lot.  I am completely in charge of this shitshow of… everything else.”

Eve suggests that part of the reason for this is that men, women and society view men’s time as finite and women’s as infinite.  Men get more autonomy over how they spend their time (and much more often they are paid for their hours in a day) and women are expected to spend their last waking moments in service of the home and children. 

But she also got this response:

“My wife just got to work on everything you list above, and now I’m marching to her tune.” 

Eve recommends having better conversations. Her tips for how are in the book, but a big one is to “Communicate when emotion is low and cognition is high”. By which she means that yelling at each other—while the oven chips singe, a kid stamps on an iPad, and the laundry basket explodes down the stairs—won’t fix it.

She says that taking the time to build the right systems is worth it—and Alaric reminds that this is because we need to be better role models than most of us had as children.

Business

Many have rightly pointed out that the IFS data from last week looked at opposite gendered couples and ignored that the hardest hit by lockdown are solo parents, for whom homeschooling is even more of a nightmare. This brought me back to what primary head teacher, Pippa Wright, shared a few weeks ago about how we should take the pressure off ourselves regarding how much meaningful teaching is possible. But, if this goes on into the autumn, as the news threatens it might, parents are going to need support if they are to work, if we’re going to get the economy back on track.

Vicky Stubbs, who shares childcare with her ex, said her employer was supportive but she knows that is unusual. Anna Harris, Strategist and Researcher on Female Ambition, says that employers should resist giving support to women and men unequally, because otherwise they are contributing to the problem.

Sarah Hesz, at Bubble Childcare App, agrees that employers need to start thinking about supporting childcare as they do healthcare. Verena Hefti, LeadersPlus, adds that employers will have to keep ‘flex’ as a default to support working families. 

Meanwhile Dr Dan Guinness, Good Lad Initiative, reminds business leaders to think hard about the impact of informal power structures when people are not able to get into the office. Who do you think will have the ‘quiet word in the corridor’ to their advantage..? 

Government

Someone (who works for the government and can’t be named) suggests we take learnings from:

• Italy for their childcare bonuses

• Denmark for their teaching

• Finland where policy has been informed much more holistically

Hannah Arkwright picked up this theme suggesting that now is the moment to rethink timings.

“School hours don’t work for most working parents (especially the six week long summer holiday).

Perhaps now is the time to look at a new term structure that better suits the needs of children and parents, seeing as children are not needed to bring in the harvest anymore!” 

Ultimately these are complex issues and many of you said that the government needs to include the views of more than just rich white men. Something student Priya Kaler nailed in a video about the double standard that allows Boris Johnson to laugh about how many women are enough, while not even admitting how many children he has by different partners.

The pressure of it all was summed up by an out-take that Dan sent of him trying to film his response, while his dog howled. The camera revealed he had a smart shirt… but no trousers. Which is pretty much how our week of getting two kids ready for school at 10am only to pick them up at noon has felt.

Here’s to some howling at tonight’s Strawberry moon.

- Christine x