If women say something over and over again, does anyone hear them?

NOTE: If you need to register, go to Bug Me Not and get a username and password.

My jaw dropped when I read this article in Fortune Magazine (hey, I have to read it for work). I can sum it up for you--male executives work over eighty hours a week and cannot take it anymore, so they're working to change this. And while it's true that since the second wave of feminism began women have been griping about crazy work hours and the requirement to sell your soul to the company in order to get ahead, it doesn't matter until men start to agree. Nothing will change until men start to agree.

(There was also the focus on the quality of life of wealthy male executives--because the working poor don't work those kinds of hours at all--but the class angle will be in my next post on the subject.)

Granted, it's nice that some of the guys out there finally agree with us and want to do something about it, but I'd like to know what makes them so important that nothing will change, and no one will listen to what is after all a reasonable idea unless the person voicing it has a penis.

What set the tone for me was the opening, however.

Gregg Slager saw the clock nearing midnight, sighed, and reached for the next file. All along the 25th floor of Ernst & Young's headquarters at 5 Times Square, lights were ablaze. It was another 80-hour week for the M&A department, where Slager, a senior partner, had been in the trenches for a decade. Slager doesn't do garden-variety accounting; his unit handles due diligence on major deals in which billions of dollars (and thousands of jobs) hang in the balance. On viselike deadlines, they plow through vast piles of financial and operational data to get a fix on a business and look for danger signs. With the boom in private-equity investing, the pace only seemed to be getting more intense.

Top partners like Slager can pull down seven-figure incomes for shepherding such high-pressure deals. Yet last year, at age 45, with 4- and 6-year-old boys at home, he often found himself wondering whether the sacrifices were worth it. Vacations, he recalls, had become merely "a change of work venue." Some nights his wife, Sue, would bring the kids to his office in their pajamas so that they could spend some quality romping-around time with their dad. The young professionals Slager was trying to hold on to in his department said they wouldn't put up with the pace year after year. Something had to give.

The first thing that occurred to me was that a woman in his shoes would be pilloried. How much do you want to bet that if Gregg Slager was Gina Slagger, she'd be called a bad and neglectful mother for putting her career ahead of her family and for "wanting it all"? We'd hear endless whining about how awful it was for her to have other people raise her children (because you know that the vast majority of men out there will not be stay-at-home parents, and aren't condemned as bad parents for not wanting to do it). I would never have strangers raise my children! is the cry I hear from people I know, who remain silent in the face of male workaholics. Sure, they quickly amend that of course they include men in their assessment too, but the subject only comes up when working women are mentioned. Because working men aren't bad parents, period. We don't even have to work eighty hours a week--the usual thirty-five or forty will do for Bad Mommy fodder. These guys work the equivalent of two full-time jobs and then some, and get pitied, not pilloried. Sheesh.

The second thing that occurred to me was that I'd never marry someone who was such a workaholic. I can't even date someone like that. I certainly wouldn't have children with a guy who worked eighty hours a week, and I don't care how much money he pulled in. I wouldn't stand for me and the kids being fourth place on my husband's list of priorities, of his feeling entitled enough to expect everyone else to take care of the family, the house, and all of life's details while he goes after the brass ring on his career merry-go-round. You reap what you sow, and all that--advice directed towards working mothers, but that should also be directed to the men more often than it is. You wouldn't catch me dead bringing in my kids to the office so they could have some stolen dad moments, ostensibly because it's "good" for them to know their father. It is good for them, which leads me to ask why this kind of obsessive ambition is condoned, or at the very least, shrugged off in men. How is it good for kids to have workaholic fathers? I just have yet to see the articles and books and public exhortations that men can't have it all. We women hear this all the time, and are guilted for working a lousy 40-hour-week, with the usual preaching about how we're self-centered and neglectful, doing it just doing it to buy luxury items. If we were all willing to cut back, we could stay at home with the kids. Forgo the second car. Buy second-hand clothes. Make everything from scratch! Practice frugality! It seems laughable when you've got a guy pulling in over a million dollars a year and no one bats an eyelash. I've yet to see the deluge of articles, news stories, talk show whining, punditry, and general bile focused on working mothers judge working fathers. I look at some of these wealthy, workaholic fathers and I think: do you really need the starter mansion? The three car garage? The Hummer and the Audi? The sports equipment you never use? The TV screen that's the size of your freaking living room wall?

Granted, I'm glad Slager had the sense to realize this was a bad setup for everyone, and that he had the foresight and the power to change things. I certainly don't want to trash him as a bad father, since he did the right thing and took a risk. I'm very heartened that male executives are beginning to wake up and see how foolish they're being, and trying to change things. But let's face it--if he were a woman, he'd be called selfish for his ambition, and his attempts to change things would be met with derision. Heh, people would say, that's why women don't advance. They aren't willing to make the necessary sacrifices to get ahead.

The article goes on to cite how men have their own daddy track--they take jobs that don't require crazy hours so they can actually be with their families (it's also not used as a "reason" for the wage gap).

A 2003 Harvard Business Review article, "Let's Hear It for B Players," illustrates the dilemma. It defines those who "place a high premium on work-life balance" as second-tier workers. The authors thought they were being generous to the Bs, pointing to them as underutilized assets overlooked in the rush to woo the workaholic highfliers. But the message, echoed across the culture, is clear: Declaring your interest in a human-sized job is like announcing a disease. B-men may not often opt out of the workforce entirely, as do some women with high-earning husbands, but they scale back, switch to staff jobs, and turn down promotions. Or, like many women, they keep their B-ness a secret and suffer in silence.

I just don't think it's such a bad thing for someone to work their thirty-five or forty hours and then go home. If I had my way, we'd work even fewer hours, an idea that would probably be decried as Communist and evil, sort of like how forty-hour workweeks were regarded before unions made them common. Then again, I'm spoiled. While my folks had a fairly traditional set up, my father was home for dinner every night, cleaned up after we were done (until we kids were older, then we did the dishes and got into water fights. Which didn't go over well at all), and set about the job of raising his kids with my mother. He didn't work nights and weekends (and wouldn't have unless we were poor and needed the money), and made it clear that his wife and his kids were his first priority, period. He just didn't take for granted that everyone in his life would worry about everything so he wouldn't have to--he regarded being a husband and a father as his full-time, 24/7, most important job. Granted, they operated in a society that had its double-standards--working mothers had even less support than they do now, and still got grief for being selfish and neglectful. But I don't think my father lived and breathed his job. We were too important to him. He realized that he couldn't have it all, and chose accordingly.

But here's what really hit me:

It's hardly news that accomplished women are desperate for a new deal at work. But anyone who understands America knows that unless men want something, too, not much will change. So what do men really want?

Can you imagine that sentence regendered--"It's hardly news that accomplished men are desperate for a new deal at work. But anyone who understands America knows that unless women want something too, not much will change. So what do women really want?"

We hear the question, What do women want? all the time, but it's more said out of exasperation than anything else. As this article makes pretty clear, what women want is immaterial unless it affects men. What men want is apparently paramount. That's a stunning admission of entitlement right there--it's simply not important unless men want it too.

I'm curious to see if the folks who extend silver platters of hankies to the guys caught in this will give feminism its props for bringing the issue to light over the past thirty or forty years. Certainly, the traditional way of thinking hasn't been helpful to men, yet anti-feminists love to complain that we aren't doing anything for these poor men. Poor men who only need to speak up and be heard, since their desires have far more priority than ours.

And if they have a problem with the way things are currently done in corporate America, and with the crazy schedules of the upper echelons of white collar workers, they have only patriarchy to blame:

The biggest challenge in humanizing work may be not how to get the work done but how to persuade corporate leaders to view the desire for a complete life as legitimate. It hasn't been a CEO priority, to put it mildly. Jack Welch, the iconic boss of the 1990s, wrote in his book Winning that he always worked Saturdays as a rising star at GE, and found that his direct reports (surprise!) showed up to join him in the office. "I thought these weekend hours were a blast," Welch wrote. "The idea just didn't dawn on me that anyone would want to be anywhere but at work."

He was hardly alone. Other seventy-something empire builders—like Eli Broad of KB Home s and SunAmerica—describe themselves as "old school" in this regard. As Bob Knutson, 71, who built Education Management Corp., put it, being a child of the Depression grafted on to his native drive a "whatever it takes" work ethic that was hard to dial down even decades after he'd made it. That style has flowed to the current crop of bosses. Baby-boomer Jeffrey Immelt, Welch's successor at GE, boasts that he has worked 100 hours a week for 25 years. That's 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week!

How much do you want to bet that these guys never heard the preaching about how you can't have it all? That they can't work like that and be good fathers and husbands too? And the article goes on to roundly debunk the "you can't have it all" argument--isn't it a pity that others don't think of this when that stupid phrase is thrown at us selfish women who work.

"You can't have it all," they say. But let's be very clear on what "all" is. People want to work at the level they're capable of and still have time for things outside work that nourish them. They don't expect to be as rich or accomplished as Bill Gates or Jeff Immelt while also being the perfect parent. They're saying that most of us lucky enough to have the talent and ambition to tackle top jobs while being blessed with people or things that give us sustenance should be able to combine both.

To say this is "wanting it all" is like saying people should have to choose between food and water.

Oddly enough, that's what feminists have been saying forever.

Comments

[The Countess]

I thankfully have never had to work more than one job at a time to make ends meet, but I know people who have. I grew up in a working class neighborhood. The people I knew who had to work two jobs, often with long hours, had part time hours, with no benefits and no medical insurance. They didn't want to work long hours, but they had no choice. They had to put food on the table and pay the electric bill. God help them if they ever had a medical emergency.

I have no pity for these CEOs earning six and seven figures who want to stay home with their families more often or want to engage in hobbies or want to do something "altruistic". Women, especially mothers, talk about it all the time, but since most CEOs are white males, it's suddenly a crisis of epic proportions when the white guys earning seven figures start complaining. I'm crying crocodile tears.

Besides, working mothers have always dealt with balancing work and family issues, but since most of them don't earn seven figures and don't own companies earning billions of dollars, they're on their own. Plus, they often get the hairy eyeball whether they work long hours or cut their hours or quit temporarily to raise their families. Only when the poor, wealthy, white male CEOs feel a little pain are we to consider family/work issues important. Cry me a river.

[thealguy]

yoy are so right by thway tover 40 hours of that 80 yje guy at the top i spendibg at work are sitting obn his ass ,,, maybe he shoulcut down on th mettungs abspen 40 on the factory floor...