I finally found a strategy — WFH — that made my reality as a working woman and mom feel less overwhelming, but now I see it slipping away.
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I never thought I could work from home. With a professional background in the nonprofit sector and in higher education in Iowa, it simply never occurred to me that working from home existed in the realm of the possible.
Then, 2020 happened. I started to work from home in March and, seventeen months later I remain, in the parlance of our times, WFH (working from home). However, discussions among the management at my agency are now in full swing regarding the “return to office” plan.
A few weeks ago, I attended a two-day, in-person series of meetings which provided a realistic foretaste of what’s to come in terms of resuming “regular” office life.
These couple of days returned me to previous, long-trodden pathways: Get up early to shower, do hair and makeup, make sure my kids have what they need for their day, drop kids off at daycare, make sure I have everything I need for my day, drive 30 minutes to work, attend meetings, frantically run errands over lunch hour, rush home, pick up kids, make dinner, head to kids’ activities, fold laundry, superintend kids’ shower/bath time and bedtime, catch up on various household chores, and collapse on couch at 9:30 p.m.
It sucked. I hated it.
Let me be clear: I don’t hate the work. I enjoy my job, and I count myself fortunate to have landed at an organization that provides genuine support and cares about its employees. For myself — and other women, I suspect — WFH isn’t just about the work. It’s also about the H, and the heavy burdens carried by women who W outside the H.
More: COVID surprise: Many people love working from home. Can employers live with that?
Knowledge of inequality, privilege doesn’t automatically change things
For many of us who came of age in the ’90s and early 2000s, it was generally assumed that we’d go to college and pursue careers, and eventually add a spouse and kiddos into the mix. Discussions of gender equality or feminism in small-town Iowa during the Clinton administration was not a thing.
Later, my own life experience, which includes serving for over two years in the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan and earning a master’s and Ph.D. in U.S. history from Loyola University Chicago, trenchantly addressed those knowledge gaps. I also want to emphasize that this perspective emerges from my identity as a middle-class, highly educated, cis white woman from the Midwest. I benefit from systemic and institutional privileges that are inaccessible to far too many others. Still, barriers remain. I know the profound ways in which systems of gender inequality structured people’s lives in a historical context, and I know how these systems continue to operate today. I’m a feminist. Women’s and Gender History was one of the areas of concentration in my graduate work, for god’s sake. I know all this.
And yet, after the workday ends, my other job begins.
I realize that the previous sentence describes the realities of life for single parents everywhere. I absolutely consider myself lucky to have partnered with a man who is a wonderful father and takes it upon himself to address, for example, bill-paying and the long-term financial planning for our family (I don’t do math). However, the majority of the day-to-day work that keeps our family afloat falls to me.
Indeed, many women’s lives today continue to reflect the insights articulated in the classic 1989 study “The Second Shift” by Arlie Hochschild with Anne Machung. Working women’s regular jobs are their “first shift”; the “second shift” represents the unpaid work waiting for women at home. The second shift encompasses the type of work outlined above (and more), and the unseen emotional labor borne by women as well. Hochschild and Machung also posited that women, and in particular working mothers, put in an entire month’s work more per year than their spouses.
More: What Apple and Google executives missed in telling workers to go back to the office
Now I know what’s possible, and I don’t want to lose it
In 2020, though, something shifted. Don’t misunderstand me: I still do all the things at home that I did before the pandemic. The second shift hasn’t gone anywhere. However, WFH provided the time and space to embed aspects of the second shift into my first shift. I can plan supper and buy groceries over my noon hour. I can start a load of laundry and fold clothes during a webinar. I spend less time getting ready in the morning since my physical presentation need only appear professional from the waist up. I drop my kids off later and pick them up earlier. I can tidy the previous day’s detritus scattered around the house before the workday begins. I don’t waste an hour each day on a commute; I can now leverage more time in support of my second shift.
Obviously, the ideal scenario would be to magically transform home life and individual relationships to mitigate the burden of the second shift. Spoiler alert: That’s not going to happen. What can happen, though, is for employers to recognize the ways in which WFH has, for many women, provided a mechanism through which to handle the logistics of the second shift.
One might argue that this is also an issue of equity in the workplace. If the basis of equitable (as distinct from equal) treatment stems from providing supports at the differing levels required by different individuals, then what does equitable gender treatment in the workplace look like? We know that working women face myriad barriers to success. The second shift is one of these barriers. What about WFH as a gender equity measure to provide much-needed support for working women?
I fear returning to work. I fear the loss of the autonomy that has made more manageable the heavy weight of the second shift. I dread a return to the eight-hour office day, and I dread the frantic daily pace of trying to maintain a productive work life and contented home life.
I mourn the loss of the extra 30 minutes I get to see my kids each morning and each afternoon.
I’m also angry. On one level, it’s anger at my impotence in the face of the gendered realities of my life and the society in which we live. I’m angry because I finally found a strategy — WFH — that made my reality as a working woman and mom feel less overwhelming, but now I see it slipping away.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
Megan Stout Sibbel grew up in Carroll County and earned an undergraduate degree from Simpson College and a master’s and Ph.D. in U.S. History at Loyola University Chicago. She works for the state’s postsecondary education agency and as an adjunct history instructor at Drake University, and lives west of Des Moines with her family.
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