What’s a Working Dad to Do?
by Scott Behson
Quick Takes
I was once on a radio show to discuss the struggles men face in trying to balance work and family demands. During the interview, the cohost told a quick anecdote about a run-in he had when he was a rising corporate lawyer at a prestigious New York City firm.
He was divorced and his ex-wife and his kids lived in London, so he flew there to see his kids every other weekend. After two monster weeks of work, he was heading out of the office to go to JFK airport late one Thursday afternoon when a more senior partner confronted him, saying, “Where are you going?”
The cohost responded, explaining that he’d bulked up the past two weeks to finish his work for his very satisfied client and that he was catching his flight to Heathrow to see his kids. The partner angrily responded, “Bullshit. You see your kids more than I do, and I live with mine. Besides I need you here tonight—and over the weekend.” The cohost pushed back and caught his flight, but shortly thereafter decided to give up his career as a lawyer. Life was just too short.
This is an extreme example, but many working fathers face similar pressures to conform to a traditional gender role that insists they be “all in” for work, regardless of achievement level and regardless of family responsibilities. And this is the case despite the facts that:
As a result, it has been reported that dads experience at least as much work-family conflict as mothers, and that in some ways, men are facing a funhouse-mirror version of women’s struggles to attain success at both work and home.2
A few years ago, the Flexibility Stigma Working Group at The Center for WorkLife Law at the UC Hastings College of the Law, consisting of researchers from over a dozen universities, published a series of research studies in a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues entitled “The Flexibility Stigma.” About half of the articles focus on barriers men face in the workplace as they try to balance work and family demands. Among their findings:
All in all, that’s a pretty stark set of findings. What’s a working father to do? The first step toward healthier workplace culture is to bring the fathers’ work-family issue out of the shadows and to make it a topic for discussion—and that starts with fathers themselves.
As Gandhi said, “We need to be the change we wish to see.” If you have the security, flexibility, courage, and inclination (I recognize some may have more ability to do this at work than others), here are four things working dads can do in our workplaces to make it easier for all of us to discuss and address our work-family concerns.
We need to make it more normal for working fathers to discuss and address family issues. I know it is not easy to stand out. But these small steps can lay the groundwork for communicating your needs as a parent and building more supportive workplace cultures.
Adapted from content posted on hbr.org, August 21, 2013.