Recently, I led a project where we interviewed a leader at a large corporation live on social media. The interview was aimed at millennial audiences as part of a recruitment tactic to showcase company culture and values. The interviewee in question was successful by all accounts – a leader of a large service line, a key decision-maker on the company’s leadership team and a key executive in shaping the company’s ethos and culture. Interviewing her was a big win.
The interviewee was also a woman.
As part of the interview prep, our team painstakingly formulated a script and questions for her team to review. The day before the interview, the final questions came back to us. There it was. The very first question after she introduced herself – “As a leader and successful woman, how do you manage work-life balance?” A loaded question that highlights many assumptions about women and work. Here are the reasons why asking women in particular, how they manage work-life balance or career and family is problematic.
1. Men rarely get asked this question
This leader was the third or fourth person we interviewed — her predecessors had all been men. Not a single one of them was asked this question. The work-life balance or family-and-career question is particularly unfair to women because it is based on a series of underlying assumptions. It assumes that successful women are giving up or to a certain extent compromising their duties as mothers, and homemakers. The question penalizes women in comparison to their male counterparts, who everyone assumes are doing what men do: — having prolific and successful careers, unburdened by family constraints. The question is also highly presumptive that most women are the primary caregivers in their families. It’s 2020, people — some women are the primary breadwinners of their families and that’s amazing — for both women and men.
This is not to say that motherhood doesn’t present a unique set of challenges for women while navigating their careers — it most certainly does. It simply means that to suggest that the issue of work-life balance applies exclusively to women (and the frequency with which women are asked this question over their male counterparts seems to imply that it does), is inherently sexist to both women and men. Men need work-life balance, too. More on that later.
2. It is unfairly biased against women who are not married
More often than not, I have seen this question asked of women who are married. Married women get asked this question far more often than unmarried women — a bias that again, is based on a series of underlying — and often false — assumptions. The first assumption here is that married women have a life outside of their careers that needs balancing and unmarried women don’t. After all, if you are a successful unmarried woman, what else would you be doing with your time if not working — is the veiled thought. It doesn’t take into account that most women — married or not — have interests, hobbies and community obligations beyond careers and family life. It labels women as mothers and professionals and forces them to fit into the neat little confines of those definitions.
3. It is becoming outdated
A Bustle study interviewed almost 300 millennial women about work-life balance and a resounding majority spoke about focusing on personal care, side hustles, community activities, travel, and personal fulfillment outside of their careers. Women make up a significant portion of the growing gig economy that involves working and earning money outside of a primary job. Many millennial women graduated either during or shortly after the 2008 recession and marriage, children and home ownership – the traditional tenets of adult life either became a postponed dream or something they opted out of entirely. The question around career and family is as outdated as being asked “Where do you see yourself in five years?” in a job interview. The question just doesn’t have the same applicability as it once did.
4. Men have issues with work-life balance too
So far in this post, I have addressed the term work-life balance and how it is almost exclusively asked of women and you have to wonder – don’t men deal with this issue too? A 2017 study by the University of Georgia, with a global sample of 250,000 men discovered that men are struggling with balancing work and family priorities as well. The kicker however is that they feel less able to talk about it. In her 2012 cover story in the Atlantic, Anne-Marie Slaughter answered the controversial question “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” to which James Joyner responded “Men Can’t Have It All Either.”
Despite being tasked with asking about work-life balance in our interview, our team opted to re frame the question. Instead of asking our interviewee about work-life balance and family obligations we asked about what motivates her, where she finds personal and professional drive, and left it to her to talk about family if she chose. Her answer was incredible — she spoke about education, how her parents had immigrated to a new country and worked for years so that she could build a successful life and career and that’s where she found her motivation. Not only did her answer go beyond simply defining her within the confines of her job or as a mother, it gave the audience a bit more insight into her as a whole person and the experiences that have shaped her.
So it’s time we put these somewhat archaic questions to bed and started to think more expansively about the challenges women face at work. Or perhaps we start asking both men and women about work-life balance and address larger structural and organizational problems. But ultimately, questions around work-life balance directed solely at women perpetuates a narrow understanding of some of the very real challenges they face.
