Returning to work: Women, parents and caregivers

As companies prepare to return to the office, they are asking: What lessons should they take from this past year? 

In part one of our ‘Returning to work’ series, Reed Smith Gender Equity Advisor Dr. Dana Alvaré discusses the many ways COVID-19 exacerbated workplace problems faced by women, parents and caregivers. Along with co-hosts John Iino and Iveliz Crespo, she then identifies policies that help ensure return-to-work plans are equitable and inclusive of women.

Transcript:

Intro: Hi, I'm John Iino and I'm Iveliz Crespo. Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Inclusivity Included: Powerful Personal Stories. In each episode of this podcast, our guests will share their personal stories, passions and challenges, past and present, all with the goal of bringing people together and learning more about others. You might be surprised by what we all have in common, inclusivity included. 

John: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. As always, I'm here with our co-host Iveliz. Hey, Iveliz. 

Iveliz: Hey John. 

John: So we've all got an exciting episode today. It's the first in a series of podcasts that we plan to release on return to work issues. And we thought we'd start today specifically on discussing the impact and perhaps disproportionate impact on women with returning to work after a long um you know, being away for the last 18 months because of the pandemic, we are really, really pleased to have our colleague join us today for this discussion. Uh Doctor Dana Alvaré for those of you who don't know, uh Dana, Doctor Alvaré is our Reed Smith's Global gender equity advisor. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Delaware uh with an emphasis on law and society. And formerly she was a practicing lawyer for a number of years where she specialized in land use and development and municipal law. So Dana, as always, it's great to have you back to the podcast. Welcome. 

Dana: Thanks for having me John. 

John: And just as a preview for this topic will actually be featured in our Diversity Equity and Inclusion Summit, which is will be virtual on September 30th. So I said this is a little bit of a tease or a preview because that will be an even fuller panel. But uh specifically the topic of that panel at our Diversity Summit is will be called returning to work equitably the path forward. So hopefully all of you have registered or will tune in to um our great summit that we have planned for September the 30th. So I know that we want to hear a lot about Dana, your background. So Iveliz, I'll turn it over to you. 

Iveliz: Thanks John. So Dana, one of my favorite things that we do on this podcast is really have people share their personal stories. Um It's a way for us to figure out, you know, to learn, right? How, you know, we're similar despite being so different. And so, you know, my favorite part is asking these questions because every time I hear someone's proud her personal story, I think to myself, wow, look how similar we are. If we just take the time to really get to know one another and to hear about what motivates people. So if you don't mind, you know, we're going to talk about more substantive points regarding the work that you've been doing later. But I want to get to know who you are and I want you to share with your audience who you are. And in particular, I want to think about why gender equity work, you could have gone into so many different industries. Um What really motivated you to go into this work if you don't mind sharing that with us. 

Dana: Of course, uh that's actually a really great question because I think that when I tell people that this is the type of work I do, I think people kind of assume. Oh, wow. Something she must have had a really bad go of it with gender inequity when she practiced law. And, you know, she's is here to avenge what happened. And that actually wasn't really the case with me. It's interesting, I've always been interested, very socially minded and thinking about things and I'm a naturally, very curious person and while I was practicing law, which I, I did like for many reasons, I actually really liked the type of law that I was practicing. I had a great boss and I liked my firm. It was the first time that I did realize, I think in my life that there was still so much work to do on the gender equity front. So, while I had a decent experience myself, I know that I came out of college and law school, relatively feeling pretty, pretty equal. I mean, there were things here and there, but institutionally I felt like things were going great and I almost kind of thought we were post, post gender inequity a little bit. At that point. I really kind of thought of that as something my mother's generation really fought hard for. And it wasn't until I started working in a law firm in 2004 that I realized and you know, being thrown into the working world, how much work there still was to be done. And you know, how many times even though I was working my tail off as a young lawyer, how many times people would ask me to get them coffee. Um you know, clients, people that didn't know, know me that would visit the office or oh, hey, hun, can you make copies for this and all of these different things that I, I really felt the need that I needed to kind of reassert my commitment to practicing law and kind of work really hard to prove myself. And I, I definitely felt all of that, but I still had a decent experience. I didn't get, you know, like I said, I had a really great mentor. Uh my mentor was the owner of my firm and he was fantastic, took me under his wing. So I had a good experience in that way. But I also was doing a lot of reading. I think it was a time of kind of enlightenment of myself, kind of reading about the world and thinking about things that maybe I hadn't really thought about my little university bubble. And so I really became a lot more interested in social issues. And I was reading all of these books at night. And I remember my husband was like, are you reading a book about Black citizenship before bed? After you just wrote that brief? And I was like, yes, I am. So and I said, you know, I wish I had just become a law professor. This billable hour thing is killing me. You know, and I should have been a professor and he actually really encouraged me to kind of redirect my vehicle and take my truck load of school loans and go back into a full time phd program. So what I, and then while I was there in my program, learning about all of all parts of society and the way that structure and culture really perpetuate inequalities in society, which I just felt was fascinating. And I was so lucky to be there. I thought like learning for a living and reading all of these books and theorists. And I really, really loved it. I just kept coming back to gender because I think for me, I mean, obviously I'm a woman identify as a woman. I've had a certain set of experiences in my life that are particular to women. And that's only grown over the years with my evolution into like motherhood and being married and all that kind of those women roles that everyone talks about and navigating all of that and work life balance and all of that. But I think what's really interesting about gender is, well, two things I think that how the gender binary and in our assumption about roles and culturally, how we look at the role of women in heteronormative, how it really structures absolutely everything in society. And even obviously, when you don't, when you don't think it does, it's there, it's everywhere. And so that is just fascinating to me, it's, it's such a grounding structure of our entire culture and our society. And also the other thing that I think is really interesting too is that we look at men as the norm and women as the other and we talk about the differences that women experience and you know, acceptable behaviors and roles for women. But also looking at the flip side how masculinity and being a man is also such a specific box of behavior. And some may say the tighter box that you have to squeeze yourself into and of acceptable behavior is to be considered a man and you know, air quote man and all of that. So um and I have, I have two sons. So I think I was fascinated for both of those reasons. And obviously, I have a personal attachment to it in my own experiences and I can really relate to all of these issues. So here I am. 

Iveliz: That's great, Dana. Thank you so much for sharing your personal story. A lot of what you said resonated with me and, and not surprising, you know, you are one of my favorite people at Reed Smith, partly because I feel like, you know, when I listen to you talk, there's so many parallels between, you know, your lived experiences that people face as being women, right in the workplace and lived experiences that other people who are marginalized face, particularly when you talk about those things like those prescriptive stereotypes and putting people in boxes. So really great to have you on here to share with us your thoughts on returning to work and what are some of the implications for women and what are some of the things that employers should really think about in terms of their plans for returning to work and the impact that it has on various groups? 

John: No, absolutely. And thank you, Dana. Your, your journey is so inspiring and we're so fortunate to have you part of Reed Smith. You know, I can't think of a number of organizations that literally probably only a handful of organizations that have gender equity advisor, someone with your experience and expertise in running programs and the like. So again, thank you. So focusing specifically on some of the topics that we wanted to cover. We know that COVID has certainly magnified issues faced by women and caregivers, parents and the like, but specifically how is that shown up in the workplace, in the work environment for some of those folks? And what were some of the issues? 

Dana: Good question John. I think that first we need to look at how we're talking about caregivers. I I'm talking about all caregivers but we know that disproportionately caregiving issues have affected women traditionally and or women more. Um and we, but these, these stereotyped expectations that we put on these gender roles also affect men that are caregivers as well. Um And it also not just parents, we're talking about caregivers, people that have any outside responsibilities, to be honest, outside, outside of the workplace. We like to laugh at winners about, well, it's not very funny but we do laugh about, you know, work life balance. Is that a myth? Maybe we should just stop using that phrase because, you know, is that, is that even possible? So that's always been a question if that's even possible, particularly in the legal profession. Historically, you know, we're in a service industry, we have billable hours, it's very demanding on your time. There's a certain prestige and pay that's attached to working more. And we have this myth a lot of places and particularly in the us of this, what we like to call the myth of the neutral ideal worker. And this is someone we like to say that, you know, if you work hard and you're attentive and you come up with great ideas and you always answer your emails and you do your job with a great attention to detail that you should essentially have the same opportunities to advance as everybody else. But we know that that's not actually true because this ideal worker that we think is like gender, race, class, neutral is not so neutral and particularly with regard to care work, we know that the ideal worker does not have family responsibilities outside of the job. They are able to, to um you know, if you think about it as a whole in our American work ethic, we really appreciate someone who's gonna return your phone call right away or pick up the phone call or get something done while they're on vacation or really makes their job and their career their number one priority. That is the thing that we, we value the most. And so what the, when we translate this into a work environment, we see that it is actually not so much a neutral standard, a neutral ideal worker, it's actually a traditionally male worker that has a support system at home or someone else doesn't necessarily have to be a wife. I mean, traditionally it was um we like to, I like to joke that my husband and I we need, we need a wife that would be very helpful for us, you know, traditional in the traditional sense, but someone that's taking care of all of the other responsibilities so that, that one person can pay attention to make the career the number one priority. And so what really happened, so we've been struggling this and by we, I mean, women have been struggling with this for a long time and we want equal opportunity in the workforce. But we also are balancing and everybody is different, of course. But you know, you're also balancing this notion of motherhood and femininity and what makes it appropriate, how much, you know, there's a certain acceptance for how much a woman can be away from her family or as a mother, some people that doesn't bother them but different cultures, there's regional differences as far as these assumptions and expectations of, of parents and particularly mothers. So bef and before we had the pandemic, this was, this was an issue. We had what we in the biz call flexibility stigma. So flex and part time policies in the past pre COVID, two thirds of them were used by women with young kids. And we have seen time and time again through research that this these flexible policies that have been offered by uh many workplaces are traditionally very problematic and not widely utilized. Research has shown that people, folks that utilize decide to utilize those flexible work structures, part time or flexible days, half virtual half not or all virtual working pre COVID um studies have shown that it interrupts their advancement. Their, their commitment is questioned, they're passed over for plum assignments. They are restricted to access to certain networks and internal networking that helps, helps you and social engagement within the office that helps you advance. And we also see a very strong stigma for men taking those policies. And so what you have then is you have it's twofold, you have men feeling stigmatized and not taking those policies and then really turning them into like a women's policy or a women's issue in the workplace. And then women are suffering from this stigma and lack of advancement, et cetera. So so and then I think with COVID, when that happened, what we saw is that everybody, we saw a near universal transition to remote work, right? So men and women, everybody we see support systems absolutely vanish from people. There's pe you know, people are not that don't have people who had family members, particularly, there's a lot of people in the US that use grandparents as childcare. Um And then you didn't want to expose your more senior relatives to, you know, obviously a very high risk situation with COVID childcare, household services. So all of this outsourcing of these quote wifely duties or these house or domestic duties, and if you're trying to work full time, say you have two partners or one person or whoever the adults are that live in the house. If they have full time jobs, you know, you have to do a lot of outsourcing of these activities. And so all of that help and support was taken away. And then on top of it, for those of us who had young Children and I was one of them, you also had virtual school demands on top of it. Which I mean, I have to tell you, I got to tell you that was a landmine and way harder than I thought it was going to be to administer virtual school to a kindergartner who can't read. So I have to listen to literally everything the teacher says every single moment of the day, I don't really know anyone who had an easy time with it. So we also have people being isolated. We have people moving some of their relatives who are in extended care home with them. People not willing to, I mean, obviously we saw what was happening in, in nursing homes and we have inadequate space and living arrangements. So we have people who are setting up working, putting their laptop on a stool in their garage to try to get away from their kids to conduct business as usual. So we do see a wide variety of challenges that different people had and what it really did was bring your family life and your domestic life and your outside responsibilities like into a full on head on collision with your work and your work duties and responsibilities. And so we really saw, we saw on TV, you know, I forget who it was. But that one man whose kids came in the back while he was on his, on a Zoom call on national television. And then you see, I think it was the mom or the nanny come in and grab the kids and slide them out of the room. So we, we not only had men kind of walking this or having this integration but, but everybody was so it, it created a lot of tension and a lot of stress, especially with where workplaces where people were expected to produce the same amount of work in this condition. It caused an absolutely insane amount of um stress. I luckily, particularly for lawyers who have billable hours and a ton of work and are already working maxed out before the pandemic even happens. But now that have toddlers running around while they're trying to do this. I mean, I I'm obviously I had a very, I have a different job now. I don't have billable hours. I don't have clients and I have a super understanding boss at Reed Smith. So I was even for me, I was stressed but I was able to, to manage it for the. So for those who did not have that type of environment, they had a really a really, really hard time and there is an extreme amount of burnout. And we know that those gender roles and expectations that and that division, gender, division of labor that we see um in non COVID times was also present during COVID. We know that most women in particular and in heterosexual partnerships, we had women were more likely to work, set up their workstation in the middle of the kitchen or at the dining room table amongst everyone. So they could do all of the parenting and the caregiving at the same time as their working. And we knew that men overwhelmingly were, were in an office or tucked away and able to just focus 100% on work. So we saw this insane, insane burden on women. And then funny enough when New York Times did, that's kind of not funny, right? But when New York Times did a poll and they asked, you know, has your caregiving increased since, since COVID and working from home? And the the differences between men and women's perceptions of what was going on was absolutely staggering and telling as well. 

Iveliz: So then I know you've talked a lot about the impact that the pandemic has had and virtual work, right? Working from home has had on women caregivers. I'm curious to know if there's, if there's certain groups out of those or demographics that may be impacted more or differently? 

Dana: Right. So it's, it's interesting when we're talking about when I'm talking about, I'm talking about a certain corporate or white collar whatever you want to call it businesses that were jobs that were able to be transferred to an online environment like ours. Right Iveliz,, we weren't having to work in a hospital or working in a store or any of the many, many jobs in our society where they were forced to go in with no childcare. And what do you do? I mean, that is an extreme situation. Also, you know, so when I'm talking about this, you know, these little like gender issues in the home with your kids running around, that is a certain, I mean, you're privileged to even have that opportunity to work, work from home. And obviously, I'm sure you feel this way um as well. So yes, there's certain groups, especially people that maybe don't have as many adults in the home to help folks that have to take care of other responsibilities, elder care, et cetera. In addition to Children, there's certain, yes, certainly certain professions where this, this really affects you more. And then also there's a really big class issue here. So if you're a well paid professional, maybe you were able to, to have a little bit more flexibility, a little bit more agency at work where you might have gotten some more understanding from, from your employer, you also might have been able to go part time or scale back on your work to accommodate some of these family demands. And for a lot of people that is just not an option. So it was really catastrophic for a lot of families. And as a result, we, I mean, we saw a lot, we saw a huge exodus of women from the workforce in September of 2020 when people were going back to, when the kids all had to go back to school. And there was a lot of schools that weren't going to be open and were going to be virtual. And unfortunately, I'm sure you've all read the articles, but it's really disappointing because it really was, we kind of obliterated all of the gender progress we had made in the professional world. Numbers wise up until that point. So it was very, very disturbing. 

John: No, Absolutely, wanted to follow up on that, Dana, you know, we, we had the great recession before that obviously we had the Great Depression, but they're on another calling after COVID, the great resignation, right? I I saw the, the, the statistics from the US Department of Labor that 4 million Americans quit their jobs in July of this year. And during COVID, I think the statistic was in amongst kind of mid career, professional, mid career employees, 30 to 45 year old, you saw a uh resignation rate of increase by 20% between 2020-21. So, you know, a lot of people leaving their jobs because of that. And as you mentioned, a significant being, women. So kind of thinking about now that where we are now looking back in hindsight, what could companies and organ organizations have done differently over the past 18 months to address this resignation wave of resignations and, and the attrition we're seeing especially amongst women. 

Dana: Well, I think that, I think that it's really interesting. This isn't this the pandemic, we see that the pandemic really made people rethink kind of what, what they were willing to tolerate as far as, as far as their workplace and their work structure goes. And so you had a lot of people really rethinking their lives. A lot of people thinking, you know what life is short, I'm going to really do what I want to do. I'm not going to take this anymore. You have a lot of that. I know that in April we saw of this year when pe when companies started putting out their return to work policies and whether or not they were going to continue offering flexible work policies. I think there was some sort of in April, there was four million millennials quit, quit primarily employers where they were not going to offer any virtual work or flexibility going forward. So we do see companies kind of taking that calculated risk with announcing their return to work policies. And now of course, we all kind of rolled that back. Thank you Delta. But so there is, there's a, a real re rethinking, there's a generational issue. We have a lot of attrition, people in general, I think are more willing to design their lives the way they want to. And I think that it has really given people a lot of clarity about what they want and companies that are not willing to step up to the plate and kind of be more flexible and be more attentive to workers needs are, are going to be losing, I think even going forward, especially as we try to reopen again, continue to have an attrition problem. 

Iveliz: So Dana, so what priorities, you know, moving forward, what priorities should they uh these companies uh set right to ensure that their workplaces are inclusive and equitable for women? 

Dana: Great question. So what do we, what do we do now? That's what everybody is wondering. How do we balance the interests of a community innovation, conversations happening at the water cooler team, the team work and bonding and networking that comes from face to face interaction in the workplace, which are all very valuable things. I don't mean to downplay them at all. How do we preserve that culture of your workplace while at the same time providing a more flexible situation to help, you know, help the mental health of our employees or maybe be able to, you know, with flexible work policies. The business case on the flip side of that is that you can actually capture a larger pool of workers to work in your office. Let's say maybe your office is in the middle of a city and commuting is difficult for people. And you've traditionally only had more able bodied people feel that they would be able to work at your workplace. For example, people that have a lot of doctor's appointments are going through fertility treatments. Folks that have caregiving needs just to be able to be at home when you're even if you don't stop your working, that you are there when your Children get off the bus, even if you don't have to take care of them, just the fact that I don't have to now pay someone to do that care might make it more affordable for people to have these types of jobs. So moving forward, the issue though is how do we structure a more flexible work policy or work environment going forward without creating two classes of employees that we saw, for example, with our earlier flexibility stigma. So pre COVID, as I said before, we had those flexibility policies that were underutilized and created a lot of flexibility stigma that prevented for different reasons, both women and men from taking, taking advantage of them. So how do we move forward and not have that issue and make it truly inclusive? So the goal here is we want to make sure that anyone who does utilize any flexible work policies or schedules that it doesn't derail their career in any way. And I know people are really worried about this. So we need to, first of all, the flexible policy needs to be universally offered and universally accepted by everyone. It can't just be, oh, people who have kids or when you come back from maternity or paternity leave you have that. It needs to be something that's offered to everybody where possible, depending on your role, of course, but it has specific guidelines is not just up to like the whim of your supervisor, whether or not they think that's ok or not. We have a lot of people that are of the mindset that are more, more traditional in what the expectations of a worker are and how much face time they need to have in the office. And so there's a lot of really good advice that's, that's been put out there. So for example, obviously, you need to make sure you have your tech up to date and that everybody has the type of capabilities that are necessary to even work from home. I think it's really important to get your leaders to model good behavior. So if you have people who are leaders in your organization or perhaps, you know, that are running teams of people, maybe tell them it would be really great if you could model this behavior by saying, you know, I work from home every Friday to really show that, that it is acceptable. Um That, that really goes a long way, you also want to make sure, um and I think this is really important that you establish routine inclusion of those who are virtual or working from home or outside of the office in meetings. So you don't want to get into the habit where, you know, just because Iveliz and I are in the office, we have this meeting and John not there that day, so he missed it. No, if she and I are going to have a meeting maybe before you would have just casually said, oh, let's meet in this room at three. You're gonna say, you know what, let's send an invite, an invite to John and let's make sure that we have the technological capabilities for him to zoom in on that meeting as well. It might be in this case, it might be nice to say, hey, we try to schedule all of our team meetings on a certain day so that you can, maybe people can maybe plan to be that one of the days that they're in the office and then with everything, I think it's really important to check in. You need to really make sure that people don't feel that they're being excluded and you need to um make sure that people feel that they've been included, that they don't think that people are, you know, stigmatizing them in any way or that they've gotten any negative kind of blowback or reaction from their superiors. And, you know, you really just need to look at this from a way of normalizing this as a way of doing business for everybody, not just those who need special accommodations, we need to move flexibility out of that area out of special accommodations for someone you know, who has a very specific issue. If we change the whole structure of work and our idea of what an ideal employee and ideal worker looks like, that's the only way to make this totally inclusive and to move away from that flexibility, stigma. And I think that's what people, that's what people are really looking for. So in that way, it is creating a new normal specifically in this area, 

John: Dana, thank you so much, such such such great advice, such insightful thoughts there as well. Um We are so fortunate that we have such an expert here at Reed Smith as part of our team. So just folks in the audience, you know, I know we just barely scratched the surface in some of these things. So for, you know, more in depth discussion, please remember to register for our DEI Summit on September 30th and in particular, the panel that Dana is leading called returning to work equitably the path forward. So Dana, thanks again for, for joining us and sharing your wisdom with our uh with our audience. It's great to have you. 

Iveliz: Thank you, Dana. 

Dana: Thank you so great to be here. 

Outro: Inclusivity included is a Reed Smith production. Our producer is Ali McCardell. This podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, PodBean, and reedsmith.com. 

Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers. 

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