Over the last few weeks quiet conversations between women have proliferated around the company. Whispered talk about the coming school year. It more or less goes like this, I am told. One woman asks another how they plan to work and teach children trapped at home thanks to Covid. This nearly silent exchange happens among women from the factory floor to the top of the company. What will you do? How will you manage the kids? Will you be able to keep working? Same questions, same shrugs. School districts have made matters worse by not revealing schedules until the last minute — less than two weeks before opening Fremont Unified School District has told worried parents almost nothing — or by imposing schedules that keep children in class until mid-afternoon. They seem little concerned by the wreckage wrought on women, who far more than men, bear the primary responsibility for child-rearing.
Sometimes I ‘m told the worries directly. One senior manager confessed she felt she had to choose between our company and her family. Another fretted she’d be cut out of decision-making since many important video calls happen in the morning, when she’ll be teaching her kids. Even a Mom with a high school student, a group that sometimes can work without oversight, wondered how to make sure her child is doing lessons while she works.
This isn’t a remote issue for me. Women form the backbone of our company. They fill key roles including chief operating officer, plant manager, scheduler, human resource manager and many more. They staff our bag-making and customer service departments. I count on their intelligence, skill, ability to multi-task. If a single one leaves the company will lose a step, maybe several. I know, for instance, that I could not run Emerald Packaging without the advice and energy of my COO, who has a small child she’ll have to teach. What if the school schedule sidelines her for much of the day? What will she do? The pressure, the avalanche of backbreaking house work, has already pushed her limits.
I know the solution. Flex-time, part-time, extended leaves and remote work form the arsenal that could keep female employees working. I wish I could say these options occurred to me upon learning of their growing despair. Instead I fretted until I remembered that one of our best customer service reps has worked from home for years, a solution we crafted when she almost quit to take care of a chronically ill child. Such compromises form a path forward. Already we’ve agreed that one manager can work from home three days a week. Another will work extended hours in the afternoon following what she calls “momline,” a shorthand for online learning. I’m not saying this won’t challenge us in new, unexpected ways. I just know I can’t afford to lose the talent to Covid’s temporary — even a full school year — intrusion.
The missing public discourse about this issue confounds me. I know society, despite its yakking away about gender equality, still expects women to manage the hearth. Even before Covid women did more than double the housework men did. The pandemic tilted the balance even further. At this historic moment, with the virus sweeping the country, we have unconsciously decided to return to the 1950s, offering little support for working women and putting no pressure on men to carry more domestic weight. It doesn’t help when a so-called progressive like California Governor Gavin Newsom quips that he knows this burden will fall unequally, but he’s lucky to have a wife who can handle it. Even women seem confused about how to respond, more or less accepting the inevitable. Not demanding answers from companies or help from government. Dread filters through offices across the country. Quiet dread. The silence of women.
Childcare has become one of the leading issues forcing women from the workforce. Unless corporate leaders do something now, we could lose generations of women who have helped spur our economy in recent years. Shareholders should especially worry. A recent McKinsey & Co. survey reconfirmed that the profits of companies with women in key executive roles trends higher than male dominated firms. People skills, intelligence and mental agility play a major role. I’ve seen it first-hand. Women often do rings around men, including me, able to multi-task and organize in ways males can’t imagine. Worse for everyone, the pandemic-induced collapse of the childcare industry could sideline one-time working Mom’s for years to come, as after-school programs and daycare disappear, unless we find a way to immediately underwrite the industry.
Men have to step it up as well. They must tell their companies they need the time to help teach and then not get penalized for it. While societal norms often lead men not to think of child-rearing as a primary responsibility, a attitude that must quickly change, fear about sabotaging careers drives behavior as well. Again, where is the pressure to move, to get corporations to support temporary work-life shifts? It’s not getting talked about much in the media, politicians don’t say much either. Men seem to have descended into head scratching confusion.
I can’t say I would have been much different in my day. I wasn’t as involved as I should have been in child-rearing or the monotonous chores that dominate home life. My wife bore the brunt, trading in her aspirations, which had its own costs. However, as I aged, especially more recently surrounded by working Mom’s, I agreed the division of labor didn’t work. I recently told her that I got it, that I deeply regretted my failure. The confession also came from experience. Three years ago when she had cancer I had to run the household alone. It nearly killed me. I do more of my share now, but I don’t want to again apologize to a mother for not doing my part to support the Herculean tasks they now face.
So I now wander with them into a new world. Odd hours, days off, along with Zoom meetings piled into the afternoon and long-term work from home arrangements. As business owners, as bosses, as fellow-travelers, we do have choices in this moment. Keep the employees who have fueled our success or lose them. It may hurt profitability in the short run as matters big and small missed, but I am confident it will rebound on the other side. And I can sleep better knowing this time, with the women in my life, I got it right.