The real fix for working mothers isnt flexible work

From consulting to retail, jobs that demand endless availability punish those who can’t or wont give every waking hour to work. Boundaries could change that.

- Corinne Low

Before I became an economist studying gender, I was a junior consultant. I spent late hours working far from home, skipping meals and making it back to our hotels late into the night only to be woken by urgent emails a few hours later.

After a year of exhaustion and regular illness, I got assigned to a new team and started introducing myself differently: My name is Corinne, and I eat three meals a day and sleep eight hours a night.

I’ve been thinking of those early consulting days as progress closing the gender wage gap has essentially stalled out and mothers are leaving the labour force in droves. The data tells me that women, and especially mothers, don’t necessarily need remote work.

We don’t need so-called flexible work schedules. What we need are plain old boundaries — jobs where work stops at a set time and allows other parts of life to exist without interruption.

GREEDY JOBS

A 2017 paper by economists Alexandre Mas and Amanda Pallais showed that working mothers with children under four would be willing to give up barely any pay for a flexible schedule, and would give up an average of just 15 per cent of their pay to work from home. But they would forgo almost 40 per cent of their income to avoid an “employer discretion” job in which their boss sets their hours at will.

The problem may be more pronounced among mothers, but it isn’t unique to them: All workers in the study - men, women, parents and non-parents alike - disliked employer discretion jobs and were willing to take hefty pay cuts to avoid them.

Yet these jobs are a significant part of the US economy. At the high end of the income range, a shift towards interactive, team-based work has created something economists call convex returns to hours.

Companies earn more when one worker works 80 hours a week than when two work 40 hours each because that one worker’s knowledge and relationships are crucial.