- 05 Apr 2023
- Managing the Future of Work
Richard Reeves on gender equity, Part 2: Work-life, learning
For many, many companies that employ large numbers of young professionals, through Covid, there were an awful lot of people on that career track that suddenly learned it’s pleasant to have breakfast with your three-year-old and then your four-year-old and then your five-year-old over the course of the pandemic. And the notion that I have to fly off to Racine, Wisconsin, or Omaha, Nebraska, for work for the next four days is suddenly punctured. And companies are going to have quite a lot of learning to do for both father-track, daddy-track, and mommy-track workers to change not merely the expectations of workers, but career paths, job descriptions, even the nature of their offers to their customers. And we did some work just before Covid, called The Caring Company, which looked at voluntary turnover of people because they couldn’t reconcile the demands of work and their caregiving responsibilities. And the top quartile of companies was the quartile most likely to turn over, self-report turnover, where top-quartile earners said they had voluntarily left a position because of that dilemma. And it was actually slightly higher for men than for women.
Richard Reeves: That’s super interesting. I’m sure you’re right about Covid, by the way. I was really struck by a study showing that, actually, fathers had changed their working arrangements more as a result of Covid than mothers, now, because there were obviously differences before and were really kind of enjoying that, and so the kind of shock to the way that normal working life is much bigger for fathers than it was for mothers. So there’s obviously a lot of discussion about how mothers had to drop out of the labor market and so on, too. Although, fortunately, their employment rates have come back strongly. There’s been much less discussion of, actually, just that a lot of dads are like, “Okay, I can work differently now.” And I think those, I hope and think that some of those demands are going to become part of the new contract.
Fuller: I mean, it’ll be very interesting to see. It’s hard to portray anything that came with Covid as a hidden blessing when more than a million American residents lost their lives. But I imagine there was quite a bit of quite heightened appreciation by a lot of people in committed couples, married, long-term relationships for work disproportionately undertaken by women around the household, because now males were in the household 24 hours a day. So suddenly, all those, that kind of uncompensated work that people who study and are interested in gender-equality issues have called out so often, and appropriately, suddenly was truly visible, indisputable, the nature of the magnitude of it and may have led to some more cooperation in the management of work. Richard, one phenomenon that emerged with a lot of vigor in Covid, of course, was big spikes in enrollment in online learning platforms. At Harvard, we had cultivated one with MIT and Oxford called “edX,” which was subsequently sold to 2U. There was a shift to hybrid work, to remote work. How do you think that might play into some of these dynamics, either in terms of perhaps opening new channels for males to get higher levels of educational attainment and skills-building, and also for allowing men to structure their work differently so they could be more engaged with their sons, with their families, more supportive spouses?
Reeves: Yeah, so I think the simple version of this is, I think it’s from a perspective of boys and men and their flourishing. The possibilities and challenges offered by online learning are bad in terms of education, potentially good in terms of work. And why I say bad in terms of education is because the skills that are required to successfully learn online are the ones where you see some of the biggest gender gaps. Just so anybody that had a son at home during the pandemic—it was difficult for all kids, don’t get me wrong. And again, these are differences on average. But there’s just, like, to the extent that we know there are some differences, like more applied learning is better for boys, they do need to be more physically active, et cetera. The sort of sitting still, learning by hearing, writing, is just a bit less boy friendly. Well, online learning is that times three. So, as it happened, it was just a kind of equity disaster across the board, with kind of upper-middle-class kids, by and large, doing pretty well because their parents were helping them. But going forward, I think there were huge possibilities for online learning. But back to where we were a moment ago, Joe, in terms of just, it looks as if, for a lot of the boys who are struggling most in mainstream education, what they actually need is the opposite of online learning. They need even more real-life learning. So if you think about the classroom as halfway between the Zoom call and the workplace, I think we need to go more toward the workplace for boys and for men. And the second half, “good for work” is—depending on the nature of the work—to the extent the pandemic and the shift in more hybrid working, remote working, has accelerated a long-overdue shift toward the more flexible working patterns that technology has promised for many, many years now, but failed to deliver. That could be great, because it could help fathers, in particular, to renegotiate the patterns. And we just talked a bit about how they did change their patterns somewhat during the pandemic. So I’m hopeful there could be a positive shock in terms of the workplace. But, again, it’s really difficult to think two thoughts at once. How can something be bad in one domain and good in another domain? Well, that’s what the evidence suggests to me.
Fuller: Well, unfortunately, we still live in a world that is strongly influenced by the teachings of Frederick Winslow Taylor and scientific management and hierarchies and work designed to minimize the capacity of human beings to interrupt or detract from the productivity of physical assets and accept we’re now living in the information age, where that type of discipline as it related to railroad freight-car loaders and steel workers in Taylor’s time is more or less irrelevant, at least in the developed world. And as I’ve confessed previously on this podcast, the Harvard Business School was an absolute hotbed of Taylorism and probably hugely associated with propagating it over several generations of management.
Reeves: Well, I mean, I’ve written a bit about this. Back in the past, we’ve always thought that the idea of using physical presence as a proxy for productivity has obviously become less and less sensible over time. And that’s partly because—and it’s not only because people can work when they’re not in the workplace, but also because they can not work when they are in the workplace. And so you’d have these companies doing things like, “We need to ban Facebook in the workplace. We need to have monitoring software.” I’ve tried to apply Taylorian critiques or even panopticon techniques of surveillance to this world, rather than saying, “Guess what? We don’t know what you’re doing anymore. We can’t track what you’re doing. So here’s an idea, why don’t we use performance-management systems and outcome-based measures rather than input-based measures about how many hours your ass is sitting on a particular chair in a particular place.” And so I do think that I don’t mind saying there were some blessings to Covid. And one of the things I really hope for is that had it finally destroyed some of this irrational resistance that employers were having that were really around trust and control about giving workers more freedom. And as you just said a moment ago, the workers you most want, they’re going to be demanding it. We’ve been saying it for a long time, but the war for talent was eventually going to force companies to seriously change their cultures around time—like, time is the ultimate currency in some ways. Maybe finally that will happen. That’s my hope.
Fuller: Well, I think the war for talent ended some time—years—ago, and talent won.
Reeves: Talent won. Yeah. But now it has a new weapon.
Fuller: Well, it has even more weapons, and for a certain class of trade, many people are surprised to realize that only about a third of work can be done remotely in the United States. But for a certain class of trade, the growth of the highly skilled gig economy, the ease of finding new positions with tools like LinkedIn, the capacity of employers to reverse that and look for talent through talent platforms all creates a level of choice and ability to access labor markets that, certainly, I didn’t enjoy at the beginning of my career, when I typed humble letters and appended my somewhat moth-eaten resume and asked people to hope that someone at the receiving end of the company would open the letter, read it, and find some merit in that. One last thing, just alluding to what you just said, I think there is a really powerful analogy between, you just said, about showing up and sitting there and that not achieving anything and changing the measure to performance in the world of education, where the vast, vast majority of courses—whether they’re community college, four-year institutions—are all designed around the knowledge of a Carnegie credit, and how many hours, whether or not you can get a student loan is determined by, is 50.1 percent of the content provided by an accredited institution? The program must have more than 100 hours to qualify. Cash is distributed on a four-year academic-year cycle. You don’t get your cash disbursement over the summer months, because the Higher Education Act says that here’s the calendar for dispersing money, and it mimics the economics of four-year liberal arts institutions in New England in 1964 when it was passed. So I think we have to bring that same type of logic to teaching and learning—but most importantly, to shifting the onus from attendance to competence. And do people actually know what they purportedly have been taught? Or rather, have they just sat there long enough, and they can get, on a one-hour, two-hour, three-hour exam, they can get just enough right to pass through and then not carry any of those skills forward.
Reeves: Yeah. Well, of course, I strongly agree with you, and it’s going to end up being a balance between what you use. We have to be realistic about what we can achieve. But I think in education—as in the workforce, generally, back to the Taylor examples—I always like this example that, when electricity was introduced, it didn’t change—we may have talked about this before, but I always liked—it didn’t change factories until Ford came along and said, “We can now create conveyor belts,” right? It completely transformed the inside of companies. I think the same is true of information technology, is that we had in this information technology revolution, then everyone kept going to the offices and working 40-hour weeks and having lunch breaks and stuff. And for me, it was like, it must be like that period between the introduction of electricity and the invention of the conveyor belt, which is this period of just these new technologies have arrived, but it hasn’t had the transformational effect yet.
Fuller: Well, Richard, having benefitted from your historical work, I’m keen to hear what’s next. What else can we expect from you?
Reeves: Yeah, well, I do want to continue working on these issues around HEAL [health, education, administration, and literacy] jobs, these occupational categories that are more based around people, more around care, those sorts of professions, in particular. I think that that’s an area that we really do need to be working harder to help get more men into some of those professions. So I’m reaching out to some of the professional organizations, looking at initiatives to just see what can be done to get a bit more gender balance in those professions. And I continue to be interested in the cultural, as well as the economic, impacts of more paid-leave policies and what that does for the division of labor between men and women. And fatherhood, generally. I think fatherhood and modern fatherhood and how it relates to work, but also to marriage, to community life, et cetera, is where a big part of my work is going to be, because the consequences of the economic changes and cultural changes of recent decades have been to fundamentally recast how we think about motherhood. And in ways that have been challenging in many cases—but really for the good—we’ve really reinvented what it means to be a mom. I don’t think we’ve really done that for what it means to be a dad. And so I think that the new fatherhood, we’re still in the foothills of developing that. And I think that’s a job for employers, it’s a job for families, it’s a job for government. But I’ve come to believe that, given the importance of fatherhood and given the importance of children and everything that goes with that, we need to make more progress in helping to create a new and a more exciting script for fathers.
Fuller: Well, Richard Reeves, Senior Fellow in Economic Studies from the Brookings Institution, it’s been just a singular pleasure to spend some time together and share some thoughts, and I’m looking forward to hearing what comes out of your area in Brookings in the future.
Reeves: Well, likewise, Joe. That was great fun. Thanks for having me.
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