Photo: Shutterstock.I hate to blame President Donald Trump for everything to do with toxic masculinity but, hey, why not? He’s always telling us how red-blooded American men should behave, and his loudest message these days is this: Real men don’t wear face masks during pandemics. He doesn’t, and neither does his sycophant-in-chief Mike Pence.
Tough-guy Trump has been on a rampage to reopen businesses. And now that states are lifting stay-at-home orders, I wonder if the corollary to his no-mask rule is that real men go back to the office.
So what happens then? While men storm the office like intrepid soldiers, working women will be the sole minders on the homefront. Women will miss out on all those critical bonding opportunities and be more sidelined than before. So I’ll give you 10 guesses as to whose career will go down the toilet.
Juggling work and home demands has been exhausting during the coronavirus, but the one positive development is that husbands have been helping more on the homefront. According to Council on Contemporary Families, men are “doing more housework and child care during the pandemic than before it began, leading to more equal sharing of domestic labor.” And even in Japan, where men “do fewer hours of household chores and child care than in any of the globe’s wealthiest nations,” men started doing more home chores during the coronavirus, reports The New York Times.
The progress made during the pandemic has been small and fragile, but could it be completely wiped out once firms reopen and men “volunteer” to go back?
“Long hours and face-time bias are the hallmarks of modern American ideal worker culture that has disadvantaged women and caregivers, and made it difficult for men to step out of the traditional role of breadwinner to engage more at home,” says Brigid Schulte, the author of “Overwhelmed.”
Indeed, much depends on the culture at work. If managers mandate that workers march back to the office, flexible work arrangements—long associated with women—will lose their hard-fought legitimacy.
Sadly, though, I’ve been hearing rumblings from some partners that they’d like underlings to return to their desks like the old days. “I’m noticing that some associates are billing 10 hours for something that should take six hours to draft,” complains one partner. Another was even more blunt: “I want to see them in the office where I can monitor their productivity.”
It’s also troubling that firms seem oblivious about how reopening offices will likely put working moms at a disadvantage. “Why don’t law firms consider when to reopen based on when child care will reopen?” asks a female Big Law partner. Instead, she says, “law firms are discussing things like public transportation options and real estate refinancing based on staggered staff,” without “a whiff of consideration about school reopenings.”
Still, there’s hope that the workplace is already altered by the coronavirus and that working from home is no longer associated with gender. “Managers who at one time were biased toward face-time work are now seeing just how much productive work can get done, even under such extreme and trying situations,” Schulte says.
“I think a lot of employers are going to open at less than full capacity,” says the female partner, stressing that no one in her firm—male or female—seems eager to return. And even if people do decide to return eventually, she hopes that working couples will do so on a more equal basis.
“Wouldn’t it be woke of the millennials for the mom to work at home one week, then the dad the next?” she says. But, she adds, “Not holding my breath.”
Email: vchen@alm.com. On Twitter: @lawcareerist.
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June 26, 2020 at 02:43AM
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