Episode 153: Partnership in the Pandemic
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…
“Nick, oh no, no, no, no! um, he needs a nap – do you wanna put him down or do you want me to put him down?”
Most of us are shut in at home, with our work and our families. Does the pandemic mean less equality for women?
“I felt really fragmented in terms of trying to focus on work and was really struggling with that – whereas I was finding my husband was getting much more of a chance to have his uninterrupted time.”
And are some of us taking on an invisible load during this time?
“I try to get him to contact his family but I think because it does weigh on my mind constantly it sort of just ends up falling on me.”
Work, family, and equality at home - coming up on The Broad Experience.
So I’m recording this in mid-April. For most people listening all over the world schools are closed, couples are at home together, many of them with kids.
Dan Carlson is one half of a couple in exactly this position. He’s also a sociologist. He teaches family and consumer studies at the University of Utah. Over the years his research has focused on areas like paternity leave, the division of labor in the household, and how that affects couples’ relationships – especially heterosexual couples where gender norms play a big role.
I started our conversation by bringing up an article some of you may have read in The Atlantic – it’s called The Coronavirus is a Disaster for Feminism…
AM-T: “One of the things that writer is talking about is women being traditionally the caregivers, getting lumbered with more of that work even as the pandemic rages all around us and people are at home. There’s this one line, ‘the pandemic smashes up the bargain so many dual-earner couples have made in the developed world: we can both work because someone else is looking after our children.’ And the writer says, ‘instead couples will have to decide which one of them takes the hit.’ What do you think of that line, do you think that is what’s going on in a lot of households, that one person is deciding to take the hit?”
“I don’t know if couples are deciding that one person has to bear these responsibilities. I think that sort of violates this egalitarian belief system so many people espouse these days. I can see it going both ways, I mean I can see it where a couple decides that yes, one person will pull back from their job, and if that’s the case that is most likely to be the mother, but I can also see a situation where couples decide to share that load.”
He and some colleagues are launching new research to find out what really is happening in households right now.
“This is a situation in which we need good data, and our goal is to get that and to understand what's going on.”
This is a rich time for sociologists – there’s so much to discover about how human beings are behaving in what is a brand new situation for most of us.
Dan says past research shows that couples report higher relationship satisfaction when there’s a more equal division of labor in the home – and this applies across the socio-economic spectrum.
But often that division of labor isn’t equal, and it isn’t always discussed, either. Dan did some research with two colleagues, Amanda Miller and Sharon Sassler…
“They collected some really excellent interviews, data from interviews with cohabiting couples several years back. And, and you find that, you know, even if women are unhappy with the division of labor that they may not even bring it up, you know, because they already preference their partner's desires or they’re afraid of pushing him too hard. And men will lean on these, you know, tropes of, well, you know, she just sees dirt more than I do and I just have a higher tolerance for it. And they fall back on these notions of sort of natural inherent differences between men and women as to why they can't do it. And then even if men do it, you know, you find that somehow they're incompetent at it, which is ridiculous because it's not difficult work. But somehow they, they fudge it up and that in the future gets them out of it, right. Because no one can afford to spend time training them when things need to be done.”
And let’s face it, sometimes women just want things done the way they want them done. Especially in the pandemic, a couple the women you’ll hear from later talked about cleaning being something they could control right now. And they valued that.
AM-T: “I found out about you and your work because another sociologist had linked me to a series of Tweets you did essentially giving men who wanted to listen a little bit of advice about how they might step up more during this time. One of the interesting things you said was around specific jobs. I think you said that when you try and divide tasks, like, ‘I do the laundry, she does the dishes,’ you said inequities can develop.”
“Yeah. So, we're combining all these different tasks when we talk about housework, right? It's all gets lumped into this general umbrella term. So we're talking about laundry, we're talking about dishes, we're talking about cooking, we're talking about shopping for groceries, cleaning toilets. So, you know, historically what scholars have done is they just kind of, they add it all up, they add up all the time for all of these things, and then they create a proportionate share, you know, proportionally, how much are men doing, and if it's near 50%, then it's like, ‘Oh, they're egalitarian.’ But the problem with that again, is that these tasks vary widely in terms of their qualities. So, you know, how enjoyable they are, how socially isolating they are, whether they can be done together, with your partner. And so if you ask people, you know, what would you rather do? Would you rather wash the dishes and you know, if you have little ones, right, if you find that that old sippy cup of milk underneath the couch that's been there for two weeks, that you want to clean that, you know, do you want to, someone had an upset stomach and you want to clean the toilet? Like, or do you want to cook a dinner or would you like to go grocery shopping and pick up a couple of things? These tasks very widely.”
Still he says a lot of couples do split tasks this way. Each person consistently does a specific job like cooking or cleaning the bathroom or taking out the trash.
“But what my research is showing is that couples who do it that way, who divide it up, tend to not always think that their arrangement is fair. They have lower satisfaction with their division of housework and their relationship satisfaction is much lower than couples who are always pitching in and doing everything together. And in fact, you know, just to give you a number here, only half of couples who divide everything up in a sort of equal way, only half of them report that their relationship is fair, whereas nearly 100% of those who are doing all the tasks jointly report that their relationship is fair. So again, 50/50 is important, but how you get to 50/50, I think is what really matters.”
Kristen Elworthy admits her pre-pandemic household wasn’t 50/50 and her current household isn’t either – but it is more balanced than usual. Even if some of the hardest stuff about being at home – helping home-school your kids – is largely falling to her.
“Alright Sienna, you’re all done with you music class…thank you.”
Her eldest, Sienna, is 7…
“OK Si, are you good or do you wanna do any more of it?
“I’m good.”
“You’re good, OK.
“Yeah…”
“What do you need little man?”
Nicholas, her youngest, is a toddler. And Emilia is 5.
“Oh Emi, when you do your class you can show them you did your solar system puzzle already, so you already know the planets…Nicky, no snacks! Alright, Siena, come here please…”
Kristen works in PR and communications. She’s a consultant with her own business, she works from home and she has a flexible schedule.
Her husband Craig is in cyber security. In normal times he works a full day at his office. They live in the Boston suburbs.
“I will say it’s been a 7 year evolution, every time I get a handle on things we have another child, so every time we have another kid the distribution of work load shifts, every time, I was joking with my husband that my son, who is one and a half, ever since this whole pandemic started won’t let me put him to bed, so now he wants him to put him to bed, which is new, which is great for me. We’re equal partners in parenting but because of my flexibility and my personality to be honest, I’m the one running the trains.”
AM-T: “So when you say your personality tell me about yourself, are you a control freak, what are you saying?”
“I’m a bit of a control freak – when I do delegate I’m totally fine ceding it, my husband handles my daughter’s hockey team completely, I know nothing about it…certain parts of our lives he does, I don’t think about it – outside of the house, certain contractors…but when it comes to the kids it tends to be me, a) because I’m a bit of a control freak but b) because mine is the flexible schedule I needed to come up with how to work around it, how much I wanted to be working vs. being home with the kids. Those are choices I’m lucky to be able to make and he doesn’t have that same decision process, he works traditional hours.”
AM-T: “What about help at home – do you have a nanny, do you have a cleaner, what’s the story there?”
“So I’ve been saying, the first thing they tell every working mom is to outsource everything and three weeks ago they took it all away. So it’s very eye opening, we have a cleaner who comes every two weeks who isn’t coming right now. The older girls are in school, there’s a sitter who comes a couple of days a week for my son and I work long days those days – so I have 2 long days and then work mornings, nights and naptimes the other three days. I have family in town, sisters, parents…they live down the street…they are super helpful – so if I had extra hours they would help out, and we are not seeing them any more. So all those social supports, paid and unpaid, have been removed from the picture.”
She read that Atlantic article about the coronavirus being terrible for feminism…and initially she agreed - she thought her carefully calibrated work/life balance would collapse…especially because she’s really busy with work at the moment.
“So I was dreading how we were gonna do it…admittedly it’s been many early mornings and late nights for me to get the work done…at first my husband kept to that nine to five schedule, as things have progressed his workplace and himself have been a bit more open to flexibility because everyone’s in this position now. He works a lot on Europe for calls so he’s on calls early and by 3 maybe he’s wrapping up, so I can then work all afternoon. We switch off, we try to work around eachother’s calls. He has been seeing what’s been going on all day that he didn’t necessarily see before and he’s said it’s made him want to jump in more. So at first I thought it was gonna be a disaster, but I think it’s been good for him and for me and for the kids for him to be more equally parenting them, especially when we’re all here all day, they need a new voice and face after a few hours. The school work is falling mostly in the morning, mostly falls on me to keep that organized, but he’ll take them outside, throw a ball around with them, do a science project with them, so it’s equaling out and it’s actually a really positive transition as the weeks have gone on, especially as we may be doing this for several more months.”
“Want to come for a nap with Dada? Say bye bye…”
“Bye Nick, have a good snooze…”
She says in their house it’s all hands on deck right now – they haven’t had a big discussion about the division of labor – whoever is free and can do it, just does whatever needs doing.
Still she says this lockdown is tough on parents no matter what.
“It’s so hard to give these kids what they need, I mean we started distance learning this week with my kids, they’re young so I’m not worried about their ability to go to second grade and kindergarten next year, but I keep missing Zoom calls for them because I’m on Zoom calls of my own, and you know, we’re being asked to both hold down fulltime jobs, teach two kids and keep a third one engaged and alive. Cause he just wants to climb the walls because he’s a baby…and also clean the house, and cook basically every meal and go grocery shopping, but don’t go grocery shopping, and all these other impossible tasks, it’s just hard, I don’t think anyone’s really escaping it, but particularly for working parents of both genders it’s just so much pressure right now. And everyone keeps telling you to take it easy on yourself but the list is endless, regardless.”
A few weeks ago one of you asked on Facebook if you thought the pandemic was harder in general on women than men. And of course many of the workers most affected by the virus – healthcare workers, food service workers, domestic workers – they are largely women.
But there may be something else going on too – something less obvious. Women and men often process things differently, deal with stress differently – and women tend to ruminate more than men. We’ve also been socialized to put other people’s feelings first.
Samantha Murphy and her husband live in Calgary, in western Canada. They both work in the oil and gas industry. They’re in their mid -thirties. No kids. Two cats.
Sam says she’s always done most of the housework…but the split has improved over the years.
“We still don’t agree on what that looks like. I feel like If you made a recording of us it would be 75/25 or 70/30 split, that’s with quite a bit of work over the years evolving from 90/10 split, of talking about why it’s important to have help and important for me not to have to ask him to do a lot of the work…we have reached a comfortable equilibrium…and some of that has been aided by hiring a house cleaner when we moved to a larger place, I just recognized the toll it was gonna take for me to keep up with it compared to an apartment, and I had gotten a promotion so it seemed like right time to hire people to do the cleaning for us…and that’s actually been tremendous for our relationship, to be totally honest. And they’re not doing that for us now, so more cleaning.”
AM-T: “So we’re talking about a 90/10 split, originally, where you were the 90…WHY in this day and age?”
“Because it was easy. Easier for me to just do the work than nag. Seems like the same old story everyone has to tell, but I would ask work to be done, it wouldn’t get done so I’d do it myself. It would often result in arguments, kind of just got easier for me to do it. But over time I did see the value, especially because we’d like to have a family in the not too distant future, of having a husband that participates a little bit more. So that’s where I started putting some work into our relationship and into making it known why it’s important to have the support and the positive impact that could have on our life. I’d say by and large it’s worked. It’s still not the split that I’d love but it’s certainly working better than it was before. I’m actually quite happy with it.”
She says he now cooks one meal a week and they get takeout once a week, he cleans up after the cats, does dishes, does more errands. And she’s been making an effort to take on more traditionally male jobs like home renovation projects and tackling technical issues rather than asking him to just fix them for her.
But during the pandemic she says they’ve slid into bad habits. Her husband is spending more time with technology to ease stress, less time on housework. Meanwhile she’s getting OCD about tidiness.
She says one big difference between them is the mental load she’s carrying right now.
“What’s happening with me is because we do have family that’s distant there’s this pressure to reach out more frequently, and it weighs on my mind, especially my mother in law who lives on her own…because I do try to split things, normally, I try to get him to contact his family but because it does weigh on my mind constantly it does end up falling on me. And it’s not just family, it’s friends, I know people are living by themselves, I’ve been reaching out to them more frequently, I know that’s important, and it’s led to some really nice conversations actually, but it’s also led to probably being a sympathetic ear 100% more than I was before.”
She also volunteers for an organization that supports seniors in her community, often people who live below the poverty line and live alone. Her job is to call an older person just to chat – and since the pandemic started, the group has asked for extra help.
“Rather than one person a couple of times a week I’ve now got two people, I’m making five phone calls a week, and I find myself on there for probably upwards of 3 hours – and I guess within all of this the folks I’m talking to are often in distress and anxious, and I’m a pretty empathetic person so it affects me, I find it’s impacting my ability to sleep a little bit, my mood certainly, I have to check myself especially interacting with my husband who has to put up with me every day, getting a little bit irritable or weepy or sad. And then there’s keeping on top of work as well, I am still working 9-5 maybe a little bit more even, without the commute my manager sort of expects us to be online by 8 o clock every morning until 5 o’clock, so it’s not a ton but it adds up.”
Then there’s her own family. Sam’s sister lost her job recently, she’s now living with their mother, and Sam finds herself mediating their somewhat difficult relationship.
AM-T: “How is your husband riding this out, how is he doing?”
“Um, I think he’s throwing himself into work, he is very busy, he’s also doing some coursework on the side, we’ve actually been faring fairly well I think as a couple, we’ve had some good conversations, I’ve tried to be open and communicative when I’ve felt agitated or down, even if it’s just a heads up that I may be behaving badly and saying things I might regret, and it’s worked so far. One thing that’s been nice is we’ve been going for a lot of walks together, late evenings, on the weekend, having wine, and I would say things are actually pretty good on that front, I can’t complain…but yes I’d say in general keeping himself as busy as possible with work. That’s how he sees he’s contributing and creating value is through his work.”
Spending more time together has been a positive during a tide of negative news. And she’s glad to offer support to everyone she does. But she can’t help hoping things ease up before too long so she’s not stretched in quite so many directions.
Thousands of miles away in Bristol, England, Anna Lagerdahl offers emotional support too, but she does it for a living.
“I’m a clinical psychologist, I work for the NHS in cancer services.”
Anna works just over three days a week for the National Health Service. Her clients are cancer patients, often readjusting to normal life after many months of treatment. Her husband works in IT. They have two children, they’re five and two and a half. And like Kristen’s family, they’re all home together at the moment with no childcare.
“So the first couple of weeks we it was really enjoyable spending more time with the children, we were both really enjoying that, but in terms of getting work done we were not the best at communicating at who had important meetings when. There was one day I was talking to patients on the phone, and at same time my husband was interviewing someone for a job, and we’d booked at exactly the same time…so the day before we realized this, and we thought, gosh, what do we do now? So we just decided to put the TV on for the children and sort of hope for the best really. But that made us realize we needed to be a bit more organized in terms of discussing who has what on, and I think we’ve just not been used to doing that.”
Also she says, the kids were used to her being the go-to parent because she spent the most time with them. They couldn’t leave her alone at home.
“When I was working the children would constantly come up stairs and look for me and want to come in and see what I was doing.”
It was hard to get anything done.
“I felt really fragmented in terms of trying to focus on work and was really struggling with that – whereas I was finding my husband was getting much more of a chance to have his uninterrupted time.”
So she and her husband decided to change things up. Two weeks ago they agreed to each work half a day, then catch up with work during the evening when the kids were in bed. This arrangement is working well so far. Her children are reassured by her presence in the house but no longer feel the need to check on her constantly.
Until the pandemic, her son, who’s two…he wanted her to do everything for him. He’s always turn to Anna rather than his dad.
“But that’s really starting to change, and I was working earlier and I looked out from the balcony down to the garden and they were playing, and my son looked up and just waved at me and then carried on playing, whereas before he wouldn’t have done that. So it’s been really nice to see that transition.
She says getting child-related tasks and other tasks done – it all seems a bit easier now than it did before. She says it may be because she and her husband are at home more and have more chance to discuss things.
“Whereas usually when we’re both away at work in the day and then we get home and the children are hungry and we’re hungry and we’re aware they need to get to bed and it can feel quite rushed, and sometimes miscommunication can happen. Where now it feels more like we have more time to think things through a bit more and discuss things, it’s just five minutes here and there, it’s not long conversations, but I guess we check in with eachother more because we’re around eachother all the time.”
I told Anna about Sam Murphy and her volunteer job talking to older people who are struggling in the pandemic, and how that left her feeling distressed as well.
AM-T: “Do you think you’re more stressed that someone else might be because you’re talking to people every day about their concerns and distress?”
“No, I’d say the opposite in some ways – I find having a focus that’s really meaningful, I can actually do something, helps me stay more focused on things like work and not get too stressed about other things that are going on –it’s really important to me that I can do something because I guess lot of people can’t. Either they’ve been furloughed, or there might be a lot of reasons why they can’t do the things they usually do, whereas I can, and that gives me a strong sense of meaning and purpose.”
And she says having the children around can be a boon…
“If I have a morning of very emotive conversations then being able to go downstairs and giving my children a hug is – there’s something about that that’s quite soothing. In some ways I find it hard that it’s brought my work so very clearly into the home. Because usually I’d drive to work, do my job there, then drive home and have time to process work in the car and get home and my focus would be different – it’s all becoming a bit mixed at the moment. I find that them being quite boundaried about staying up in the room where I’m working while I am working…and finding other ways of maintaining those boundaries, that’s helpful.”
AM-T: Just going back to what you said about you find it nice to be able to offer people something during this, you’re helping people in this situation and a lot of other people don’t have that. Have you found just through your skills that you bring to your job, do you have less anxiety around this pandemic than some of your friends, do you think your training has helped you cope with what’s going on around us any better than anyone else?”
“Oh, I think it varies – I think for first couple of weeks I felt overwhelmed, like I had porridge in my brain, I was thinking very slowly. It depends a bit on what’s going on…having a focus means I don’t sit reading lots of news updates…there are things I talk to patients about I know are helpful for them to consider…if I’m faced with a similar situation in theory I know the helpful tools to draw on. But I also think it also depends on how you’re affected…if you know someone very unwell then for sure, that’s going to increase anxiety levels. At the moment it feels like we’re in a bit of a bubble, we have a house, we have a garden, it’s not the biggest garden in the world, but we have options…if you don’t have a lot of options even if you have the tools that’s gonna be more difficult to manage.”
Anyone who has a sick family member or is struggling financially right now knows this all too well.
But for now Anna says, her family is managing. Some things are harder than before, but communication and cooperation are helping a lot.
Dan Carlson from the University of Utah says right now it’s hard to think of this situation as temporary. The weeks can seem endless.
“But eventually this will end the, the shelter in place orders and stay at home orders and people will go back to work. But I think it's really important that people recognize that what we're doing now and the patterns that we're setting now have the power to persist. And especially if it comes to, you know, shaping a more egalitarian relationship. You know, we know that when men take paternity leave, that even though that's short-lived, that taking that time off and spending it with their family leads to more childcare and more housework and those increased responsibilities, those persist even after men return to work.”
So he says if couples do share more of the domestic and childcare labor now…
“…there is a possibility that, that this will become a new pattern in your life and that even after things return to normalcy that how you’re dividing work in this moment will be something that’ll carry into the future.”
That’s the Broad Experience for this time. Thanks to Dan Carlson, Kristen Elworthy, Samantha Murphy and Anna Lagerdahl for being my guests on this show.
I’ll post a few photos of some of my guests and their families under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.
In a future episode I’ll bring you the stories of women who don’t have as many resources to fall back on during the pandemic.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.