Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Elinor Burkett argues that family-friendly policies are racist, regressive and, worst of all, anti-woman.
Apr 6, 2000 | To secure a place on Working Mother magazine's list of the 100 best companies for working moms a business has to put a premium on the personal needs of its employees, particularly female ones. Most companies on the list offer flextime to let parents cope with family demands; many offer on-site child care as well as extended maternity leave and adoption aid.
According to Working Mother, the companies that make the grade not only are superior "trailblazers" from a corporate values standpoint but also "attract star recruits, retain talented employees and boost productivity."
Over the past 14 years, the list has become one of the oldest and most respected tools used to measure company cultures and values. To make the list -- especially at a time when companies have to offer major perks to compete for the best employees -- is widely regarded as a badge of honor, one that companies like Bank of America, Prudential and IBM are happy to receive.
But if you ask journalist Elinor Burkett about this hallowed distinction, you'll get a more disturbing assessment. She believes that these distinguished companies have set American women back half a century with discriminatory policies that violate the once-sacred feminist canon of equal pay for equal work.
In her book, "The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless," Burkett argues that both the family-friendly platforms pushed by politicians across the spectrum and the family-friendly policies adopted by corporate America over the past decade are anti-feminist, regressive and tinged with racism. Such programs, she says, are little more than a politically correct way for affluent baby boomers to milk the system for cash and personal indulgences.
Government- and corporate-sponsored pro-family programs, says Burkett, shift the burden of parenthood off parents -- most of whom, presumably, have chosen to have children -- onto the shoulders of their childless friends, co-workers and peers.
When the Equal Pay Act was passed by Congress in 1963, it upended a business precept that had stood rigidly in place since women had entered the workforce: that men, because they were more likely to be supporting a household on their salaries, deserved to be paid more than women, who were probably single (why else would they be working?) and responsible only for their own expenses. The act's passage promised women the "simplest and most basic foundation of economic justice," writes Burkett.
Almost 40 years later, however, the pro-family programs endorsed by governments and employers now offer just the opposite: unequal pay for equal work. Employees with children get thousands of dollars a year in benefits -- extra insurance and unpaid leave, scholarship aid and tax credits -- that are denied to nonparents. Those of us who remain childless save untold sums for our employers, Burkett argues; yet these sums are not repaid in other benefits, like extra vacation time or greater 401K contributions.
Burkett also cites an array of less tangible inequalities. Childless employees, she says, are often asked to pitch in to finish a project when their co-workers have to leave early to pick up a sick child. Nonparents may be forced into less desirable shifts to allow parents to spend breakfast and dinner with their children, and asked to cover for parents on holidays. (For example, Burkett writes about a New York Times editor who managed to wreak havoc on the paper's metro desk simply by handing July 4 weekend work assignments to the staffers who had not worked a holiday in two years -- that is, to the newsroom's mothers.)
While more traditional feminists laud the array of new programs and policies designed to make it easier for women to continue to work while raising children, Burkett sees a world in which women are still rewarded unequally for the choices they make -- with the highest rewards going to the women who choose motherhood, the most traditional female role of all. The goal for which feminists labored in the second half of the century -- the opportunity to have both a family and a career -- was never supposed to be easy or to pay more, Burkett says; it was just supposed to be available.
Perhaps I am dense, but, to me, the "right" to choose both career and family means that no one can say: Look, if you want to work, you may not bear children. Or, if you want kids, you may not work. And, finally, thank goodness, women have gained that right. But having the right to opt for that choice doesn't guarantee that it will be easy or stressless, or that you will be able to do both at once without keeling over in collapse ... Rights are guarantees of opportunities, not outcomes.
