Why Work-Life Balance is a Patriarchal Myth: Gender Justice and Burnout

Read any major human resources publication these days, and you’ll learn that we’re in the midst of a shift from thinking about “Work-Life Balance” to “Work-Life Integration.” The idea is that work-life balance was a good start. In a Capitalist society, we needed to acknowledge that there was a danger of defining people solely in terms of their profession.

The concept of work-life integration, we are now told, represents an evolution, because in reality, it’s difficult to keep work and life separate. So maybe we should not be trying. Maybe we should be thinking about how to craft a work situation that integrates well with the rest of life.

But I have a fundamental problem with both these concepts. They’re both rooted in a separation between “work” and “life” that many people, especially women, don’t actually experience. The idea of that separation always assumed that the person focusing on the “work” has a counterpart handling the “life,” in other words, a wife.

The workplace experience of men is most often constructed with the assumption that they have fewer domestic and child rearing responsibilities. This is a double-edged sword, at best. It may come with fewer automatic duties at home, but men who want to take on more in the domestic sphere are far less likely to get a significant amount of parental leave when a child comes along, and they may have less leverage for workplace flexibility. I once worked with a man who left early a few days a week to pick his kids up from school and was challenged by colleagues about how much “babysitting” he was doing, until a manager intervened with, “I think the word you’re looking for is actually parenting.”

Women, on the other hand, were once cheap and relatively expendable labor. They were hired young, before kids, or older, after kids had left the nest. They were hired in roles where they were clearly replaceable. They were given minimal education, because they weren’t expected to be CEOs. They were given minimal pay, because men were assumed to be the ones that would need to financially support families. Slowly and painfully, cultural norms changed, and many women had access to greater education and consideration for a wider variety of roles. But equal pay did not materialize. Equal consideration did not materialize. At home, women still quietly take on the lion’s share of domestic duty, parenting responsibilities, and emotional labor. In her book, Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has Time, Bridget Schulte writes, “…Time studies have found that married women in the United States still do about 70 to 80 percent of the housework, though most of them work for pay, and that once a woman has children, her share of housework increases three times as much as her husband’s.”

It’s no wonder many women have been alarmed and enraged since the draft Supreme Court decision was leaked and it became apparent Roe v. Wade would almost certainly be overturned. Much of the anti-abortion discourse ignores the reality of many women’s experiences in favor of an oversimplified view that ignores a vast swath of hugely impactful economic, health, and social realities. Those touting “pro-life” restrictions on medical care are not rushing to build the sort of social and economic infrastructure that would support people rearing children in any real way.

And yet, as sociologist Jessica Calarco notes, “…We — especially women and people from other systematically marginalized groups — are taught to self-help-book our way out of structural problems. To believe that all our problems would go away if only we were to strictly follow some seventeen-step plan.” The ideas of work-life balance and work-life integration fuel many such seventeen-step plans. These ideas are invoked to suggest that, if you’re struggling, you just need better skills, or perhaps you don’t understand these concepts well enough.

For working women, decisions about “life” have always had profound implications for their careers, for their workload, for how their energy will be spent, and for their earning power. It has never been any other way. “Work” and “life” are and have always been inseparable.

For this reason and many others (detailed in the book), authors Emily and Amelia Nagoski, who wrote the super popular 2020 book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Code, make “Smash the partiarchy” and essential component of their prescription for combating burnout. This doesn’t mean take personal responsibility for bringing down the patriarchy, solo. But, some questions you might ask, no matter what your gender:

• How are gender-based expectations showing up in your workplace?
• How do they show up at home?
• What gender-based expectations are having a negative effect on you or those you care about? (Remember: Patriarchy is not only harmful to women.)
• Where might you have room to push back against the effects of patriarchy in a way you haven’t before?