Men took on more household responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, but return-to-office mandates risk undercutting that progress, says Sarah Green Carmichael for Bloomberg Opinion.
Many households established new routines during thethat allowed them to divvy up responsibilities - grocery shopping, laundry, waiting for the electrician - more equitably than in the past. And the earlier, voluntary stages of the return-to-office push allowed couples leeway to decide who would commute on which days.
A strong return-to-office push is likely to blunt the gains of the last two years - when US women reached new highs in labour force participation and men a new level of unpaid household work. It was nowhere near equality, but we were heading in the right direction.Commentary: Singapore is trying to make things better for families, but employers and employees too need to walk the talkBacksliding isn’t inevitable if employers remain open to hybrid schedules.
One manager actually said it out loud to a man who had asked about going part-time: “Part-time is traditionally only something we make work for women.”because of an outdated assumption about the division of household labour: That a married woman will cut back at work and that a man will always be on call.Bain’s study jibes with earlier academic research in the US that found that men pay a higher penalty than women for seeking flexible work arrangements.
And about a third of companies are calling hybrid workers into the office on specific days. Employers that are willing to make exceptions are asking workers to submit formal applications - a route women have been more willing to take than men in decades past.
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