Why Do Women's Jobs Matter Less?

With the flu and cold season upon us, someone needs to take care of the kids.

A few weeks ago, a friend told me a story. She runs a small business that has several employees, and one of her managers reached out to her. The woman’s two kids had a virus, and they had to stay home a few days that week. The manager said she was terribly sorry, but she would be out those same days to care for her children.

My friend, who was frustrated that she had to scramble to find a replacement, texted me a question: I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but do you think I can ask her why her husband can’t take one of those days off to help out? Are we really living in a time where a dad can’t share the burden of a sick child?

Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash

Obviously, you cannot pry into someone’s personal life, and my friend, who is the boss, can’t tell her employee that her husband needs to step it up. But my friend and I began exchanging a flurry of texts on the topic, namely: When kids get sick, why does the burden often fall on mom?

My son had the flu last week. Poor guy was in bed for three days. Then my daughter caught it. She’s inside watching a movie as I type these words. I’ve been making tea and serving chicken soup for what feels like an eternity, and I’ve been thinking about how much harder it would be for my husband and I to manage if I had to report to an office every day. If someone was accounting for my whereabouts.

As a freelance writer and author, I work at home. To miss a day of work means only that I postpone revising my writing. I will still be paid for my articles or books, even if I must scramble to catch up if I’m on a deadline. So it makes sense for me to play Florence Nightingale because my husband would have to cancel an entire day’s worth of patients (and income) to stay home with the kids if they get sick.

Writers and creatives of all kinds grapple with another implication when it comes to their work: That theirs is not a real job. For one, when you don’t have a big salary, it’s easy to feel like your work doesn’t really count when it comes to cancelling it. It’s fluff! You’re underpaid! What does it matter if you skip a few day’s work? You can miss it, and no will miss you! But then I think of my good friends, some of whom are lawyers and doctors and marketing executives, and they are also playing catch-up when a sick kid throws a wrench in the work week. Why am I the one to reschedule the piano lessons? Why do I have to cancel the carpools and buy the new bottle of Tylenol and somehow work at home while trying to figure out what’s for dinner.

So it got me thinking, how do families make the decision of who cares for sick kids when two parents must report to a workplace? How is it decided in a marriage whose job is more important? In other words, if I was a salaried reporter at The New York Times, would I force my husband to cancel a day’s worth of his patients to watch one of our sick kids? Or would it still be expected for me to call in sick to my job, like the office manager had.

When I asked several professionals, also moms, everyone agreed that sick kids were definitely their problem.

A friend of mine who works as a lawyer said, “I live in fear that my children are going to get sick at a time when I have a court appearance. If they’re sick and it conveniently falls on a day when my husband is working from home, then yes, he’ll stay with the kids. If he’s in the city at work, then it’s certainly up to me to stay home. He does not change his schedule. God forbid!”

The same friend said the school nurse never calls her husband; she always calls mom first. Her older kids do the same if they’re not feeling well. “In their mind, that’s the unspoken rule in our house. Mom will take care of it.”

A recent study out of Tufts University reported that school nurses most often call mothers.”Even when schools are told that both parents work full time, mothers are 1.4 times more likely than fathers to be contacted by school officials,” reports the study. Another fascinating facet of the study. “Researchers sent emails to 80,000 school principals asking for a call back and providing contact numbers for both a father and mother. About 60% of the time, the principals called the mothers. Even when the emails specified that mom was less available and dad was happy to field calls, 26% of the principals called the female parent.”

Another friend, who works at a high level at tech company, finds that she and her husband try to split the stress of caring for sick kids, even if it’s not a perfect scenario, “I am definitely the default parent in just about every situation (except maybe sports), so that includes unexpected illnesses,” she said. “But I will say that my role tends to be planning, while my husband's is execution. So while I'll be the one to make decisions about how to care for the kids while they're sick, my husband will be the one running out to buy the medicine, taking them to the doctor, etc. — if I ask him to (and I do).”

And maybe that’s part of the problem. It may not ONLY be that men expect women to take off work or do the heavy lifting when the kids get sick. Perhaps it just doesn’t occur to men to offer to stay home with the kids unless his wife asks, kind of like how men just don’t see the socks they left on the floor. Of course this can be problematic because women are going to resent the fact that they have to ask. Women want the decision to be equitable: I stayed home last time, you stay home this time. But mostly, women are going to grow frustrated if they have to ask. Here’s why: 1. Women already feel guilty that they should actually be the one staying home, thanks to societal pressure to be number one mom, and 2. Moms figure it’s just easier to do it themselves rather than hassle with their significant others over it. Ahem, like picking up those socks on the floor.

A few women said they believed the burden of caring for sick kids fell on mom for one reason: The income divide. There’s an unspoken or spoken understanding in relationships that one job is more important than the other, and it’s informed by who makes more. Says my lawyer friend about why she’s the one rearranging her schedule: “It’s because he earns more money than I do. Without his job, I cannot support the family alone, but with his, we can. So his job becomes more financially important for the family, which is frustrating, but also true.”

Another woman I interviewed said something similar. “I think I became the default parent years ago because my job was considered both less important (in terms of income) and more flexible back then. That's not really the case anymore, and we have been reassessing since I started working full time about three years ago.”

In my heart of hearts, I know I’d still be the one scrambling for child care if I had a big reporting job at the Times, and I say this because that’s what I see my friends doing again and again. My husband (and their husbands) are not sexist jerks. These are caring, kind men, and my husband is super understanding when his women employees call in to care for their own sick kids. But why is it always women calling in? As a society, no matter how equitable we feel in our marriages, women are always expected to pick up the slack when it comes to childcare—and research shows it impacts wages, productivity, and perception in the workplace.  

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released numbers from USAFACTS, a nonpartisan data collection organization, who reported that among working parents, women are four times as likely to miss work due to childcare as their male counterparts. I don’t think that there’s a mom reading this article that is surprised by that number. Because we’re all living it.

So I’m turning the question out to readers. How do you and your partner decide who will stay home with the kids? Does it ever cause tension in your relationship? Has anyone found an equitable solution to this unfair burden often put on women? Please share.