Women at Work

First it was quiet quitting. Now, we read that American workers are not engaged with their work. Most of them complain all the time and want to find new jobs.

Of course, many of them have unrealistic expectations about work. They think that work should be meaningful, that it ought to contribute to their mental health. In some sense this is true, but only for people who are doing well at a job that is productive. And that are working within a well-organized and profitable enterprise within a country that has a sense of national pride and purpose.

Staff morale is so low many workers are confronting their managers with new demands. They want more time off. They want less burdensome commutes. They certainly want more work/life balance.

The good old work ethic is dying or dead.

The Wall Street Journal has reported the story. Link here.

Half of workers aren’t engaged on the job, putting in minimal effort to get by, according to research by Gallup released Tuesday. Employee engagement, a measure of involvement and enthusiasm at work, in the U.S. declined for the second year in a row. There is also a growing share of the workforce that is disengaged, or resentful that their needs aren’t being met. In some cases, these workers are disgruntled over low pay and long hours, or they have lost trust in their employers.

Among the curiosities in the Journal story is the failure to distinguish between male and female workers. Are working mothers more desirous of spending more time at home because they want to spend more time with their children? For some reason most of the studies of quiet quitting ignore this obvious point. The few studies I have seen suggest that far more women than men want to work remotely.

One recalls that some seven decades ago Betty Friedan identified the problem that had no name. She declared that suburban housewives were suffering from emotional distress because they did not have careers. They were being damaged by being full-time mothers and homemakers.

You know the consequences. More and more women decided to put career ahead of family. More women had careers and fewer women had families. And more women adopted a lifestyle that involved more hours on the job, more hours commuting and fewer hours with their children.

But then, along came the pandemic. Work from home became a new experience for both men and women. Whereas men seemed to be more willing to return to the office, the same is doubtless not true of women. Having gotten used to spending more time with their children, and having spent more time at home, they might have liked the experience. 

Evidently, the corporate response to large numbers of disgruntled employees is to have meetings, to hash it all out, to allow everyone to express him or herself. One understands that this is the standard corporate approach:

In the spring and summer of 2020, as Covid-19 spread and there was social unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, executives at many companies had town halls and listening sessions with employees, communicating organizational mission and keeping workplace relationships strong.

With large numbers of employees working remotely, company culture is suffering. Loyalty seems to be in short supply and productivity is declining. 

But still, if, as I suspect, most of those who are most torqued by the requirement to come back to the office are women with children, you are not going to solve the problem by having more deeply meaningful conversations between management and staff.

At the very least, this experience seems to contradict the feminist dictum, to the effect that women can achieve much better mental health and emotional stability if they have careers. Given the option of working from home and spending more time with children, many women, feminism notwithstanding, seem willing to fight for the latter.

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