Should Women Lean In Or Should We All Lean Back?

Update: I appreciate all the attention and comments this post is getting. As a result I've been updating the original post on my blog to clarify some points, change others, add details and resources, and refine how the post reads. Please feel free to read this version, but I'd love to hear your comments on the updated one which has changed quite a bit.

A few months ago I read Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook. The book has been a huge best seller. I agree with a lot of what Sandberg says, probably 90% of it, inasmuch as she talks about how women need to have more confidence and women should be able to do anything a man can do. No arguments there. But there was one page of the book that drove me crazy with regards to parenting. She cites a study that states:

Exclusive maternal care was not related to better or worse outcomes for children. There is, thus, no reason for mothers to feel as though they are harming their children if they decide to work.

Sandberg then goes on to say this:

Children absolutely need parental involvement, love, care, time, and attention. But parents who work outside the home are still capable of giving their children a loving and secure childhood. Some data even suggest that having two parents working outside the home can be advantageous to a child’s development, particularly for girls.

Although I know the data and understand intellectually that my career is not harming my children, there are times when I still feel anxious about my choices.

With what appears to be scanty data, Sandberg throws out millennia of anecdotal evidence, ignores countless studies that show the benefits of parental involvement (see here, here, and here for starters), and seems to disregard common sense. And all in the name of what? A job.

In fairness, Sandberg doesn’t appear to be saying parental involvement doesn’t matter, but it would be easy to get that message from her book. It provides a feel-good message for those who feel burdened by parenthood, liberated and in control when at work, and who are looking to comfort their consciences when they work late, work weekends, stay glued to their phones when in the presence of their children, and then spend small bits of token “high-quality” time with their kids.

What if this message is wrong?

The work many do in their professions is undeniably important. The work Sandberg and Zuckerberg are doing is changing the world. But when it comes to questions of what is good, what is better, and what is best, what’s most important? What if no success outside the home can compensate for failure in it? Not that anyone who works outside the home is automatically failing as a parent, but what if in the long term scope of things it’s more important for Sandberg and Zuckerberg to be good parents than to do everything Facebook is doing? Not that these are mutually exclusive choices, but we certainly can’t assume that a father who leaves his children at 7 am, doesn’t see them again until 7 pm, and is then glued to his smartphone, engages in this behavior at no cost to his relationship with his children and without any damage done to their development.

What if not just this behavior is harmful, but what if the standard 8-hour day is harmful to children and families? We accept it because it’s the norm, because everyone is doing it, because psychologists and other authority figures tell us it’s ok and we shouldn’t feel guilty about it, but what if they’re wrong? What if the real results can’t be measured for decades? What if they don’t show up in standardized exams? What if the results that really matter aren’t even being measured? Many studies focus on academic results, but academic impact is one facet of life amongst many others. What if the results you want for your kids can only be had by what most of the people in the professional world would call “excessive” parental involvement? What if the larger problem in today’s first-world society isn’t that we don’t have enough women working, or not enough women working in professional leadership roles, but that we have too many fathers working? Maybe women don’t need to lean in so much as we all need to lean back.

A better way?

Politicians and economists like to talk about unemployment levels, as though unemployment were a bad thing. 200 years ago we had full employment in many areas of the U.S. Every man, woman, and child worked all the time, with the average frontier household spending perhaps 300 hours per week working. And this wasn’t easy desk work at a computer in an air-conditioned office, but hard, dangerous work that made you die young of overwork, if not by accident. What did our ancestors get for their 300 hours per week of work? A small log cabin, and a subsistence lifestyle. Forget about healthcare, Social Security, Starbucks, central heating, Facebook, or hanging out with friends. Full employment is easy if you don’t care about the quality of the employment.

Today we assume we need to have at least one person in a typical family working a standard 40-hour week, if not two people working 60-hour weeks. We do this to “get by,” but getting by includes multiple cars, a large house with all the comforts, annual vacations, flat screen TVs, smartphones for everyone, Netflix, and so on. Even an American family living at the poverty line lives better than most European kings did 800 years ago. Do we really need all the stuff we think we need? Do we need two incomes? Two cars? Big houses? Does all this stuff produce the outcomes we want for our families?

Why do we work an 8 hour work day? Why not a 4 hour work day? Why 5 days a week? We used to work 6 days a week, 7 days if there was an emergency, as there frequently was what with the ox getting in the mire and such. Why don’t we work 4 days a week? Or 3? If it used to take 300 hours per week for a family to eek out a hardscrabble existence and today we can do quite well with 40-80 hours per household, why shouldn’t we be able to do well enough with 10-20 hours per week? Is it just because we’ve been tricked by advertisers and marketers (shooting myself in the foot here…) into thinking we need more than we really need to be happy?

Yesterday I met a father who is taking a year off. He’s traveling the world with his wife and four kids. Each month they move to a different country. They’re currently in Hong Kong. Last month they were in Italy. He’s still doing some work while traveling. He’s getting by. But he’s not making the money he could make if he were at home working 80 hours a week. And he’s ok with that. Why aren’t more of us ok with making less money in order to live more of life? Why do we value possessions more than experiences?

I’ve been running a business since 1999. I used to work 80+ hours per week. I had a nice office. I got rid of the office and the 80 hour work week in 2007. Now I work about 4 days a week, rarely more than 40 hours in a week, and I make better money, live on a sub-tropical island in Hong Kong, and work from home and am able to spend lots of time with my kids. I’m seeing them grow up firsthand rather than hearing reports about it. This morning at 9 am instead of being at the office or commuting there I was getting my makeup done by my 7-year old daughter. Others are working 4-day work weeks as well.

I have nothing against women in the workplace, no more than I have anything against men in the workplace. I think we have too much of both. We don’t need more men or women showing us how to be powerful executives who work hard and change the world, we need more men and women who recognize the family as the fundamental unit of society, happy children as the most important KPI, the 5-day, 40-hour work week as an outdated relic, and who are willing to take the risk of ditching the career they think they need for something more important. For some, it might mean making financial sacrifices. But smart, creative people are figuring out everyday how to work less and have more of everything, including financial benefits. There’s no reason you can’t be one of them.

Originally posted at JoshSteimle.com. Follow Josh Steimle @joshsteimle.