Ep. 379: The Flexibility Myth

I recently came across an op-ed in the New York Times that caught my attention. It was written by Corine Lowe, an economist at Penn who studies gender in the workplace. In this piece, she says the following: this is the quote that really uh grabbed me. She says Almost two-thirds of corporate leaders who mandated return to office policies after the pandemic saw disproportionately higher numbers of women leave their companies.

Now, why is this happening? As low notes, there's an obvious answer here. You can blame the the call to return to the office, right? Maybe women came to count on the flexibility that was afforded. by remote work.

And given that women have much higher household labor and childcare labor burdens than men, they would be the group that you would expect to struggle most when you took some of this flexibility away. But as Lowe goes on to argue, this is not the full story. There is another major factor that disproportionately impacts women, but is a real problem for all knowledge workers, an issue with the knowledge sector that has been quietly making all of us miserable. In today's episode, I want to talk about this mystery factor. I want to describe where it came from, and then using this knowledge suggests some concrete tactics that you or your employer can deploy to help reduce it.

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