The ways in which women have been told (and told each other) how to work
I’ve been thinking about work a lot lately. I am not quite sure why it has been rumbling around in my head so much. Maybe because my youngest child will be leaving for college next year and I can’t help but reflect on my parenting and presence with him and my daughter. Did I work too much? And, as a woman and mother I hope I reflected the value of my role in the professional world. Like many social identities, it often feels like a quickly swinging pendulum that I’m hanging on to with half of me still in one way of thinking as I am flung into another. How we view work has always been a volatile space.
I want to be clear that I feel incredibly privileged to be able to think so much about work and what it means to me. Many have little choice and work is a means to an end. And while I haven’t had the choice to not earn a paycheck, I have had lots of choice in how I earn my paycheck. I don’t take that for granted.
Being raised as a hard worker served me well the first half of my working life. I was raised on praise and validation for a job well-done as well as the effort I put in. Entering the field of social work and nonprofits further fueled that unconscious belief that working hard was equivalent to a job well-done. Late hours and missed vacations was a badge of honor many social workers wear proudly. Unfortunately, it often means working harder than is justified or helpful for those they are serving.
Adding to that, we were the generation to prove that women could “do it all.” We could be professionals, have families, meaningful relationships and grow in all of the above areas of our lives. I remember going to a professional women’s conference and the keynote speaker opened up by talking about how many women come to her complaining they have too much on their plate. Her response? “Get a bigger plate.” Thus began my journey of identifying less with being a “hard worker” and more with what my work means to me and how I choose to integrate into a life full of other things equally if not more important to me.
I pivoted professionally to incorporate sustainable practices and habits for myself and my clients. I resisted the grind and encouraged others to push back as well. I asked, how could we do this “work thing” differently? I traded the grind for flexibility. It wasn’t easy. I love what I do and get immense satisfaction out of it. It took me a few years to make the choices only I could make to build a life in which I could work and not burnout. I stopped working with high acute clients and grew my own private practice. I moved into working with adults only which allowed me to be more flexible with my own hours.
Now, thanks to our younger generations, there is less of a fight to obtain and maintain a less frenzied worklife. Especially in the past few years we are seeing greater shifts in even the large companies and industries on flexibility, mental health awareness and accessibility; all of which are helping to make the workplace less toxic. In my field the average number of clients seen per week for a therapist has decreased significantly. As a full-time therapist I used to see 30-35 clients per week. Now, full-time therapists see 20-25.
And yet, sometimes I feel like we have swung too far, pathologizing those who enjoy their work or (gasp) work more than 40 hours a week. I often find myself feeling judged and shamed for how much I work. I always find it odd. This experience typically looks like someone giving me a knowing look and asking “And, how are you? Working and doing too much like always?” First, they never actually know that. They don’t know about the mornings I stay in my pajamas until 10 reading or the afternoons I’m in my garden by 3 PM. They seem to forget that I travel frequently and mostly that I haven’t complained about working too much in years. We’ve gone from pressuring women to “have it all” to judging each other for working some arbitrarily defined “too much.”
Don’t get me wrong, for those who were working 80 plus hours a week and slowly losing their health and meaning in the world have hopefully benefited greatly from our new relationship to work. And, there are times when I do still fall into working as a coping mechanism or to bypass something else (more on those in posts to come).
I’m just tired of the intensity and judgment on either side of the polarities around work. I don’t want a bigger plate or weird looks from people if I say I worked over the weekend. On one end of the continuum is the belief women need to work all the time in order to have it all and on the other is this pressure to cap your hours and don’t let them know you are working.
What women and men really deserve is the ability to define what work is for them. Only you can decide this and if you are fortunate to be able to influence it based on the different seasons of your life embrace that. But, don’t work or not work because that’s what “they” say is how we should work.