Welcome to The Interpreter newsletter, by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, who write a column by the same name. On our minds: When both parents stay home, whose productivity suffers? A Newsletter About How Hard It Was to Write This Newsletter
Life during lockdown is starting to seem like a leaky inflatable raft submerged under the water. Perhaps the tiny punctures were always there. But it’s only now, in the crisis, that we see the streams of bubbles and realize where we were losing air. I have not been able to stop thinking about two very different articles that I read in the last few days. One was a study from the editors of the American Journal of Political Science breaking down article submissions by gender. The other was an essay in Slate by Emily Gould, a novelist whose new book “Perfect Tunes” is out this week, about what the lockdown is revealing about her role in her marriage, her ability to prioritize her work the way her husband prioritizes his, and what that means for her self-image. I am not a political scientist, nor do I foresee any likely circumstance in which I become a party to Ms. Gould’s marriage. And yet both articles lodged themselves in my brain in a way that makes me certain I won’t get rid of them until I listen to what they’re trying to tell me about the tiny bubbles streaming off my own life. The American Journal of Political Science study broke down all submitted and accepted articles by gender: written by a man, co-written by male-only teams, co-written by mixed-gender teams, co-written by women, and written by a woman. It makes for depressing reading. Sixty-five percent of submissions had no female authors. Only 14 percent of submissions had no male authors at all. The remaining 21 percent were papers co-written by mixed-gender teams. And when the authors of the study zeroed in on the period since lockdown began, a sharper picture began to emerge. Although mixed-gender submissions had increased slightly, solo-written submissions from women had dropped significantly. Women “seem to have less time to submit their own work than men do amid the crisis,” the authors conclude. Where that study hints at a bleak story about whose professional work gets prioritized when resources and time are scarce, Ms. Gould’s essay elaborates on a similar one. Even in normal times, she writes, she is the person in her household who picks up the extra child care responsibilities that inevitably arise: staying home with a sick child, covering days when school is closed, doing full-time child care when school is closed for summer break and camp is too expensive to justify. (Her husband, Keith Gessen, is also a novelist and editor, but has a salaried academic position too.) Ms. Gould’s essay describes her family’s version of what I’ve come to think of as the parent’s “infrastructure of no.” When work and child care obligations come into unresolvable conflict, a pattern often develops: One parent says no to work and prioritizes child care, while the other says no to child care and prioritizes work. Those noes often feel as if they affect a few hours at most. Who leaves early that afternoon to pick up a sick child from school, for instance, or who will stay home with a sick kid, squeezing work time into whatever windows are opened by nap time or “Daniel Tiger” streaming on Netflix seem like emergent temporary measures. In the grand scheme of things, if the big tasks are shared evenly, does that really matter? But over time those noes create a much bigger infrastructure — one that can affect all aspects of a career, pandemic or no. Parents who pick up the care burdens at those times end up with careers where it’s possible to say no to work that conflicts with child care. They seek out projects where they can set their own hours. They explain to bosses and managers in advance that they have young children and will sometimes have limited availability. They put hard stops at the end of their day to make sure bedtime is sacrosanct. They skip conferences and networking events that aren’t strictly necessary. By contrast, the parents who do not usually pick up the unexpected care burdens have a very different infrastructure in place. Their bosses and colleagues do not expect them to turn down meetings. They do not put hard outs on their schedule and insist they be respected. They do not choose roles or projects where they can set their own schedules. That’s the infrastructure of ‘no.’ And it means that by the time lockdown created a seemingly endless series of conflicts between work and parenting, many households had one parent whose job was already geared toward refusing work in order to prioritize child care in such moments of conflict, and another parent whose life was set up for the reverse. And so now that the pandemic has thrown life into permanent crisis mode, “things are different,” Ms. Gould writes. “Our long-term stability as a family hinges on whether my husband can do the work he needs to do this year in order to keep his salaried job. If there is only enough time for one of us to work, it doesn’t make sense for that person to be me.” Even when parents try to divide things more equally, the parent whose career was already geared toward picking up unexpected care burdens is likely to be quicker to accrue tiny punctures during the pandemic. And even tiny punctures can have big consequences. Writing takes time and concentration, so a writer who gets interrupted for an hour in the middle of her work day has lost half a day, not just an hour. Many computer programmers I know find that a single meeting can disrupt their mental flow, cratering a day’s productivity. For a journalist, having to put down a timely piece for half a day is functionally equivalent to never starting it at all. And as Alessandra Minello, a social demographer at the University of Florence, wrote in an article in Nature, academic work “is basically incompatible with tending to children.” I speak from personal experience. My husband and I have divided the days in half; I work during the mornings while he takes the afternoons. But during just the last three hours of my “work time” this morning, my girls came in eight different times to ask me a question or show off a tiny accomplishment. They are adorable; I am proud of their coloring and delighted by their hugs. But each of those interruptions shattered my concentration, setting me back far more than the handful of minutes they stayed before their dad came in to scoop them up. I started work on this newsletter days ago. I am now trying to finish it with a tiny person hanging on me, begging me to pretend we are both kittens. Kittens don’t type, apparently. And that, my husband and I have realized, is part of a broader truth about our working lives: that if I am not on deadline, my job is usually more flexible, which means I have been the one whose infrastructure of no is geared toward delaying work obligations in favor of dealing with an unexpected child care burden. But now we are both faced with the difficult task of rebuilding our infrastructures to say no to different things at different times: I have had to reduce my flexibility and put stronger barriers around my work time to get anything done at all; he has had to become less available to his colleagues and psychotherapy clients in order to make room for my work. All of us are doing the best we can. Every family is different, and we are fortunate to have the option to even try to do that kind of restructuring — juggling two jobs is itself a relatively good problem to have during this time of skyrocketing unemployment. But not all couples are as willing or able to do so. And there is considerable evidence that, in the aggregate, women bear disproportionately greater burdens of care work than men do. That means that now that lockdowns are increasing the volume of child care to be done, Dr. Minello wrote in Nature, “the greatest likelihood is that this will exacerbate gender inequality.” Across society, that is, we may start to see similar patterns to the one found in the journal submission study, in which men are able to carry their projects over the finish line, but women's languish. Some consequences of that are easy to foresee. If women become less productive, then they will also be less likely to advance as far in their fields. Men will continue to make more money and hold more power. But there will be less quantifiable consequences as well — ones that make me feel angry as well as helpless. The fact is that I am more interested in reading a novel by Emily Gould than one by Keith Gessen; the prospect of losing her future work in favor of his adds a tiny bit to my simmering fury. Likewise, the researchers whose work I find most interesting and useful in my journalism are mostly women; that they might produce less research is a loss to the public. And for me, it is yet one more reason to be filled with rage. What We’re Reading
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