Irritated Multi-Taskers: Why Women Leave Corporations and Stay Away

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May 09, 2005

Irritated Multi-Taskers: Why Women Leave Corporations and Stay Away

We had a close-call inconvenience last week. Our landlord sold the house we're renting (and opted not to buy--a story for another blog: the F%$@ed-up California real-estate market). We figured we'd have to move and started looking for new houses, but fortunately the new owners opted to rent to us for another year. Phew!

I'm quite relieved. This was hardly the time to put another project on my plate. And we've only been in our house for a year; the memories of re-creating the Amazon jungle with the b-friend's houseplants and re-routing all of my subscriptions depressed me. Yet, if we had to move, I would have sucked it up and eeked out a line or two a day on the Palm Pilot for looking for places and packing.

What shocked me the most during this near-debacle was my b-friend's reaction to all of this. Simply put, he couldn't handle it. I think I saw him short-circuiting--sparks and smoke were coming from his head when I read to him the email from our landlord, telling us she was selling. He was in the final stretch of his graduate school semester, which was admittedly stressful and time-consuming. But apparently one big thing is all that men can juggle at once. (That's not really juggling, per se, that's more like frantic ball tossing.)

"Whyyyyyyyyyyy!" he moaned. "Why is this happening to meeeeeeeee!"

"Excuse me, Nancy Kerrigan," I had to interject. "But what exactly is happening to YOU?" I mean, let's face it. Who would be looking for new places? Pulling together credit reports? Shlepping all over the East Bay to look for properties big enough, clean enough, and cheap enough for a freelance writer and a grad student working at home to live in? Just the softshoe required in explaining how we'd pay for the place was work.

The b-friend made it clear that he would not be capable of helping me during finals, so I traipsed around for a week looking for places, finding one we were about to sign for, when our landlord decided not to sell.

"Phew!" b-friend said, hugging me, rubbing my back. "Thank God we didn't have to do any work!"

The whole experience left a strange taste in my mouth. I know the b-friend was trying to be supportive. He thanked me numerous times for my effort. But it occurred to me that he, like many men, can only handle so many things at once. Sexual spiritualist and gender observationist David Deida makes this distinction in several of his books: Men have difficulty focusing on more than one thing at a time, which (this is my take) often frustrates women, who are natural multi-taskers, but who may have a few hundred other things to think about and can't always--or want to!--take up the slack.

Still, we have this tremendous innate ability to take on many crucial tasks simultaneously. When things get tough, we handle it, period. Instead of slashing our pay or merely patting us on the back for this competency, we'd prefer to get the proper credit.

I got a great note this weekend from a reader on the East Coast, a self-described "peon in a marketing department," who works part time, "with no bennies after 17 years." She writes: "I am here 'cause I'm doing the mommy thing and trying to figure out my next move."

Stories like these make me marvel at women's perseverance. Let's put aside for a minute that this job offers no benefits (lemme guess, it isn't exactly paying for college either); what gets to me is that workplaces like this one assume the part-time Mommy has no capacity to take on more responsibility, and that she's grateful for the often mindless slice of corporate pie she gets. In their eyes she's LESS valuable, MORE maintenance. In truth, she brings more capability to the table. She's a bargain.

This year Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Carolyn Buck Luce, Peggy Shiller, and Sandra Southwell of the Center for Work-Life Policy published a study that looked at the "hidden brain drain," the REAL trajectories of talented women who left the corporate world but never came back.

A synopsis of the study reads:

"Indeed, (corporations) make it very easy for women to depart. When women take a temporary leave of absence to have children or deal with other personal matters, they find it difficult to return to work and contribute as they had previously. In essence, corporations provide women with many career off-ramps, but provide them with few on-ramps."

In her wonderful book, The Naked Truth, Margaret Heffernan addresses the topic of women opting out of the workplace. A major misconception, Heffernan says, is that women leave the workplace because of family conflicts. It's simply not true. She cites a 2001 Korn/Ferry study that showed that women opted out to take risks with new businesses. We may have left to have a kid, or because our spouse was taking a job elsewhere, but once we saw the slim pickings awaiting "deserters" opting back in, we decided that independent status wasn't so bad.

Sure, some women LOVE being full-time Moms, but think about it: if a talented career woman leaves a full-time job, does she leave her ambition? By the time she's 30 I'll venture to say that her intellect is hard-wired, she needs some form of vocational stimulation.

My twin sister, Julie, a history professor, took a tenure-track position in New York City, despite the fact she and her husband just bought a house last year outside of Boston. They can't move, she says, it just wouldn't be wise financially. Her husband is a physicist-in-residence at a law firm and won't be finished with law school in Boston for another year.

My sister manages to keep both the job and the house by commuting from Boston to New York every Sunday night, returning Wednesday night. She doesn't mind the commute, she says, but she does mind being away from her 22-month-old (did I fail to mention the kid?)

"The Nanny's great," my sister says, "but I feel like I should be the one she sees every day." My sister earmarks Fridays for being with her daughter, Bella; no errands, no email, just Bella.

Recently my sister and I had a heart to heart. I asked her how the arrangement was working. Was she managing the commute? Could she handle a load of classes and the administrative duties at her college, which sometimes included ad hoc speaking engagements in other cities? Could she endure being away from Bella for half of the week? I visited a few months ago and commuted with my sister to New York; the sound of the kid screaming for her mother on our way out was excruciating.

"It's stressful," my sister said. I think I need to cut down; it's wearing me out. I feel like a bad mother."

"Do you think the university will let you reduce your class load, or even stay home some weeks?"

Julie sounded perplexed: "University?" she said. "I was talking about Fridays with Bella."

There you have it, boys. You think we can't handle a demanding job AND motherhood? You've never muti-tasked. And you've never kept a kid occupied for twelve hours.

Posted at 03:47 PM in Career, Impostor Syndrome, Meaningful Work, Trends, Women | Permalink

Comments

Spot on the money. I've got a 4 year old that I'm raising completely on my own, work 4 days a week and I think my employers get a bargain out of me as I do a full-time job in the 4 days and of course I don't get paid full-time. Multi-task and organise are my middle names.

Posted by: Jen | May 09, 2005 at 04:28 PM

Amen! -Mom

Posted by: Joy DJ | May 09, 2005 at 05:26 PM

Wait, let me get this straight. The woman has worked there 17 years with no benefits because she's "doing the mommy thing and trying to figure out [her]next move." Seems like the next move is to drop the kid off at college and find a good job.

I'd say that the issue isn't her workplace not valuing her, but her not valuing herself. Why the heck hadn't she left earlier?

Posted by: cz | May 10, 2005 at 06:53 AM

I've gotta take issue (albeit supportively) with the gender stereotyping here. Right now I've got the usual stuff at work, plus one long-term project that just came off the back burner, plus another must-not-fail project that just fell out of the sky, and my wife and I are buying one house and selling another, with all of the crazy to-dos that come with both of those tasks. And of course she has all her work stuff to deal with as well.

Both of us have our moments of freaking out, and both of us have our moments of keeping the balls in the air seemingly with no effort. Generally speaking, we take turns on the freaking out, so that there's always one of us calm enough to talk the other one down.

If I were going to make generalizations based on your story, it'd be that grad students (like many academics) sometimes develop tunnel vision that makes them need a caregiver, while those of us who've been out in the world for a while just do what needs to be done, regardless.

Or maybe it'd be just what my real estate agent said: "In every relationship, there's a Burt, and there's an Ernie, and through this process, you're going to find out which one you are."

Posted by: Mike | May 10, 2005 at 11:33 AM

On the other hand, I was talking to Christie last night about this very topic, and she said, "No, you don't multi-task. You work on one thing at a time, and switch to something else while the first task is processing. That's multi-threading. It's different."

She's gotta point. So I've gotta agree that my own experiences bears out that men and women deal with multiple to-dos in different ways.

Posted by: Mike | May 11, 2005 at 08:47 AM

Jory! 'You've never muti-tasked. And you've never kept a kid occupied for twelve hours.' Your writing is usually more balanced. Have you been reading Tom Peters?

Suffice it to say, men and women solve problems differently. OK. Women are better multitaskers. Women are more well-rounded. Women have higher tolerances for pain. Women have a lower center of gravity. I concede all of these things and more.

Women are the fairer sex. Women are better care givers. Women are better communicators. Women smell better and they taste better.

God. I do love women.

There was a time in years gone by when I would have based a decision on plus or minus five pounds. Now, I would like to think that I am wiser. But even so, I was birthed subpar on so many levels. Thank God for my ridiculously enormous ego and thesaurus. Otherwise, I might still be pushing a mailcart.

Blind arrogance. You can't take that away from us. Bravado! Machismo! Storm the beach. Take the hill. Damn the devil! Remember the Alamo!

Despite all the degrees and certifications and seminars and conferences, you can still learn pretty much all you need to know about me by watching The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly.

Posted by: Troy Worman | May 12, 2005 at 01:27 PM

Yeah, if you look at Michaelangelo's original work order for the Sistine Chapel, he was supposed to do the ceiling AND put in some carpeting AND create a screened-in sun porch. Alas, he could only manage the ceiling, lazy slacker %*&#!@.

Ok, I'm goofing, you raise some valid points.

Posted by: Robert | May 25, 2005 at 09:35 PM