"What if the reason why we're all burned out is because the productivity norms of our profession are based on white men whose wives who took care of everything"

[flashbac]

Not my words. Saw it on Twitter and it made me think.

twitter.com/AmyAchenbach/status/1470394756844957702?t=K01WWVnQE2WPIQl80rZUyw&s=19

I think another element is the nature of the work we do. We need to do exercise on top of work because our work is so sedentary. A couple of hundred years ago that wouldn't have been the case.

I think work would have often been more social too - more people worked within their own communities with friends and relatives. You don't need to go and visit your parents every weekend if you work in a family farm with them every day etc.

@GrandmasCat

I think it's true of office based productivity. But actually in terms of domestic tasks technology has reduced our workload for many things. Vacuum cleaners, online shopping, large supermarkets so we can get everything in one place, cars so we can get to the shops quickly, easily available ready made clothing, shoes etc, lots of quick easy food.

Technology may have reduced the amount of work a woman needs to do at home but then we sent the woman to work as well, for a lower salary than a man even if doing the same job, while the man is still working and only taking a half arsed attempt to have a 50/50 distribution of childcare/house chores.

Yes exactly. And then take out the man aspect. For a good few years I was a single parent to 5 dc, working full time as no other income. Ex not on the scene at all. I used to find it very hard when collegues (all men) would easily put in additional hours, plus social time after work and I just couldn't because I didn't have what they had at home holding the fort. I was often made to feel like I was not putting in as much effort as them, which wasn't true. I just physically couldn't do the extra hour after work or weekend drinks. Plus getting home. Zero time to unwind as straight into chores, making dinner, collecting from clubs etc.

I eventually left that job as I was made to feel by some of them that I wasn't pulling my weight, purely because I couldn't stay late on occasion. They didn't understand that the reason they could do that was because they had a wife at home making dinner, putting the dc to bed, keeping the house clean and they could rock up home at 7pm to a cooked meal and put their feet up. One even said the old chestnut 'your choice to have kids'. Well yes, but when I had the dc I at least had a partner to help with the load.

@Capricopia
It’s saying that professional white men traditionally had the luxury of spending 40 hours a week at work without getting burned out because they had the luxury of a wife at home to look after the cooking, cleaning, child rearing, housekeeping etc.

Sexist and racist. All over it. What is to stop anyone writing that exact sentence about most Muslim families today? Doesn’t matter which sex or race you say this about, it is sexist and racist.

Besides productivity norms are for factory work, not professional work as the tasks are not discrete, measurable and repetitive. And factory work is done by working class in which both parents have always had to work regardless of race or sex.

And one of the best things is now lots of us are WFH. And yes this is great for families, I see my kids more etc. But most companies like it because people are actually working more hours. Rather than using that commute time on rest, relaxation and leisure we are using it to work. Depressing.

Yes 100%. I think this every time I see a thread about nursery/work/going back to work.

Things are so s**t for mums now because there is so much pressure to be a full time worker but having no parents looking after the baby isn’t really practicable even when paying through the nose for full time childcare.

Maybe ten years ago it was still acceptable to only go back part time now it’s seen as bizarre or selfish to raise a child when you could be earning money for the household.

@Cam2020

Race is relevant because if you are in the favoured group in your society you have less shite to deal with and so more time/energy/mental bandwidth to get on with your work.

That's pretty offensive. How do you know what shite others are dealing with?

Everyone has shit to deal with but if you are, for example:

• disabled
• poor
• from a disadvantaged group e.g. one that suffers from prejudice

You will have even more shit to deal with.

Don’t forget that our domestic standards have massively gone up with living standards!

My kids school have expected full clean uniform every day over Covid, plus the amount of interaction expected with school is HUGE (one child has just been given a ‘seven day secret Santa’ yes SEVEN DAYS of just little thoughtful things to organise for a random child wtaf?), there is less carpooling due to car seat issues, there is less ‘playing out, be home for tea’ mentality. My mum was incredibly house proud and hardworking, but chucked us in the garden most afternoons and washed our wool-mix school skirts every… so often ?

Plus, when I was being given a lecture on how mat leave was so selfish and they never did it from a senior colleague, she then added a) of course there was no email then so we just left the office at 5.30 and that was that b) she bought one double fronted 5 bed house in west London then never had to think about moving again, nor pension as the rising value of her asset protected her (just sold recently for 1.7 million) and really easy and casual to get childcare and cleaners!

A nanny of the kind I would need to do what she did (of the Love, Nina type) would currently cost £48k a year. A cleaner, decently paid in west London, would cost about £260 a month.

Very true. Years ago, one income was enough to support a family so one could work for a wage and the other could look after the home and family.
We weren’t all trying to do absolutely everything and burning ourselves out!

The technological changes should be allowing us all to do less labour for the same output, in reality corporate owners simply require more and more output thus reaping all the reward.

This exactly. I agree with the statement overall but I think unchecked capitalist exploitation is the biggest issue.

@Cam2020

Race is relevant because if you are in the favoured group in your society you have less shite to deal with and so more time/energy/mental bandwidth to get on with your work.

That's pretty offensive. How do you know what shite others are dealing with?

Probably loads. But if you’re white, dealing with racism is one less thing you need to worry about.

This is all bullshit based on a romanticised narrow segment of society in the golden 1950s/60s where all the middle class white men had perfect little housewives at home to cater to them. Not sure why only the white men had this, when in fact it was all men. So that’s racist.

But anyway, the productivity norms of the 1950s/60s are not even remotely similar to the productivity norms of today. The statement is assuming they’ve remained unchanged for over half a century. They haven’t due to technology advances, they’ve gone up. Mobile phones brought in expectation to be available outside working hours. Email doubled this on duty 24/7 expectation and also brought in expectation for immediate, instant answers compared to the few days you could take to the written letters in your inbox. Industries moving to “just in time” or lean logistics added to the working round the clock because if supply chains stutter, you don’t have any stock to draw from. Social media then amplified all this because the second some asshole tweets a complaint your public relations teams have to investigate and then respond publicly as fast as possible.

It’s a racist and sexist statement with no factual basis. It “feels true” because we all feel hard done by and think earlier generations “had it easy” but when you dig into why productivity norms have changed to be more demanding, is all due to technology advances.

@KateInHappyland

Very true. Years ago, one income was enough to support a family so one could work for a wage and the other could look after the home and family. We weren’t all trying to do absolutely everything and burning ourselves out!

Not if you were working class.

@Capricopia

Totally agree. It cannot be natural for humans to have to fit all their rest, socialising, parenting, chores, hobbies, self-care, fitness, family time etc into the sparse hours left over by the 9-5 model.

I listened to an interesting podcast with a historical anthropologist who said that while we cannot know with absolute certainty it's likely that the whole 'work' element for pre-historic people would have been c.30 hours per week.

This included domestic chores and childcare.

I believe this was based largely on research done with tribes that live as closely to pre-historic people as possible in modern times.

It was very common for working class women to be SAHM from the 40s onwards.

My family (very much working class) had a mix of women who needed to work and women who stayed at home (because no-one wanted to be seen to be 'poor' and so they would live on one income rather than be seen to have a 'dirty' house and be so poor they had to work).

@wheresmymojo
That’s impossible for work to be only 30hrs a week including domestic chores and childcare in prehistoric societies. They tended to do everything with their children beside them to either protect the young child or to teach them how to hunt/gather/do domestic chore of tanning hides, napping flint, making spears, sewing clothes, cooking, etc.

I have read similar and it was always around 30hrs excluding childcare.

I think the racist element here is not about the men at all. What they are getting at is that in many places, the only way this model can actually work is if some/all of the domestic/childcare/elderly care work is undertaken by others - and those others are disproportionately non-white people from countries where standards of living are lower.

@wheresmymojo
My family had a similar mixture of working class women staying at home and of going out to work. But all the ones who stayed at home still took in work such as washing, or baking, or sewing, or even as child minders. Quite a few women in my family also married sailors who could be gone with no pay for 1-3yrs and so even though he’d leave some money, that always ran out and they had to take in work or take turns with sisters to watch each other’s children so they could be a daily scrubwoman in mornings at richer homes or evenings at offices.

[quote EmpressCixi]@Capricopia
It’s saying that professional white men traditionally had the luxury of spending 40 hours a week at work without getting burned out because they had the luxury of a wife at home to look after the cooking, cleaning, child rearing, housekeeping etc.

Sexist and racist. All over it. What is to stop anyone writing that exact sentence about most Muslim families today? Doesn’t matter which sex or race you say this about, it is sexist and racist.

Besides productivity norms are for factory work, not professional work as the tasks are not discrete, measurable and repetitive. And factory work is done by working class in which both parents have always had to work regardless of race or sex.[/quote]
What is sexist and racist about it? I genuinely don’t understand your point.

It’s a good point!

You could just say it’s based on having “someone” at home to deal with all the rest, and it would still be true though. I’m also not sure where race comes into the specific question of how much we should be doing.

“Just” going to work, and maybe getting home to read kids a story at night, the odd bit of diy on the weekends if we felt like it, does sound like a dream life though.

There is an argument that life for women has actually got harder. In the 50s the expectation was that women looked after their husband and children and did not step into the workplace- I would have hated that. Now however, the expectation is that women work and do these things. What has not changed is that many men do not do more. Childcare, cleaning and food preparation remains in many houses women's work. We need more focus in education on evening workloads up.

@DeepaBeesKit

I think another element is the nature of the work we do. We need to do exercise on top of work because our work is so sedentary. A couple of hundred years ago that wouldn't have been the case.

I think work would have often been more social too - more people worked within their own communities with friends and relatives. You don't need to go and visit your parents every weekend if you work in a family farm with them every day etc.

Two excellent points. Took me decades to grasp the former point, as my waistline can attest.

...and in fact way before the 40s most of the women in my family (couldn't be more working class) were 'unpaid domestic duties'

@GertrudePerkinsPaperyThing

It’s a good point!

You could just say it’s based on having “someone” at home to deal with all the rest, and it would still be true though. I’m also not sure where race comes into the specific question of how much we should be doing.

“Just” going to work, and maybe getting home to read kids a story at night, the odd bit of diy on the weekends if we felt like it, does sound like a dream life though.

Ah right, I think I see - you’re saying the same could be said of any family, regardless of race or gender, where there is one working person and one non-working person.

Which of course is true, and I agree. What I think the tweet is saying though is that the expectations we now view as ‘norms’ were set at a time when the professional class was almost entirely white men with wives at home. Of course a Muslim man or a black woman or whoever would be just as productive in the same job and set up, but at the time these expectations took hold, the majority of workers on which it was based were white men.

The tweet isn’t saying white men are inherently more productive than any other person. Nor is it saying a black person or a woman wouldn’t be just as productive in the exact same family set up. It’s saying that our expectations about what constitutes a reasonable working week are based on the most privileged group in our society - therefore, people are burned out because those expectations aren’t taking into account all of the other things people who aren’t in that ‘ideal’ (for productive working) position of privilege have to deal with. That includes chores, child rearing, hobbies etc but also structural racism and sexism.

I take the point about the working classes rarely having had the luxury of being one-income families, and therefore burnout being nothing new.

Spot on.

All the brilliant, very high-achieving men I know have an army of women behind them. Wives who don’t work or who work part time with the help of nannies, housekeepers, gardeners etc. And usually multiple PAs, aides, and other young (usually female) staff members running around doing the boring and finicky bits of work to ensure they never have to do anything other than be brilliant and successful. Most of them came from wealthy families to begin with, too, and never had to claw their way up the career ladder while living in a grotty house share.

One of the biggest reasons I’m almost certainly not going to have kids is that I’ve seen the same story over and over again with my female friends who’ve had them. Their jobs just expect them to act like their kids don’t exist. Women who have too many childcare emergencies or who always leave ‘early’ (i.e. on time) for childcare pick-up are gradually sidelined or disciplined for not taking their jobs seriously enough. They’re expected to do their jobs with the exact same productivity as before they had kids and just make it all work, somehow. It’s this giant gaping hole in the way our society and economy are constructed and it both enrages and terrifies me.

Very true.