Some women have taken matters into their own hands. In Germany, Nobel Prize-winning developmental biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard set up a foundation when she realised how disadvantaged her female PhD students with children were compared to their male counterparts.127 These women were ‘committed researchers’, and their children were in full-time care during the day. But this wasn’t enough to level a field so in thrall to long-hours culture: when childcare ended for the day these women were once again encumbered. Meanwhile, their male and childless female colleagues were ‘squeezing in extra reading or research’. And so these women, committed researchers though they were, were dropping out.
Nüsslein-Volhard’s foundation aims to put a stop to this leaky pipeline. Honourees receive a month stipend that they can spend on ‘anything that alleviates their domestic load: house-cleaning services, time-saving appliances like dishwashers or electric dryers, babysitters for nights and weekends when the daycare center is closed or unavailable’. Recipients must be pursuing graduate or postdoctoral work at German universities. And crucially, and unlike the gender-neutral tenure extension for US academics who take parental leave, they must be women.
Ideological male bias doesn’t simply arise at a workplace level: it is woven into the laws that govern how employment works. For example: what counts as a work expense. This is not as objective or as gender neutral a decision as you might think. The expenses that a company will allow its employees to claim back will generally correspond to what that country’s government has decided counts as a work expense. And this in turn generally corresponds to the kinds of things men will need to claim. Uniforms and tools are in; emergency day care is out.128
In the US, what is an allowable work expense is decided by the IRS, which explains that ‘Generally you cannot deduct personal, living, or family expenses.’129 But what counts as a personal expense is debatable – which is where Dawn Bovasso comes in. Bovasso is one of the few female creative directors in US advertising. She is also a single mother. So when her firm announced that it was hosting a directors’ dinner, Bovasso had a decision to make: was this dinner worth the $200 it would cost her for a sitter and travel?130 Bovasso’s male colleagues on the whole had to do no such mental accounting: yes, men can be single parents, but they are a rare beast. In the UK, 90% of single parents are women.131 In the US the figure is over 80%.132 In Bovasso’s case, her male colleagues were able to just check their calendar and accept or decline. And most of them accepted. In fact not only did they accept, they also booked the hotel next to the restaurant, so they could drink. And unlike her sitter, this cost was claimable on company expenses.
The implicit bias is clear: expense codes are based on the assumption that the employee has a wife at home taking care of the home and the kids. This work doesn’t need paying for, because it’s women’s work, and women don’t get paid for it. Bovasso sums it up: ‘You can get $30 for takeout if you work late (because your wife isn’t there to cook you dinner) or $30 for Scotch if you want to drink your face off, but you can’t get $30 for a sitter (because your wife is at home with the kids).’ In the event, Bovasso was able to get her company to cover the cost of her childcare – but as she points out, ‘these have been exceptions I’ve had to ask for’. Which is women all over: always the exception, never the default.
And in any case, not all employers will grant these exceptions. The Fawcett Society’s 2017 report on local government in England and Wales found that despite regulations dating from 2003 that call for ‘all councils to offer an allowance to cover the caring costs that councillors incur when fulfilling their role’, in reality, provision is patchy.133 Some councils don’t reimburse caring expenses at all, and most that do only pay a ‘contribution’. Rochdale Borough Council’s scheme ‘pays just £5.06 per hour, and specifically states that it is “a contribution rather than full reimbursement of carers’ expenses” – although this important caveat is notably not made for travel expenses’. Adding to the sense that this is a matter of priorities rather than resources, most local-government meetings take place in the evening (when childcare is most likely to be needed), and although it is standard practice in many countries from the US to Sweden for councillors to remotely attend or vote at meetings, current law does not allow for this cheaper alternative.
It is abundantly clear that the culture of paid work as a whole needs a radical overhaul. It needs to take into account that women are not the unencumbered workers the traditional workplace has been designed to suit, and that while men are more likely to fit into this automaton ideal, increasing numbers of them no longer want to. After all, it is simply a fact that none of us, including businesses, could do without the invisible, unpaid work carers do. So it is time to stop penalising them for doing it. Instead, we must start recognising it, valuing it, and designing the paid workplace to account for it.
CHAPTER 4
The Myth of Meritocracy
For most of the twentieth century there were no female musicians in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. There were a couple of blips
