The Best Way to Promote Gender Equality? Make Flexible Work Policies Open to Everyone

Brigid Schulte: I’ve followed your research for years on the costs and consequences of overwork. What can you share about your latest research looking at solutions?

Cha: My past work is all about long work hours and the harm that does to people, particularly when it comes to gender inequality. My current research is more about trying to solve the puzzle. What can we do to reduce long work hours. It’s in line with what you’re trying to do.

I always get fed up when organizations ask, “What can we do for work-life balance?” And they say, “meditate,” or they ask you to take a spa day, when most people feel they can’t take it—they’ve got too much work to do! So I’m all about finding systemic solutions to reduce work hours, rather than leaving it up to individuals to just take a deep breath or create a spa day for themselves.

One of my current projects is looking at the role of organizations. I’m looking at flexible policies and paid time off. Numerous studies find that these are good tools that we can rely on to create a more humane work culture. But the problem is that there's a stigma attached to using these policies. So the key is really how to reduce the stigma or, in an ideal world, make it completely go away.

My current research shows that how the policies are implemented really matters. A lot of organizations offer some sort of flexible work policies these days, especially in the post-Covid era. More people are remote working. There are more options for hybrid work. But not all the policies are the same and they’re implemented in vastly different ways. Sometimes, employees don’t even know what’s available to them, so a flexible policy may be on the books, but employees don’t have easy access to it. Other organizations are proactively advertising their policies and resources.

My research shows that if these policies focus on accommodating women and mothers and are seen as more feminized, they’re actually not effective in improving employees' job and health outcomes and increase the stigma of flexible policies. People associate using them with a career-limiting move. But if the policies are framed as more gender neutral, about employee wellbeing, something organizations do because they care about employees, those are more effective.

We also found that leaving everything up to the discretion of managers—when employees have to bring those flexibility requests to managers and negotiate one on one—also increases stigma. The policies are much more effective when they’re formalized and rely less on manager discretion.

And then we found transparency and clear guidelines for when it’s okay to use these policies and when it’s not can reduce stigma. When it’s murky and you have to ask and get into negotiations with your boss, then people can be more hesitant to ask for [flexible policies.] Employees can feel like they’re doing something that can harm their career.

These insights draw on the research around redesigning work of Erin Kelly and Leslie Perlow. They wrote how the feminized “accommodation” model is not effective. It’s time to change work routines and practices, rather than expecting individuals to change their behavior.

Schulte: Thinking about designing policies, and following on your research on formalizing flexible policies, rather than relying on manager discretion—and, let’s be honest, favoritism—I remember a couple years ago, writing about a law firm that had implemented a new paid parental leave program. They designed it as an “opt out” policy, as in, everybody that qualified got the leave as a default. You didn’t have to ask your manager for it, or “opt in.” Instead, you only had to ask if you didn’t want to use it. Within the year, the number of men taking paid parental leave rose. Their goal was to encourage gender equality at the firm, and enable more women to rise into leadership, not just men.

Cha: That’s the same idea in the Kelly and Perlow intervention, making flexible work policies the norm. Unless you wanted to opt out, you didn’t need to ask about taking time off or when to work from home. The assumption was, as long as the work gets done, nobody asks a question about where you’re going to do it or when. They only care about the result.

Schulte: What role does public policy play?

Cha: When I was living in Germany, I began to think about the role of macro culture and the institutional environment in why we are so obsessed with work hours, and why work has to take priority at all costs. I also began to see how gender culture is an important factor. Long work hours are supported by the social organization of the family. One person overworking is possible because somebody else is picking up the slack at home, doing all the things that need to happen to function as a human. And that’s usually a woman.

A lot of my research shows that women bear the cost of overwork cultures, because they can’t work those long hours, so it costs them their careers. Women also feel guilty when they’re not there for their families. So you miss out on your career opportunities because you prioritize family. Or if you prioritize career, you feel more guilty compared to men. The psychological and career costs are larger for women.

I have cross cultural experimental studies that measure the flexibility sigma in South Korea, the United States and Germany. South Korea is very gender conservative, much more so than Germany and the United States. In Germany, the work culture is much more humane than in the United States and South Korea too. I was looking at how those work cultures and gender cultures determine flexibility stigma and how using or not using flexibility policies impacts perceptions of them as workers and as parents.

What we found is that, when a gender culture is really conservative, like South Korea, women get penalized when they don't take advantage of flexible practices when they’re offered: people think they’re bad mothers.

We found that in Germany and the United States, too, but the magnitude of the effect was much larger in South Korea, which suggests that the stigma is really a function of gender conservatism, and that puts women in a position that harms their careers. There’s a pull factor toward the family, pulling them out of work and into a caregiving role.

So systematic change needs to happen. Organizational policies can be implemented in a certain way that could be effective. But ultimately, it is gender culture that needs to be addressed.

Schulte: So how do we change gender culture?

Cha: It’s really hard. It’s a chicken and egg problem. What needs to happen to change culture? Changing policies. How do we change policies? Change culture.

On the organizational level, that means not framing policies in a gendered way. On the larger level, it means thinking that family is not just about women, and that family policies aren’t mother- or women-only policies.

Think of some countries that incentivize men’s participation in paid family leave. What was really impressive in Germany was, we consider Germany a gender conservative region in the traditional sense, but that's been changing. There's still a fundamentally gender essentialist ideology that a woman should be the primary caregiver. But men are taking part in care work, care roles, and are much more involved than in the past. When I read recent research and talk to researchers, they say implementing paid family leave in a gender-neutral way was the key to that. Germany has a “use it or lose it” policy, just like in Sweden. [To encourage men to take paid family leave, some countries designed “use it or lose it” or “Father Quota” systems. Each parent is given a designated amount of paid leave. If a parent doesn’t use their share, the family loses it. That policy design changed gender norms about what it meant to be a good father—no longer just a breadwinner, but an active caregiver— and sent rates of men taking paid leave soaring.]

South Korea has that, too, but not many men use it because the career penalties are still so big. But the South Korean government is really aggressively trying to help men use those policies: when both partners use paid leave policies, their [wage] replacement rate is a lot higher. We know from the research that the financial incentive is really important for men. So if you want men to participate in any family leave and flexible work policies, we need to raise the replacement rate. The loss of salary is a really big deal for men.

The motivation of the South Korean government is not to resolve the gender inequality problem. Primarily, it’s actually an economic problem there, a low-fertility rate problem. But that could create the opportunity to design policies that can change gender culture, like incentivizing men’s participation in care.

If we design the policies in the right way, we can change the gender culture eventually.

Schulte: I remember you sharing on a Better Life Lab podcast episode a few years ago that overwork, or long work hours, even contributes to about 10 percent of the gender pay gap, right?

Cha: Yes. [Economist] Claudia Goldin makes a similar point, that it’s the people who work long hours who are paid a higher per-hour rate. This benefits men more, compared to women, because [without care responsibilities] they can actually put in those longer hours. That's what we call the “overwork wage premium.” So if there’s an overwork wage premium, and more men are able to work those hours, that contributes to the gender pay gap. What we show in our research is that that wage premium has been increasing dramatically over the past 30 years—we looked at data starting in 1979.

You see how the overwork premium pulls the average wages of men and women apart, because more men can benefit from that rising overwork premium compared to women. This inequality exacerbating effect of the overwork premium essentially wiped out a lot of the progress that we’ve made by closing the education gap during this time frame.

Schulte: Why has overwork and the overwork premium taken off in recent decades? Years ago, if you worked overtime, unless you were an hourly worker, you didn’t get more money. You were just gifting your time to the company. When did overworking start being rewarded and become such a part of our work culture? And is it just the United States? Or is it broader than that?

Cha: Some people argue that it goes hand in hand with broader labor market restructuring. When companies are laying off a lot of people, downsizing, for the people who remain, their workloads increase. Also, with all these new technologies, people are not just working longer hours, but the intensity of effort per hour has also increased. At the organizational level, there are clear incentives to overwork, because that’s what’s rewarded and appreciated.

All that creates a really overloaded person in this modern economy. It would help if workers had more power. We saw that during Covid—when workers have more power employers have to listen to them. So the solutions are not just gender neutral work-life policies, but also empowering workers.

Schulte: Talking about empowering workers, let’s talk about class. Flexible policies are more available to white collar workers. For low-wage, hourly or service workers, flexibility sometimes means chaos—never knowing when you’ll work, or how many hours. From the reporting I’ve been doing for my book, it became clear that white collar workers are expected to overwork in one job, but hourly workers have to overwork in a bunch of different jobs or side hustles just to survive. And the key to wellbeing and work-life conflict is really schedule control—the ability to have a say in the flexibility about when, where, how and how much you work.

Cha: When we surveyed workers, both professional workers and those in other occupations, we saw that there are different ways they think about the ideal worker norm. For professional workers, the ideal worker norm is really important. They need to show they prioritize work and prove they have work commitment to the job at a high level. For hourly workers, instead of putting in long hours for one job, what they view as an ideal worker is that they’re on call whenever the employers call them. It’s a different way of showing work commitment when they don’t have control over their schedule; they have to be on call with an erratic schedule.

Service workers can get overtime compensation, but they don't get the same level of career boost that professional workers get. In some cases, their long hours are not even properly compensated. This “wage theft” is more prevalent in lower wage service sectors. One study about women care workers in South Korea found that these workers work extremely long hours, yet these hours are often taken for granted and uncompensated because people expect care workers to offer additional effort and hours, just out of altruism, which people expect from women workers in care sectors.

Schulte: I’ve been looking at short work hours movements that are directly trying to combat overwork culture. One thing I’ve been struck by is that in order to get to shorter work hours at the same pay, organizations have to rethink everything about how they do their work, and focus on the result, the outcome, the impact, rather than simply rewarding long hours. That’s easier, which is probably why it’s still so prevalent. I went to Iceland when I was reporting on my book. The entire country moved to shorter work hours to reduce stress, increase wellbeing, and improve gender equality. But what they found was that by forcing everyone to rethink work, the work itself got better. People were much more focused and effective. So gender equality may have been the goal, but what got managers on board was the gender-neutral message of making work better. Is that a strategy that can lead to change?

Cha: Thinking about “better” work is so important. Because we value work, we don’t want to seem like a person willing to compromise on our work responsibilities. A lot of people have internalized overwork culture. We did a study with a university unit. The leaders said that overwork is not a requirement, and that’s primarily why people chose this place to work. But we found that a lot of people still opted into overwork and did more than they were expected to.

When we asked why, the workers said, “It’s not an institutional expectation; it’s my personal expectation. This is who I am.” People didn’t even realize they’d internalized the cultural value that work is most important and makes you who you are. So I think it’s really smart messaging emphasizing working smarter, rather than saying lower your work expectations because it’s in line with the cultural value that work is important and important for people’s identities. I could see that being very effective.