Speaker 2 (00:08.91)
Hello and welcome to management under construction. I'm Dee Davis.
And I'm Brad Wyatt and we are here today to talk about working parents. This is a really interesting one. I have never been a parent, so I have a very different, maybe more limited understanding of this one. I'm going to be excited to hear what Dee has to say about it as a working parent. We're going to go through some of the challenges that parents face in the workplace, some of the challenges that employers face employing parents, parental roles, a little bit of
a statistical analysis of men and women and working parents and non-working parents in the workplace based on some research and then the work from home impact on all of that. So, Dee, why don't you kick us off?
absolutely have been a working parent most of my life. My kids are all grown now, but working parents is not a new phenomenon. We think about back in the day in the old shows, dad goes to work and mom stays home with the kids. I love Lucy and leave it to Bieber and all the really old, the Brady's, all of those really old TV shows where that was always the case. But working parents is not a new phenomenon. My mom worked, my dad worked my entire life.
I have to go in my family back to my grandparents and where my grandmothers didn't work outside the home. Believe me, working at home is work. Raising kids and managing a family is a lot of work. But when we say working parents, we're talking about parents that work, have an employer, or maybe they own their own business. But working outside the home away from home and family.
Speaker 2 (01:54.328)
So there's tons and tons of challenges that parents face. But again, most of these are not necessarily new challenges, but they're new in the greater scheme of things in that 50 or 100 years ago, less women worked outside the home.
One of the biggest challenges I know I faced in raising my kids and working is that school schedules, they're horrific compared to an expected work schedule. The work days, hours don't match up school and work. So that creates challenges of daycare. You got to have care maybe before school, after school for your child so that you can get to work.
And then if you're not working from home, you're commuting somewhere. I commuted 30 minutes to an hour and a half most of my career each way. So there's additional time away from your family that is invested that you have to find care for your kids. School schedules change all the time. I'm amazed at how many different types of school schedules there are out there.
of the weather a little bit here. I'm just getting a little sun infection. has been burning the candle at both ends, so forgive us if our voices sound gravelly and cool.
So we have frequent school breaks, frequent days off. We actually at our house in Colorado, we live around the corner from an elementary school. And I'm telling you, these kids are out of school. feels like every five minutes. And that's just me watching from way over here. I did a little bit of research on how much time kids spend in school in different parts of the world. I was curious because it seems like kids in the U S have so much time off. was
Speaker 2 (03:42.958)
curious at how that compares to other countries. It varies state by state, first of all, I found out, which I thought was kind of interesting. I think there's 35 states that have a set limit of hours that kids must meet every year. The rest of the states, don't have a definitive limit, which explains why I've heard stories. I just was reading the other day, a woman saying that her kids have only had one full day of school in the last month.
What?
Yeah. She was saying that her kids only had one full day of school in all of January. Part of it was weather incidents and school closures because of weather. Part of it was illness. Part of it was holidays and breaks from school. My first impression when she said that was no. Yeah, B. But depending on where you are.
Those days may or may not be made up. And we know that when you have kids in school, they go to school, they pick up germs from everybody and everything and they're sick. I know a lot of the folks around here have had illnesses just blazing through their houses in the last month. Everybody's taking turns getting sick. And then in addition to the frequent school breaks and days off and parent teacher conference days where the kids are out of school and all those kinds of things.
School hours and schedules can vary district to district or area to area. And year-round schools can either go four days a week or a certain number of weeks on and off. I remember a friend of mine, when our kids were growing up, her kids were in a different district than mine. Her kids were in year-round school. Well, that was a complete nightmare. It worked out okay because she was home during the day and she worked at night.
Speaker 2 (05:31.8)
her and her husband did that trade-off thing. He was working during the day and was home with the kids at night. But her kids were on tracks where they would have, think it was seven weeks on and two weeks off or something like that. Well, one was in elementary and one was in middle school. So guess what? They were on different tracks. So somebody was constantly out of school. It's just mind boggling to me. I don't know how anybody functions like that if you have to work.
I can't believe that the PTA would not revolt in the streets, French Revolution style, over that kind of a schedule is insane to me. If my mom and her friends when we were growing up had been faced with that, she'd be like, no, no, no, we're burning it down. We are protesting, marching in the streets, blocking off. That would not have flowed where I grew up. That's crazy.
I know. I, but see, here's the problem. The working parents, they don't have time to march in the streets and rebel. You know, they're too busy trying to work and find daycare and all those things. U.S. kids spend somewhere between 160 and 180 days a year in school. That doesn't mean they're there full days, by the way. Just means they're there at school at some point, right? There's so many half days. It's not even funny. Brazilian children spend about 200. In Italy?
They go to school six days a week. Saturday is a school day in Italy, apparently.
We think of them just sitting in cafes sipping cappuccinos all day, but now they're going to school pretty aggressively.
Speaker 2 (07:01.974)
Chile wins the international record for having children spend the most time in the classroom. School days and classroom instructional hours, not necessarily the same thing. You can go to school for a lot of days and still not have as many instructional hours if you constantly have half days and part days and short days. I've heard of school districts who have that every single week, which is another thing that just boggles my mind.
A thousand seven hours of instructional time. If you go to school in Chile, which the United States is more like 900 hours in the most stringent. States. So. More days, more hours does not necessarily equate to a better education was. I think we all know every time you have a sub what happened.
video.
video, the TV come out, you watch a movie, you play Heads Up 7 Up when you're in elementary school or whatever. Just because you're sitting in school doesn't mean those are beneficial instructional hours. Let's compare how much kids are in school compared to how much parents are at work. In round numbers, parents are going to work about 260 calendar days a year.
Mm.
Speaker 2 (08:16.482)
You might have some vacation and whatever, just just round numbers, 260 days. Kids are going to school 160 to 180 days. So that leaves you 80 to a hundred days per year. This doesn't count weekends people. The presumption is that you're off on weekends. Your kids are off on weekends. Well, that's also not true for everybody, but we're making that presumption in these numbers. 80 to a hundred days a year.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:45.73)
You're looking for daycare for your kids. Somebody's gotta be watching the kids.
When you put it down to numbers like that, it really was enlightening for me having done the research and figured out what the numbers really are. And if you live in an area where the required school days are less, you're going to be looking for somebody to care for your child even more days.
Forget the sports activities, the school events, the illnesses, the doctor's appointments, all the other things that go along with having kids. So there's a lot going on for parents. And again, these are not necessarily new challenges, but they're challenges that every single parent faces to some extent. The challenges that employers face on the other side of that is trying to manage all of this.
And you have employees who maybe don't have kids, but they've got other commitments. Maybe they have a sick spouse, a sick parent, or some other family member that they need to accommodate. So as an employer, you can't just say, great, I'm going to go out and hire a whole bunch of people that don't have kids. You still have to accommodate.
could eat everybody.
Speaker 2 (10:05.506)
Well, I'm telling you, I think there's an awful lot of employers who hasn't ran through their head is, you know, gosh, it's a lot easier to deal with people who don't have kids. Fair. A lot less interference with work, but that doesn't mean they won't have kids. That's discrimination and illegal. Yeah, that's off the table. You can't do that. Top advice.
from the Management Under Construction podcast. Do not break discrimination laws.
absolutely. And statistically, you're leaving out so much of the population. It's kind of silly. And there's different needs that employees have at different stages of their lives, including having to take care of parents and siblings and other extended family members.
As an employer, you have to manage your customer or client expectations, your project needs, however you're organized. For a construction company, you have people dispatched out to projects of managing those project needs. You lose a key person on a pretty regular basis because they've got disciplinary issues with Johnny and they have to keep leaving to go to parent teacher conferences or illnesses or whatever that can disrupt the workplace.
And the bigger your staff, the bigger the challenge becomes. There's also ever-changing benefits, costs, and regulations associated with this. know in Colorado, they just adopted a couple of years ago, a program called Family. And it's very similar to programs that we've seen in other states. But this is a fund that employers have to pay into. These benefits are not free for employees, even if it's free to the employee.
Speaker 2 (11:50.35)
The employer has to pay into it and it accommodates for leave time and things like that for maternity leave or paternity leave, illness leave to care for a family member and those kinds of things. So these things are constantly evolving and changing at the state level and employers have to keep up with that. Then there's the social expectations. I mean, all you have to do is go to LinkedIn.
to get in your full about all this right now. Employees are screaming bloody murder that they want more benefits, more time off, more flexibility, more this, more that, more pay, more everything. As an employer, you have to listen, you have to hear that and do what you can. You must do certain things, but you wanna do the things that you can do to keep employees happy and to keep them working for you. But you still gotta balance all that with keeping the business running, keeping it.
profitable. And that's one of the things that I don't like that I'm hearing going on right now is a lot of one-sided conversation or I would even go as far as saying demands on employers saying me me me me me me me me and realizing that if we put too many demands on employers, guess what? The business is no longer viable.
Right. You hear a lot of people, especially in my age, around the halls of MBA saying, you know, look at Europe, they're giving such amazing paid time off benefits for parents. And while that may be true, I think there's also the fact that paid time off has an economic cost to the businesses that are offering that benefit. And that comes out of everybody's paycheck at some point. Economically speaking, that's just slowing down everybody else to certain point to the point that
If you have to have more staff on hand on a business, let's say you have to hire an 11th employee at a company of 10 so that people can take the time away from work to be parents. There's a right or wrong answer. It's just that all decisions have consequences and understanding the ramifications of the consequences are things we have to trade off. So for me, the question would be then, OK, would you take a salary cut to have that much more paid time off? And if the answer is yes, then great.
Speaker 1 (14:09.666)
work for a company that provides those benefits? If the answer is no, then work at a different company. I think there's just trade-offs there that have to be acknowledged.
Yeah, it pops its head up every once in a while, but it's probably not a very popular view. So I don't see it happen often, but I think it's worthy of just at least bringing up. We talk about all these benefits and all these things that are needed and they're absolutely needed. Or working parents. What about people who choose not to have children?
If we're going to push over and we're going to say, hey, we have to provide all these things for working parents and all this additional time off, well, do people that don't have kids get that time off too?
Is it fair if they don't?
Right. The fairness conversation really has to come up. It is a personal choice to have children. So is it fair to have people make a personal choice and saying this is why this is not a popular conversation because every people say, that's not fair. It's my choice to have children. Absolutely. But then it becomes your burden to some extent and versus the employer's burden to manage that, which is hard.
Speaker 2 (15:26.37)
That's a very unpopular conversation. One of the things that I can say definitively having cleared and being on the other side of that now is talking about parental roles. Regardless of how your family is formed, there's parental roles. We all take those roles. It's somebody's job to take out the trash. It's somebody's job household roles. We fall into those roles also as parents and
This parent takes care of that and that parent takes care of the other thing. Having those conversations before you get married, before you have children, I don't think most people do that. I know I didn't. So there were points in time where I was expected to take the traditional role of a woman in my marriage and take the kids to the doctor's appointments, attend all the school events, take off when the kids were sick.
And I remember having this conversation with my husband at one point and going, Hey, isn't it time for you to start picking up some of this burden? My husband, he's a wonderful guy and he's by no stretch of the imagination, that guy, but he just, no, he was not. And it was a substantial contributor to my decision not to have any more children because it was like my career has always been very, very important to me. And I felt like.
it was impacting my ability to focus on my career to some extent, which of course it is going to. So who takes on those roles and what that looks like is a big deal and it still traditionally falls to women. So maybe a good conversation to have with your potential mate would be how much sick and vacation time does each person get? Some people work in employment situations where they have
Lots of sick in vacation time and they could use PTO flexibly. That's great. I know when my kids were young, almost all of my vacation time and sick time was spent covering their days off of school. And when they were sick, I was almost never sick, thankfully.
Speaker 2 (17:42.754)
People have different levels of family and tribal support. And I say tribal because I know families, I'm going to say family groups. have a local book club that I belong to in the neighborhood we live in is a mostly young families. So a lot of younger gals with younger children live in our neighborhood and they have formed a tribe. And it's amazing to see they help each other. They cover each other. Some of the moms work, some of the moms don't.
They have formed a tribe and they help each other a lot. I think that's fantastic. I always wanted that when I had young kids and I didn't have a tribe, but I did have a lot of family support. My parents helped a lot. This kind of brings us to the economics of working parents. And I'm going to turn this over to you, Browd, and you've done a bunch of research here.
I have this one article that I read as part of a class assignment. The class is called Incentivizing Productivity. It's about the business economics of trying to figure out how to signal the right things to your employees, depending on what kind of business you run, depending on what you need out of them. But before we do that, there's something you said that was really interesting to me about parents using PTO to cover kids' stuff. When I think about my 30-year-old
up until now life of when I get to PT I'm like, I get to go skiing on a PTO day or I get to go on a vacation for working parents to be like, no, I need to use those PTO days just in the normal course of my life. Not for time that I get to recharge, not for time that I'm going to use to come back to work refreshed. No, just to keep things going as they're supposed to be. That's crazy. That is just,
Big care is incredibly expensive to have to pay out of pocket. And people do, people choose to pay out of pocket to cover. If they can find care, they can afford to pay for care, then they can save those days and take a real vacation. But most parents, I don't think are doing that. I know I didn't do that. I didn't take vacation ever when my kids were growing up because I didn't have time. All of my vacation was used to cover spring break, Christmas break.
Speaker 2 (19:54.122)
And that was it. I couldn't even cover both of those necessarily. And then everything else in between. It's crazy.
This article that I want to talk about really blew the back of my head out and brought numbers and statistics to the issues that we're talking about, the problems that you hear about, whether it's this gender pay gap and tried to investigate it on deeper level. what these authors have done, these researchers have done, is they've studied the post-graduation careers of people who graduated from the university.
University of Chicago's MBA program between 1990 and 2006. So the education level is even across all these people. They're super highly educated, probably gonna earn a ton of money because UChicago is one of the best business schools in the country. They're very, very smart people to go there. The nickname of University of Chicago for those who have not grown up in the Chicago area is where fun goes to die. But boy, boy, they smart.
these people are very statistically well suited to earn a lot of money. But anyway, so they study these people with this equal level of education, men and women, parents and non-parents alike. And what they wanted to understand was how do those career dynamics differ by gender? How do earnings by different choices that people make as far as having children or not taking time away or not impact their earnings? And what they found in this research was that
the biggest driver of income inequality was not just gender or not just choosing to have children or not, but choosing to take a lot of time away to have those children. So this is a quote from the article, across the first 15 years following the MBA, so following graduation, the starting point for this data, women with children have about an eight month deficit.
Speaker 1 (21:59.424)
in actual post-MBA experience, so working time compared with the average man, while women without children have a 1.5 month deficit. For whatever reason, are still more likely to take more time off, one and a half months, over 15 years. So, you know, that works out to be a very, very low amount per year. But eight months over that time, that's a lot more time all of sudden. The conclusion of whole thing is that three factors account for
the large and rising gender gap in earnings, differences in training prior to MBA graduation, differences in interruptions, that one we just talked about, and differences in weekly working hours. So they found that firstly, women are taking more time away from the workforce to be able to be mothers, due to physicalities and other factors associated with that, and that they end up working fewer hours over the course of their entire career than men if they choose to be a mother.
Those explain more of the gender pay gap than gender alone by a lot. So for me, the conclusion, the so what of all that is that as an employer or as an employee, when you think about taking time away from work or letting an employee go on a lead, you've got to say, okay, this employee is not worth less to my workforce because they've taken time away. They spent that time not on the job, not continuing to learn, sure, but
Their career should not be stunted because they are doing the thing that keeps people in the world. That's not the way things should work. As an employee trying to figure out how to come back to the workforce in a positive way and trying to manage the challenge that Dee talked about earlier, those are the present. Nobody on this podcast listening as a parent is going to
hear anything new there. But for employers, understanding that the people coming back to your workforce are often more valuable because they're going to learn so much from that parenting challenge that it's worth keeping around. It's not something where it's like, they're not taking their career seriously because they're becoming a parent. My mom told me this story when she went to work for William Blair in Chicago.
Speaker 1 (24:24.128)
She came on at the same time as somebody else did, but that person made partner a year earlier than she did in the firm. And when that person was sitting in the room, he said, Hey, why isn't Dale Wyatt in this room with me? She's crushing it. And we came on the firm at same time. And they said, well, she told us how seriously she's taking her career. She had a child this year and she made partner next year because she was knocking the cover off the ball. There's this awesome photo that's legend in the family of her.
with a brick-shaped cell phone in the hospital with me in one arm and the phone in the other, taking calls from people who were buying stocks from her because they knew that she'd had a kid, which is a whole nother thing. Enabling the people that understand your company, that understand your values, that are working well for you to continue to succeed is well worth the risk, in my opinion. It's not a risk in so much as it is a challenge that is easy to overcome if you have opened and...
truthful conversations with your people and respect them as individuals.
That's an amazing story. And I love that you bring that up as a mother myself. have several thoughts that ran through my head when you're telling this story about your mom. First of all is she is amazing. I just, I already knew that I already knew your mom was amazing, but respect big time for her. But would a man be expected to do the same thing? You have to ask yourself.
You know, would a man be expected to do the same thing, to be in a hospital bed having just, well, I mean, obviously they're not going to just give birth, but what if he just had a heart attack or some other medical thing and be on the phone doing deals? It kind of goes to that whole thing of I've always felt like women have to work twice as hard to get the same recognition as their male colleagues. I know that that was certainly true for me. I had to work my high knee off.
Speaker 2 (26:23.928)
to get the same recognition as my male colleagues and to even come close to getting the same pay as my male colleagues. That's a whole other topic.
Yeah, that's not exactly our focus on this, but it is an interesting one. I found it so interesting that the article was able to bring up that the exception for the pay gap is that an adverse impact to children unemployment and earnings is not found in female MBAs with lower earning husbands. So in a situation where the woman is the breadwinner and the man makes less, the woman isn't impacted as much as if
were the other way around if she was an MBA who still earns less than her husband. And that phenomenon of whoever just is the primary breadwinner being the one that receives less impact. We were talking earlier about the dynamics of who becomes the primary parent when things come up, like who's going to be the parent that's closer to school or that just deals with the during school stuff.
gender and society roles and expectations being what they are that often ends up being the mother. But there are families where that isn't true. I don't know what to do about that in terms of information, but that data point is fascinating to me that women who make more than their husbands don't suffer the same wage penalty that women who make less than their husbands do. I that's just a very strange thing because I don't know what to do about that.
Well, I'm going to guess, and of course, without the data, it is just a guess that if they are the primary wage earner, their spouse is probably taking up some of that slack and that gap. And we're going to talk a little bit more about some other statistics here that I found in researching that women statistically spend less hours working when they have children.
Speaker 2 (28:22.294)
than men do. However, if you're the primary wage earner in your house, that's probably not true.
Speaker 2 (28:32.632)
We're going to have to look for some data on that. I expect that if you're the primary wage earner, you're probably the one that's spending the most time at work. I can tell you, my sister was the primary wage earner in her household when her kids were growing up and my brother-in-law stayed home with the kids. That was in the nineties. That was very uncommon at that time. My sister worked 16 hours a day because she had somebody home to take care of the kids.
Do all of their stuff, get them to school, all those things. She was the primary wage earner. She invested a lot of time at work and she made very good money doing it.
Like I said, I'm just guessing that that might be the reason why that that data point is different, but that's very interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:24.894)
The article ends by saying that female MBAs often have husbands with higher earnings than female PhDs and MDs, which is one of the groups that they compare their pool to, allowing them the luxury to slow down the market and spend more time with their children. The career costs of that decision may not be evident until much later. Is it fair that if a group of the population spends less time at work or takes more time off than work, that they are
seemingly overly penalized in their careers for that time away. The earnings gap all of a just gets bigger and bigger if you take this eight month time off over 15 years. It seems like more punishment, but then again, career growth is exponential. I look back on the last 10 years of my career and trying to learn more every day and how different I am one year versus two years versus four years out of
my undergraduate in terms of what I was able to bring to bear in my career. Not that we're earning skip up that by the way, in terms of your ability, but it's just a hard problem to solve. think it's the kind of thing where now that we're getting this kind of data, I think this article is not that old. Now that we're seeing what our biases are leading to, now that we're having these conversations about gender pay gap and about parent pay gaps and about time away from work pay gaps, maybe we can start to acknowledge
those biases and integrate them into our decision making and say, okay, well, let's make sure that we're being fair. Let's make sure that we're making the right decisions for everybody, for the company and for the employee.
Absolutely. of course, work from home has changed some of this conversation. At least in my opinion, it's changed on the worker side. It's changed the conversation a lot around parents being able to have more freedom and more flexibility. And if you're truly working from home, like I do,
Speaker 2 (31:29.026)
you've got a sick kiddo, you can work and take care of them because you're a room away. You don't have to take a day off of work necessarily. And of course it depends on how sick they are, but the chance of being able to stay home and not have to miss a day of work is better. Even things like picking up and dropping off kids, those are huge benefits to parents. Massive benefits. Being able to have your morning routine, drop your kids off at
school and then go to work. Well, school schedules, you know, they don't start till eight thirty, nine in the morning. It depends. They're not starting at seven a.m., especially in construction. If you're supposed to be to work at five thirty or six in the morning, how do you manage that? I can tell you how I managed it. I hired a nanny to come to my house at five o'clock in the morning. She got my kids up.
She got him ready for school. She took him to school. I did that for many years. And when I no longer could find anybody to do that, that's hard to find by the way, I would get my kids up at five in the morning and I would get them ready and I would drop them off at a friend's house. I can't tell you how many bleary-eyed parents had me knocking on their door at 530 in the morning to drop my kids off so that they could take my kid to school with their kids.
I did that for years. That's how I managed it. I had a boss one time that was lamenting to me that other employees weren't doing that and that they weren't coming to the job site till nine o'clock in the morning because they were dropping their kids off and he was mad about it. He was saying, well, that never happens with you. And I said, don't you dare compare me to anybody else. I'm choosing to do this. This is expensive and extremely inconvenient for lots of people.
This should not be your expectation. This is what I'm choosing to do in my situation. A lot of the resistance that employers are getting to the return to the office is family care, whether it's children or parents or whatever they've got going on. In one case, one of the people that I hired last year, they left a traditional employment situation because they had aging parents they needed to care for.
Speaker 2 (33:52.814)
in addition to small children and just couldn't maintain the status quo of expected schedules anymore and they needed a more flexible situation. So Jude and Ward Cleaver are gone. As of the last census, there was almost 11 million single parent families in the United States.
with over 80 % of those households being led by women.
Speaker 1 (34:23.681)
Wow. Wow.
The avoidance of child care costs, before and after school care costs, when you're able to work from home, participation, being able to block out a little bit of time during the day to go to your kids' school event. I can tell you there is no kind of parent guilt like the kind of parent guilt that happens when there's an event during the day at school. And all the stay home parents are there.
because they stay home and you're a working parent and your kid looks at you and says, mom, why can't you come to this? Because all the other moms are coming. crushing, crushing parental guilt there. I remember it well. It still hurts my heart. It's not the kid's fault. All they know is what they see. They see other parents there and why can't you come? Why can't dad be there? And the ability to care for the sick kids at home, like I mentioned.
My philosophy on work from home is as long as the work gets done, I don't care when you do it. I don't care how it gets done. If you want to work at seven in the morning or 10 o'clock at night or take out chunks in the day to go pick up your kids, drop your kids off, as long as the work gets done, I don't think it's relevant. Not everybody agrees with that. It requires different management skills to manage people that work remotely.
And I think that's one of the biggest barriers we're seeing from employers right now is they don't know how to do this yet. And we've seen the implementation of, in my opinion, ridiculous things like everybody has to have their camera on all day long. Micromanagement.
Speaker 1 (36:11.884)
What big brother shit is this?
Right? I remember a couple of years ago, my daughter had a work from home day and I said, Hey, why don't I grab us some lunch and I'll come over and we'll have lunch together. Her workstation at the time was in her living room. And she says, but you can't come through the door until this time, because my camera has to be on during my work hours and there can't be anybody else there. I'll get in trouble. So I had to wait until her official lunchtime started.
mean, it was ridiculous. like, you got to be kidding me. They make you sit there with your camera on all day. That's insane to me. What micromanagement is this? And then the mouse trackers, we've all heard about those. That happened a lot during COVID, right?
And then people building the machine that keeps the mouse jiggling every three minutes so that it looks like you're there at work.
You build a stupid rule and somebody's gonna come up with a stupid program to overcome the stupid rule. I mean, come on.
Speaker 1 (37:09.902)
That's why I love this class, this incentives and productivity class, because it goes into the economics of all these kinds of situations that employers try to create that people put themselves in for trying to measure workplace productivity. In commission sales roles, it's easy. If you're selling stuff, you're making the money. If you're not, you're not. You can get into the nuances of, well, this account just makes more money because they buy more of our stuff. Yeah, fine. But for the most part, you can measure productivity pretty effectively.
by measuring a commission salesperson's output. For creative outputs, for managerial outputs, like the ones that we mostly talk about on this podcast, it becomes a lot more fraught. The opportunities for bias associated with affinity, associated with proximity to that particular employee or personal distaste or whatever there might be, it's a lot harder to measure an employee's output in some of these non-
Commissioned non sales types roles and the professor I'm learning from his class This is his whole field of study is trying to understand the economics of incentivizing productivity He doesn't have any clearing answers about it, but he does have clear things like okay. Well, we know this definitely isn't the solution qualitative assessment Doesn't work proven time and time again That people just putting their finger in the air and saying yeah I think that employee did a better job than that employee this year is not
a sufficient way of evaluating your staff. You have to take into account some of the things you have to be quantitative about it. But even then, that can be fraught. There's no great do this one thing, dividing rod perfect solution for the problems that talking about here today, but try and understand that each of your employee groups has different things to bring to your workforce. I think it's fair to say that employees who are parents
may have more patience and more empathy than before they became parents. They're going to improve as people because of the experiences they have as parents. And then being able to manage their personal lives effectively and to be happy outside of work is going to make them better employees. Would you rather have to see your best employees or just any of your employees leave your workforce because your policies
Speaker 1 (39:37.006)
don't allow them to live the parts of the life that they want to live, then to try to accommodate them and make it possible for them to be the people they want to be outside of work and at work at the same time. That's the question I would ask myself as an employer trying to consider how to accommodate or whether to accommodate or not working parents. There are some workplaces that just take this a totally different way. I I have a friend who's getting her JD right now.
And she talks about big law, quote unquote, big law, these firms that are very, very famous for working with people to death, 100 hour work weeks. And somebody was telling the story of like working for one these big firms and being at their grandfather's death bed and getting calls and calls and calls from somebody saying, why aren't you working? Well, I'm at my grandfather's death bed. It's a big family event. like, no, no, we're paying you this much money because this is what you're expected to do. You're not allowed to have this life.
We need to go do what we say right now or you're fired. Maybe there's still a place for that kind of a workplace, but limiting your talent pool so drastically that the economics of making that choice to me don't seem like they would pay off.
Speaker 2 (40:50.508)
Definitely heard those stories, particularly in the legal field. At some point in time, that seemed to be the expectation. If you went to law school, it was the money dangling. You got some big fat offer. Then you're kind of selling your soul to the devil to some extent because for a dollar value for living in a nice house, having a nice car, all the trappings that go with it.
I would imagine that working from home is probably not something that the legal profession is excited about. But, you there's a lot of arguments against working from home from the employer side. People goof off, they take advantage, managing people that are somewhere else. So you mentioned proximity in what you said. And I think as human beings, we are wired. We want to be within seeing and touching proximity to people.
And when people are further away than that, they're kind of further out of sight, out of mind, kind of a thing. Even when you think about your friendships and your personal relationships, it's work to maintain relationships with people who are distant. Right now you're in Michigan. I'm in Colorado. We see each other once a week on a podcast, but if it weren't for this podcast, we talk less frequently when we're not recording. It's work to maintain relationships with people that are further away. It goes the same with managing.
It takes an additional energy effort to manage people and they need to be managed differently. I can definitely say that I have been in situations where just because they're supervisors right there doesn't mean they're getting any work done. We've all seen that.
I had book who forced me to sit right next to him for a whole project. And my anxiety level with the way that he communicated and the way that he directed action was so high that I would just be like, my God, what's he going to turn around and say next before that project, the product just before then, my boss chose to sit in his own office in the trailer with a wall and a door. And he had
Speaker 1 (43:01.324)
me and two junior employees sit right outside his door. And we became really close and I ended up mentoring them. And then I felt comfortable with the space between him and I. And it's different for every person, it's different on every situation. But just even that physical proximity within trailers, within 12 by 60 trailers makes a big difference. if an employee can work from home and the other
member of the couple can't. And that all of a becomes a bias that the employers of both of those people might find, well, the spouse who's closest should just be the one who takes care of the kids and I should get my employee more often than that other one should just go take care of it. That's, sure the way that some employers have thought about it, but anyway.
Well, and the construction industry is rife with couples working for the same company. My husband and I worked for the same company for many years, and that's not uncommon. Family members, extended family members, spouses working for the same company. I always used to joke, we're all related. Our eyes are all a little too close together. And there's, there's a lot of that going on in the construction industry, multi-generational, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings.
spouses. yeah, the employer certainly knows if they're employing three or four members of the same family, not nepotism like the owners of the company, it's their family. I'm talking about just cousins and siblings and fathers and sons and like that, you know, work in the same company. So yes, when they have intimate knowledge about what's going on within the family, because there's so many people within the family working in the organization, that can be a little bit tricky.
Mm.
Speaker 2 (44:46.826)
I love working from home. know there's people, it's not their bag and that's fine. They love to be around in the office environment, whatever, but people very young in their careers, not as great just because there's so much to be learned from that proximity that you mentioned of being around senior people, hands-on learning, especially on a construction site. I can't imagine where I would be today had I not spent so many years working in job site trailers.
next to people who are smarter than me, no more than me, I could ask questions. The learning curve is accelerated in those environments where if everybody's isolated at home, that's not going to happen. And then, of course, some jobs don't lend themselves to this. Depending on my role on any given project, I may be on site full time, I may be fully remote or some blend thereof. I can tell you this last week, I had an incident.
on a job where I would have given my eye teeth to be on site, just service for my client. We had some issues with the HVAC system on a project and I'm trying to extract information from people that are not necessarily the right people. They're not really sure what's going on. I'm getting data, but it's not all the right data. It's not all the information. And I'm trying to troubleshoot assist over the phone.
on a team's call and then come up with what are we going to do from here? What's next? What needs to happen? And being on the other side of the country, that was tough. I could have probably solved that much faster had I been there, but it was like the afternoon and everybody needs to be on site tomorrow morning. wasn't even physically possible for me to get there. So it's not always the best to work from home. There's arguments for and against.
I did some research on gender pay gaps. I've always found this. Phenomena is interesting. I wanted to do a deeper dive in the research because you always hear on the news. Well, the gender pay gap is this 80 cents on the dollar. It's currently 82 cents on the dollar. When I went to school, I did a lot of statistics and a lot of learning how to read and translate studies and things like that. And so I never take.
Speaker 2 (47:06.764)
numbers like that at face value, because I know there's deeper information. And I've always wondered when we make a big broad statement like that, where's that data come from? What's it based on? Is it taking into account that there are certain jobs where there are way more women? There's certain jobs where there's way more men. Is it even stevening that or is it just making a bid?
broad statement based on general incomes across multiple industries, across multiple levels of education. What I found was the current gap is 82 cents on the dollar in general, and that's a very, very general average statement.
So we're almost so generalized to be unuseful in these terms. think throwing that kind of statistic out there can be the kind of thing that shapes an unhelpful narrative. I think one of the things that we can talk about from the construction side of things.
Generalizing broadly here, men are more likely to work in construction and other high risk, high bodily injury risk than women for all of the reasons that that entails. And as a result, a post high school career for men on average involves more bodily harm risk than for women. So maybe that's a contributing factor that deserves some of that pay gap inequality. If there were some like made up
economy where there were three jobs that anybody could take out of high school, being a teacher, being an office clerk, and being a construction worker, and 80 % of people take the office clerk job, and then there's more women in the teaching job and more men in the construction job, you would likely predict that there would be this need to incentivize those construction workers to take on that additional risk for additional pay from a pure economic standpoint.
Speaker 1 (49:11.5)
That's the only reason that men would at all choose to seek a career where there's more risk for more reward. So just the two cents on the 80 cents on the dollar thing being a broad generalization.
Yeah, absolutely. When I think about things generally, and that's why a statistic like that bothers me, because when you think about teachers, there's more, far more female teachers than there are male teachers. It's a sadly lower paying job. Should it be? That's a different discussion. I personally think those people are grossly underpaid for what they do, but it is a lower paying job.
And there's far more women in that job. Well, are we comparing that to an industry like construction where there's far more men? And I don't believe that equal opportunity means equal result. Do men and women have the same opportunity to become teachers? Yes, I think they do. But more women choose it for reasons that's a very complicated answer. Do women and men have the same opportunity in construction? Yes, I think they do. Do we have a 50-50 result? No, we don't, and we probably never will.
And that's okay. The equal opportunity is the, the goal. But you look at things like unions. If you're a journeyman electrician, you get paid same, same. Nobody's lifting your skirt to find out what your plumbing's like. If you're a journeyman electrician or a plumber, you know what I mean? It's same. Everybody's getting paid the same. Now it's not true in the non-union sector necessarily. That's maybe a little bit more flexible, but in the union, it's all about where you are.
third year apprentices all get paid the same in the same discipline. That's why I look at that with skepticism and I said, I want to dive deeper. I did dive deeper and I found some crazy stuff in there. And of course I wanted to relate it specifically to parenting and children and whether or not having kids influences this. And as it turns out, it does.
Speaker 2 (51:15.98)
The gender pay gap increases with age for women with children, which I thought was very interesting. It actually starts out pretty even. We all start out when we're very, very young, the gender pay gap is narrower. It's about 94 cents to the dollar when we're very young, like early working career before people start having children.
Then it starts to spread because we start having people leaving the workplace, taking maternity leave, even if you're just taking maternity leave, like by the way, those, those stats that you quoted for the women with children that have MBAs, the gaps were very short, which tells me that they took their maternity leave and went right back to work. Not all people choose to do that. But as you get older, it's about, it's about 90 cents up to age 34.
And then it starts getting worse for women with children. And it's the worst between 55 and 64. And if you think about that logically, that's because that's assuming that there's some percentage of women. And again, we're talking about statistics. So it's not necessarily applicable to you as an individual. It's applicable in general over large amounts of people. If you stay home with your children until they're 18, 20 years old, you have maybe several children.
You're returning to the workforce in your late 40s, 50s, and you're never really making it up. And that pattern has persisted for more than four decades. So we are not beating that statistic. We're not improving that. But women that do not have children, their pay gap is about three cents.
And that's to a father's dollar. So let me clarify what that means. There's this phenomenon called the fatherhood wage premium. This has been going on forever and ever. Amen. Fathers earn more money than anyone in the workplace. If you are a male and you have children, that is your maximum earning potential. You will make more money than you will by not having children.
Speaker 1 (53:30.606)
This is great advice to get a girlfriend right now. This is the best advice I've all day. Podcast over.
It's crazy when you dig into the psychology of that, this kind of goes back to the word Cleaver days, right? The idea that employers have in their head that, this guy has children. He is a family. He needs to make more money to support that family. We don't have that same idea for women. The assumption is that women's jobs are extra. It's a second income. It's not critical. There's 11 million single.
single households and 80 % of those are led by women, women's pay is not extra. It's not. Statistically, it's primary income these days. But fathers still make more money than anyone. So a woman who chooses not to have children makes 97 cents on the father's dollar.
pretty freaking close.
Very close. Men are rewarded for having children. Women are penalized.
Speaker 2 (54:41.912)
So employment gaps are penalized as you already brought up and it doesn't even matter what the reason for the gap is. When topics like this come up on LinkedIn, I like to just read the post and then I like to read a lot of the responses that people give in these conversations.
It shouldn't matter what the reason is, whether you took off because you needed a break, which I've been there. Did you take off because you had a child or a spouse or a parent that needed care? Whatever the reason you take off, everybody's getting penalized for it and it shouldn't matter. And I remember when I was trained to review resumes back in the day.
We talked about this in another cast, having more than five years at a job was beneficial. It's not as true today, but having people explain their gaps in a way that doesn't sound bad or doesn't sound selfish, sounds beneficial to the employer. What did that person go do? Did they just go do nothing for 20 years and sit there and eat bonbons and watch Oprah? Not likely.
I'm sure they did something helpful and useful in that time and can bring something to the table, but we don't treat it that way in the workplace.
No, we don't. That's the telling results of all of this to me is that somehow the way the labor market, economics, people who take any time away from work, eight months or 15 years, that statistic is going to be with me for the rest of my life. That explains like a huge portion of the wage gap. That's nothing. Eight months and 15 years more time off. That's less than a month per year. That's almost two weeks per year.
Speaker 1 (56:32.526)
that it would have huge of an impact kills me. Cause that's who, that's like, that's 10 working days out of 160. It's less than 10 % for sure. But more than 5 % of your calendar working days, I guess, if you're working.
that he
Speaker 2 (56:38.019)
Okay.
Speaker 2 (56:48.738)
More than likely that was maternity leave.
And not a lot of it, by the way. If you had two or eight months and 15 years, you might have had two or three children and taken a small amount of time off with a brand new baby. It's not a lot. So where does all this leave us? This is complicated and it's challenging.
no dividing rod, no silver bullets here.
No, other than the awareness, I think is very important. Just like we always say with any bias, it's awareness that we have the bias so that we're critically thinking about it when we're put in that situation. It is absolutely challenging and exhausting to be a working parent. I don't think anyone's going to argue that it's not. We have a lot of dual income houses, households, and single parent households, and the challenge becomes greater.
As a working parent, when you don't have someone at home who can take up a lot of that slack, whether you're dual income family, because you choose to be a dual income family, I chose to work. I could have lived a very different life and stayed home, but that's not what I wanted to do. I'm not a good stay home parent. That was not the right choice for me or my family.
Speaker 2 (58:11.928)
whether you're doing it because that's what you want it or you're working because of the financial necessity to live the kind of life that you want to live or just simply make ends meet, or one of those 11 million single parent households who is just trying to get by and manage things, it's a greater challenge.
When one parent stays home, employers tend to expect that the working parent is not distracted with parental issues, which is not fair. One of the things in the gender pay gap research that I found is for women. You can level the pay gap field by education.
That 82 cents on the dollar is not leveled for same same with education. That gap is mostly made up of people who do not have the same education as the males. So ladies, one of the ways that you can level that, the best way you can level it and still have children, the best way to level it to be statistically accurate would be to not have children. But that's not a path a lot of people are going to take and I'm not.
telling anyone to do that. But if you want to have children and you want to level that gap as much as possible, get your education first, then have children, which I think is what a lot of women are choosing to do these days.
Speaker 2 (59:42.242)
Back in my day, people tended to get married younger, hurry up and have kids. That's what I did. I went back to school later. I got there eventually, but it took me a lot longer to get there. Both my daughters are smarter than me and went to school, got their educations first and chose to have families later. So that's a takeaway for you. Have these conversations with your partner about how you're going to manage.
this working parent thing and talk about it in detail as noted by Brad. It's like, gosh, you don't even think about those things when you don't have kids.
Not something you really think about and it needs to be thought about because I think what happens is a lot of folks decide to have kids. And then now they've got this baby almost here or now it's here and they think, what do I do now? Daycare is really expensive. I have to go back to work. How is this going to happen? Please do not participate or allow it to happen. The toxic male parent shaming.
I've seen this a lot in the construction industry. I was working on a job site where one of the guys I was working with, his wife got this incredible opportunity to take a job that was just going to be career changing for her. She had been staying home with the kids. She got this opportunity to take this job, but they were going to have to temporarily relocate. He was electrical engineer. He decided to quit his job and care for the kids.
in order to give his wife this opportunity. He tried to work with his employer on taking a leave of absence, on doing some remote work, on some kind of situation where he continued to work. And I was very disappointed in hearing about how his employer shamed him for not being a real man and continuing to work, for taking care of his kids, for giving his wife this.
Speaker 2 (01:01:41.984)
opportunity to enhance her career. And I even went to his boss and I pulled him aside and I said, I think what you're doing is wrong. I don't understand what's happening here. Why are you not working with this guy?
That's just so stupid. What is that telling that employee and the rest of your employees about the way that you treat people at your company? Is that the right signal to send? No.
This was maybe five years ago, six years ago. I still think about it often. Was the person that was shaming their employer, were they a bad person? No, I think they're a good person. I think they're a good tradesman. think they're a good leader in a lot of ways. I think they had a toxic view of male parenting and I don't know what their specific situation is. I don't know if their wife takes care of the kids and stays home or what that whole background is, but as a leader.
as an employer, as a colleague, we should never be shaming men for taking an active role in the lives of their children and their family. To this guy, kudos to him. He said, this is what I'm doing. I'm not going to walk away from this. And he did. He took off six or eight months or whatever was required for this assignment for his wife. And then he came back into the workforce after just working somewhere else. They lost a good employee. When you are.
Choosing where to live and what schools people always talk about. we gotta go find a good school district for our kids to go to school in. Well, look at what those school schedules are. Part of picking a good quote unquote good district should be looking at those schedules, understanding what you're getting yourself into. Like I said, there are some school districts that I know that have half day once a week. It's insane. I don't know how anybody manages that kind of stuff. Form a tribe.
Speaker 2 (01:03:33.44)
If you don't have the family connections around you with you, some grandparents sign up for being full-time care for their grandchildren. That's great. Like I said, I wasn't great as full-time care for my own kids. It's not going to be doing that, but helping out. Absolutely. Get your family tribe together, get your greater friends and relatives tribe together. If you have siblings that can help out, whatever.
Get your tribe together and to help bridge those gaps in childcare. And if work from home is your jam, then find a way to make it work. Set yourself up in a situation where work from home can work for you if that's your jam. I wanted to give a word of caution of the passing ships in the night method. I've used this method of parenting and trying to manage the whole income, childcare thing. have some family that's
doing this method right now. I'm here to tell you it's not sustainable.
I call it the passing ships in the night method. So what that is is one parent works during the day and the other parent works at night.
Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:04:44.162)
So you're the passing ships in the night in that day shift comes home at whatever time and you practically high five each other on your way out the door. You go work all night. It's brutal. I mean, it's something that people do because they don't have a better plan at the moment, or maybe they're having trouble affording daycare. It's very, very hard on relationship. can tell you, I'm not saying that as the reason that my last marriage ended.
but I think there were lots of other issues, but it certainly didn't help. It's very, very difficult on a marriage because you're exhausted all the time, because you get no breaks. Nobody's getting a break. The kids are getting cared for, but the parents are getting no breaks at all, ever. You're just exhausted all the time, even more so than you normally would be, because there's no ability to share the load. You're splitting the load 50-50, yes.
but you get so little time together. It's very, very rough. would just say anybody considering that method, I would consider it only short term, because it's pretty brutal.
That sounds hard on raising kids and on theirs. That just sounds like
logging.
Speaker 2 (01:05:58.968)
Thanks for joining the management under construction podcast and we'll see you next time.
Catch you later.
Watch us on YouTube at YellowstoneProfessionalEd.co. Don't forget to like, share, and follow us. Apple, Spotify, everywhere you listen to your podcasts. You can email us with questions, comments, and suggestions at heyd at management under construction, H-E-Y-D-E-E to get me or Brad at managementunderconstruction.com.
