Why We Should Keep Asking Executives How They Balance Family And Work

Open any Kenyan magazine/newspaper article that has an interview with a female executive (married or a mother), and it will have this question “How do you balance family and work?”

For me, this question often is,

“Kellie, how do you balance single motherhood and work?” Both in formal situations and socially.

There has been online sentiment that we should stop asking women this question. I agree it is an odd question that suggests two things:

1. It affirms the “career woman” sentiment, which is the idea that careers are inherently male (no one says “career men”), and a woman who then chooses to pursue a demanding career is stepping away from what is inherently female and therefore needs the prefix “career” to describe her.  At the work place a “career woman” is that woman who has abandoned her home to be “like the men”, and at home, the “career woman” is an undesirable spouse, for the same reason.  This is why we get fascinated when we meet women who have busy jobs and are also married / are also mothers.
2. The fact that the question is mostly asked to women executives conveys the underlying assumption that family = the woman’s responsibility. A male CEO will not be asked how he balances work and family, because he has a wife, she takes care of family so he can focus on being the male CEO.  If he is a single father, may be, but even then, the tone is different – it is one of awe and fascination.

I however do not think this question should be scrapped from executives’ interviews. It should instead be asked to every executive, whether male or female. I also think it should go further…”how have you designed your workplace to make it easier for your workers to balance family and work?”

First, if we truly believe family is important to society, then balancing family and work successfully should be a success marker for everyone, not just women. “I have a stay at home wife” is not a satisfactory answer to this question. The stay at home wife may ease the logistics, but as a father and a husband, you have responsibilities, so how do you balance?

Secondly, this question is useful. I have gleaned a lot of useful nuggets from what female executives share around their work-family balance. Their talk of this struggle communicates to me that I am not alone, others have done it and succeeded. When I share my tactics and strategies, other parents find them useful and vice versa.

Finally, this question triggers sensitivity at the top. An executive who has struggled to balance work and family understands his/her employees struggles with the same, and will therefore be sensitive to workplace policies that make this balance harder than it needs to be. When I became a mother, one of the things I realized was that the core of my ability to balance was the fact that as an executive, I could have flexi time. When my daughter woke up to feed at 3am, I could work till 6am, go to the office till 1pm, then go home to nap. The week my baby came home, I did not have a helper, did not have maternity leave and I had meetings, so I took her with me. I could do this, because I was at the top.

When I needed to, I took her to work

My staff however, who were mostly shift-based hotel staff did not have this flexibility. So it forced me to think what we could do to make our workplace more friendly to parents. Though our resources as a new business were limited, I found simple fixes like not having new parents on night shift, and constantly talking about the need for fathers to support their wives. If I had the resources, I probably would have set up a day care, etc. But further than that, I stopped expecting that everyone would work long hours just because I could. It changed the way I evaluated dedication to work. I scrapped evening meetings, and became the champion of productivity – if a job needed to be done till late at night, we needed to talk about it.

I suspect that part of the reason today’s workplaces are unfriendly to women and mothers is that they are headed by married men and fathers who do not feel the need for balance, and therefore do not expect you to.

So let us keep asking this question, and especially of the men. Women have been balancing stuff since time immemorial, how are the men doing it? Are they? When I watched the Pepsi CEOs interview, I found myself asking what the husband has been doing. Where she talks about missing coffee at school with other mothers, I wondered why the father could not attend the coffee, the fact that it is for moms notwithstanding…