The Best of Both Worlds

In the long run, employers' schemes that give a lot of family-friendly benefits to women are going to bounce back in a negative way. We should be aiming for gender-neutral policies that would allow any person the right to paid leave, sabbaticals or whatever. They shouldn't be tied to family roles because that immediately creates divisions in the workforce that are going to have to be put right later on.

FC: What is it about the race to the top that makes it so aversive to women?

Hakim: It takes prioritizing your career to the point where your private life, family life, and social life are wrapped around your career, rather than the two having equal weight. The key thing is not pre-plannable work, but unexpected deadlines, crisis points that turn up at short notice. If somebody has to do it, and if it's the man who does, it will be the man who gets promoted, irrespective. It has nothing to do with male or female. That is the bottom line, and it's not a sexist bottom line. Of course, you can say, jobs shouldn't be greedy. But in practice, the higher up you go, by and large, jobs get greedier and greedier. The idea that if only employers would reshape jobs they would be perfectly easy for women to do is just nonsense.

FC: But is it really necessary to work killer hours to get ahead?

Hakim: I'm an academic; my thesis fits with sporting and artistic activities as well as the labor market. In the creative arts and in academic research the person who's thinking about a problem 24 hours a day is going to produce more interesting work than the person who thinks about it five hours a day. The difference between a full-timer and a part-timer is not that the part-timer doesn't do his five hours when he comes in; it's that the person who's a full-timer isn't working just eight hours a day, he's actually thinking about it 24 hours a day. Creativity enters a whole different level when that's all that you think about; for a lot of jobs, that kind of mental, emotional, and intellectual input actually makes a qualitative difference in your output.

Take Picasso as an example of a work-centered person. He was, by all accounts, a really selfish, unpleasant man in his private life. But he was also totally dedicated and creative. The reason he had an amazing and varied output was because he was on it 24 hours a day.

There's a level of creativity in management and business that has always been overlooked. Women could excel at this, but often their attention is diverted to solving other kinds of problems than intellectual or management issues.

FC: Are you saying that women can't have both a good career and a good life? Is it really necessary to pick one?

Hakim: Men have always recognized that you really have to make choices. Women have deluded themselves into thinking that you don't. This is not to say that you can't have a decent family life and an interesting job as well. People who are working part time in professional jobs are having a much happier time than if they were home working full time as mothers or working as clerical workers. So we've made huge strides in making the "best of both worlds" argument work. I just don't think those sorts of women are ever going to get into the top jobs, which is a different matter.

FC: Is there no hope for women who want to have both to really excel?

Hakim: There's always the possibility that when their children leave home and they revert to full time work they might start thinking differently about their jobs. Since everybody is living longer, all the calculations are going to have to change. Now if you only have two children, that kind of two-stage life is going to be a real possibility in the future.

FC: Catalyst says the reason why women aren't getting the top jobs is because they're disproportionately clustered in staff, versus line positions. Any merit to that argument?

Hakim: One of the reasons women tend to gravitate toward staff positions is because they're ones where you can organize and plan your work so you can go home at 5:30 on the dot. In the line positions, it's more likely that a crisis or a problem will come up, and you'll just have to deal with it. Accepting that the job takes over your life on the line side becomes quite crucial to being selected and accepted for senior positions.

FC: Let's flip this subject on its ear for a moment. Why are men willing to make these sacrifices so readily?