Life/Work - Issue 38

Since then, Burkett reports, the pendulum at the Times has swung to the opposite extreme. On the reporting staff, a number of mothers work four-day weeks with full benefits -- and, in some cases, with no cut in salary. For a while, many of those employees were exempt from working nights and weekends. But in 1997, a reporter named Joyce Purnick, who happens not to have children herself, was named metropolitan editor. Dedicated to the principle of fairness, Purnick, who is now a columnist for the paper, decreed that all reporters would have to work their share of weekends and holidays. She further fanned the flames when she gave a graduation speech at Barnard College in which she had the temerity to suggest that it wasn't necessarily possible to have it all.

According to Burkett, Purnick said, "If I had left the Times to have children and then come back to work a four-day week the way some women reporters on my staff now do, or if I had taken long vacations and leaves to be with my family, or left the office at six o'clock, instead of eight or nine, I wouldn't be metro editor. Should women and men who have taken the detour of the Mommy-Daddy track be as far along as those who haven't? Would that be fair? I reluctantly have to say that it would not be fair."

How fair is it, Burkett goes on to ask in her book, that working mothers at the Times are entitled to extended maternity leaves but that reporters who seek leaves to write books are routinely turned down?

Actually, these issues are more complicated than Burkett acknowledges, or than Purnick's speech suggests. The reality is that merit figures into the equation. The Times, for example, has granted book-writing leaves and other accommodations to stars whom it does not want to risk losing. One of them, Anna Quindlen, rose even more rapidly through the ranks than Joyce Purnick did -- even though Quindlen had children and sometimes took time off to be with them. But Burkett and Purnick are right in arguing that most working parents who elect to devote less time to their careers and more time to their children ought to expect that their decision will put them at a competitive disadvantage at work in the short term. We have a phrase for that: It's called making tough choices.

Burkett travels closer to home to illustrate the sense of entitlement that even the most affluent working parents feel when it comes to tax breaks. The example that she uses is Michelle Gaboury, who happens to be Burkett's sister-in-law. Gaboury and her husband, Paul, live in a $500,000 home in a manicured Boston suburb. They ski on winter weekends, take vacations in France, and have a combined six-figure income. Still, they are entitled to a $500 tax credit for their 8-year-old son and to a $1,500 tax credit for their daughter, who is in college. Also, because Gaboury works two nights a week as a psychotherapist, they are entitled to a child-care deduction of nearly $1,000. "I think that we need to look at the social value of families," Gaboury says. "Children are an investment in the future. There are a lot of risks for people who have kids. Having a family is outrageously expensive. Maybe the childless take the brunt in some ways, but this isn't about justice."

But is parenting the highest social calling? Do we really want the government to offer incentives to people to have more children? How salutary would it be for an already-overpopulated planet if every couple suddenly decided to have 10 children -- or simply upped the current average to 3 or 4? And should the government really be offering family-friendly tax advantages to the parents of the 3 million kids who are neglected, abused, or abandoned each year?

Burkett had her own brush with exclusion while she was covering the AIDS crisis for the Miami Herald. During her assignment, she grew close to a number of people afflicted with the disease. At one point, she wound up as the primary caretaker of two young Cuban men who had no other family or friends. Under the Herald's benefits plan, Burkett could neither take a family-medical leave to help the two men nor work more-flexible hours. "We need to recognize that parenting is not the only legitimate activity that people can undertake outside of work," Burkett says. "I don't want to be forced to defend my lifestyle, but it's ridiculous to say, as we now do, that going to a child's baseball game is more important than taking a dying friend to see a doctor."

Burkett also argues persuasively that most family-friendly tax advantages don't benefit the families who need them most. For example, families that fall into the poorest one-third in the nation get no relief from tax deductions, simply because their incomes aren't taxed. Much as I favor the Family and Medical Leave Act, which gives working parents the right to 12 weeks of unpaid time off in the event of a child's birth, adoption, or illness, how many parents with incomes under $25,000 can afford to take 2 weeks off without pay -- much less 12?