Twitter at the speed of parenting
Companies that actually make it a policy to support parents - not just daycare up to school age, not just parental leave, not just backup daycare - will survive & thrive. The rest...good riddance.
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This was written about Amazon but could be about any tech company - parents with stay-at-home partners (mostly men) always do better and advance faster than parents who don’t. It doesn’t have to be that way. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-04/holdout-jeff-bezos-confronted-by-amazon-moms-demanding-daycare …pic.twitter.com/R8KWYg0wO0
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p.s. I don’t see ANY company doing this. It’s super clear that current policies are set by/oriented towards people who have *young* kids. I have a 10yo and a teenager and I do this parenting thing on my own - and here’s what I want:
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1. Mildly sick kid dropoff service 2. Great work from home support for when it’s more than “mildly” sick 3. Bus to bring my kids to afterschool program at my office, so we can all go home together
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Daycare up to school age isn’t enough support. You think parenting just gets easy at that point? Protip: school gets out WAY before work.
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When my kids are with me, due to them being at different schools in different parts of the city with different start times, I get in to work between 9:30 and 10. I have to leave by 4:30 to pick them both up before their respective afterschool programs close.
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Support on one side or the other would make a HUGE difference in my productivity. Bus to an on-campus afterschool would be one way, but how about credits for a carpool service in the morning? Get creative. Ask your employees.
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If I had a partner who could do all the pickups and dropoffs because they had a flexible schedule, imagine how much more energy I could put into my work! This is what the men who get ahead have.
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You want women - who statistically do more of this work, and statistically are more often single parents - to succeed at your company? Give them the fucking support they need. It’s really that simple.
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I am getting sick of talking about this. Been doing it for years without discernible improvement. If you want midlevel & senior technical women to succeed at your company, childcare support (up to AND beyond school age) is required.https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/971861219823968256?s=21 …
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This is another seldom-examined aspect of this problem: the women who don’t work because they get paid less than their husbands (thx pay gap), but WOULD work if there was decent childcare support.https://twitter.com/rose_w/status/1102812197569216512?s=21 …
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Pre-emptively: yes, OF COURSE the government should do it, but just like healthcare, they won’t really, so in the meantime, tech companies have an opportunity here to differentiate themselves from the pack when competing for midlevel and senior technical women.
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Maybe they can take a little of that $12k/year/employee food budget and put it towards something that matters. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Sure. Better benefits. But. The thing is, though, if that were the lock on advancement, you'd see childfree women heavily in the ranks of upper tech management. You dont. By far the majority of exec women have kids. Sexism applies to the childfree too & women who have shared care
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Confused. Are you saying tech companies should not expand childcare benefits? Or just that it won’t fix everything? Because nothing fixes everything, but that doesn’t mean we should do nothing :)
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Sure improve benefits. You should not equate child care as the fix though. With the alternative of "doing nothing." Realize that if child care was the core, you'd see childfree women filling the tech exec ranks and all the management pipelines. It's the sexism not motherhood.
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These things are not seperable. But that’s good for both sides. As you point out, bias against moms affects women without children. So if we reduce bias against moms, it will lift all the boats, as it were.
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Sarah, it's false binary to divide women into "both sides" - with & without children. Not on "the side" against benefits. But truly if it were the case that children are the only real thing, the core thing, holding women back you'd see childfree and older women taking over.
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And this problem removes woman from tech. At least some of those stay-at-home partners would be tech workers if the family didn't need someone to balance out the other spouse's schedule. Thus why I work 10-15 hours a week... so my husband can work "normal" tech hours.
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Yuuuuuup. Thanks, pay gap. :/
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years ago, I was turned down for a promotion because I was a single mom, single moms aren't a protected class I was told. That was 2003/2004. I haven't been promoted since. And I work in government. I switched to the tech track in 2008, I'm happier, just not any further ahead.
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