Is telecommuting the answer for working mothers?

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 4:38 pm by Jane the Actuary

Is telecommuting the answer for working mothers? 2015-03-13T16:38:13-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So says an article at The Federalist this afternoon, “Women Can’t Have it All, But They Can Have What Matters,” in which the author cites another piece, at Fortune, “Female company president: “I’m sorry to all the mothers I worked with,” which promotes the idea of working at home.

The author of the latter article, Katharine Zaleski, talks about her experiences as the head of a start up with a remotely-working workforce, PowerToFly.

If they work from home, it doesn’t matter if a kid gets sick. Yes, they might not be able to Skype with me as often through that day, but they can still be productive because they can work from home while keeping an eye on their child. (And, like me, many have childcare. There’s no way you can work from home without support, usually from another woman.) Moms work hard to meet deadlines because they have a powerful motivation – they want to be sure they can make dinner, pick a child up from school, and yes, get to the gym for themselves.

So I thought I’d share my experiences with working at home.

In itself, working at home does nothing but eliminate the commute — though, as I was commuting into the city via train prior to the WAH arrangement (a minimum hour and a quarter each way, depending on whether it’s the good express train or not), this is a huge benefit. At the same time, for the first year, it reduced but didn’t wholly eliminate the commute, as I still had a kid to take to daycare.

The other perks of working at home tend to come in conjunction with a flexible and, especially, a reduced schedule. I am able to take a long lunch or get a late start on my day to run an errand, clean up the kitchen, or, yes, blog about something I read in the paper. I can go over to school for a special event, whether it’s “mystery reader” or a school mass where my kid has a special role, or if I need to pick up my fallen-sick kid. And — a plus for my employer — if I’m having a hard time focusing on what I need to do (whether it’s due to bad news on the homefront, or even an e-mail telling me I made a mistake I didn’t anticipate), I can take a break, do a chore around the house, and come back later.

But “they can still be productive because they can work from home while keeping an eye on their child”? No, not really. Maybe some parents can block out their kid while working, but it is very difficult. (Maybe it’s just me? Do I need a Ritalin prescription?) On weeks when I know my kids have a day off school, I try to put in extra hours on the other days, to minimize the amount of worktime needed, and then make a point of checking out a movie for them, and even then, I find that I’m recording time in an adjusted sort of way (“Let’s see, I’ve been up in the home office for two hours, but I had so many interruptions, I really can’t claim to have done more than an hour of productive work.”) And promoting the idea that you can do two things at once on a regular basis does a disservice to the remote-working “cause.” The only women who should attempt it are those who are paid in a piecework manner of some kind, when they can be measured by their output rather than number of hours worked, and, used to be, at least, at my employer, they reserved the right to ask for documentation of childcare arrangements when an employee would ask for a work-at-home arrangement.

And here’s the story with my employer: it is not about the “facetime,” but they are becoming increasingly insistent that exempt employees be measured based on how many hours of overtime they work. For many years I had flown under the radar, even though the recurring joke was “we’re flexible . . . you can choose when in the day/week you want to work you’re overtime,” but now I’m beginning to get that pressure, too.

For a job like writer, as with the Federalist author, you set your schedule and are paid accordingly. For most mothers — most parents, heck, most employees — paid on an exempt, overtime-ineligible basis, the bigger issue is how many hours they are expected to work per week. If you’re lucky, you have a job you like and can convince yourself that your extra work hours are like a hobby you pursue. But the compatibility of these work hours is the bigger question, not just your workplace location.

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