The case for enabling more men to access workplace flexibility: Let’s count the ways.
While significant gains have been made for women in accessing workplace flexibility over recent decades, men still find it more difficult to negotiate greater flexibility over when, where and how they work and suffer more negative career consequences when they do.
We’ll unpack some ideas on how we can move the dial to support more men to access workplace flexibility in a later Journal Article, but before we do, let’s explore what’s at stake.
Enabling more men to access workplace flexibility so they can take on a more active caring role and/or enable better “balance” in their lives is a compelling argument, no question, and I should know.
Workplace flexibility was the focus of my PhD research well before Covid19 catapulted workplace flexibility into the public zeitgeist. I’ve also spent many years working in senior HR roles for large organisations, recruiting and developing young men and women to fill those organisation’s talent pipelines.
Closer to home, my husband accessed workplace flexibility so he could shoulder much of the caring role while our five children were very young as I pursued my academic and global corporate career from Australia. We now live in Copenhagen, Denmark, or “Nordic nirvana” when it comes to gender equality and workplace flexibility, or so it goes. So, I truly understand the “co-caring” benefits of workplace flexibility and the hopes and expectations of young adults entering the workforce today, including those of my own three sons now aged 24, 21 and 17 and daughters, aged 23 and 19.
Men around the world want to do more of the caring and they want to access flexible work practices to do so. Recent reporting identifies additional barriers for men including ingrained socio-cultural gender role expectations, lack of access to parental leave and the gender pay gap, among others.
Breaking through these barriers will require an energised business sector, committed public policy makers and broader societal change. It will also require an even more compelling and wide-ranging case for change beyond just increasing the amount of caring a father can do. This expanded “for” case includes:
Benefits for the individual fathers’ mental and physical health including the ability to develop “self-complexity”, a term coined by psychologist Janet Hyde and cited in Richard Reeves’ excellent book, Of Boys and Men. Self-complexity enables individuals to develop meaning in their life beyond the meaning derived from their identify as “worker” or “breadwinner”. Or as Richard Reeves claims, “if you have a bad day as a mom, you can make up for it by nailing it at work, or vice versa, or at least, that is the theory”.
Positive spill-over effects for their children as workplace flexibility enables fathers to literally spend more time with their children. At multiple stages of a child’s development, the evidence persistently demonstrates having a present and engaged father matters in determining life outcomes.
In mixed sex / heterosexual partnerships, increasing male equality by creating equal access to workplace flexibility has the potential to drive female gender equality if it enables the woman to share more of the housework and caregiving with her partner and/or to pursue her own career aspirations .
Research, including my own, persistently demonstrates business benefits where access to workplace flexibility is correlated with increased rates of employee trust in the organisation, job satisfaction, engagement, wellbeing, performance, and decreased rates of turnover intentions.
Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, there are environmental benefits to support the “for” case. Research conducted by the Nordic Information on Gender (NIKK) demonstrates a clear link between interest in sustainability and climate friendly consumption habits of individuals (e.g. cycling instead of driving), and those who have the primary responsibility for day-to-day domestic and care work, and who consider this work important.
As we will explore in another Journal Article, businesses play a significant role in enabling and supporting men to access workplace flexibility. However, businesses themselves are just one of the recipients of the positive outcomes associated with men taking advantage of workplace flexibility. As in the case of women taking up flexibility, the positive social impacts extend beyond the individual to their partners and children with an environmental dividend, also up for grabs.
Contact us at hello@multiplegroup.co to start the conversation. You can also follow Multiple, Alison and Kerry on LinkedIn.