Associate Professor of Sociology Lindsey Trimble O’Connor studies the challenges that working caregivers face on the job while she raises two young children.
Interview and editing by Karin GrennanWhat is your research focus?
I’m very interested in what’s broken about work. Workplaces are not built around having family caregiving responsibilities. You’re expected to come in at 8, stay to 5, be there day in and day out, and work for the entirety of your adult life with no breaks. And that used to be just fine for people when there was a stay-at-home person who could take care of the children when they were small and take the dog to the vet and mom to her doctor’s appointments. But most families don’t have that stay-at-home person anymore. Families have changed, but work hasn’t.
What led you to specialize in that topic?
I’ve always been interested in inequality in the workplace, but I really got interested in the issues that working caregivers face during my postdoctoral studies at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. And now, I’m the parent of two, and I live everything I study. We are just in the blender, hanging on for dear life, just barely making it through the day, trying to combine family and work. We don’t have family nearby so it’s just my partner and me trying to do it all.
Associate Professor of Sociology Lindsey Trimble O’Connor
Can you explain your experiment that was the basis for the article “Gender and the Disparate Payoffs of Overwork” published this year?
My friend Christin L. Munsch at the University of Connecticut and I were commenting about how everyone always kind of humble brags about much they work and how problematic this bragging is for changing this overwork culture. So, with our friend Susan Fisk from Kent State University, we designed a study about people’s perceptions of people who work a lot. We made a bunch of fake performance evaluations that we tested ahead of time. We picked ones that were rated and judged as equally performing even though they said different things. And then we made these fake Outlook calendars where we chunked off in 30-minute increments how they spent their time and told the respondents they came from the company’s employee time-tracking software. Every respondent looked at the evaluations and calendars of two men or two women. One is performing this much work in 40 hours, and one is performing this much work in 60 hours. Then we asked the respondents questions about what they thought about these people and what we call organizational rewards.
What did the results show?
Maybe not surprisingly, everybody loved the person who worked 60 hours a week, who we call the overworker. The overworker was seven times more likely to be chosen for a management training course and promotion than the full-time worker. Overworking also increases the perceptions of commitment, competence and likability.
But we found that the effect of overworking is not as strong as it is for women as it is for men. Everybody gets a boost when they overwork in terms of getting those organizational rewards and the competence, commitment and likeability. But the boost that men get when they overwork is greater than the boost that women get.
Lindsey Trimble O’Connor is balancing motherhood with research and teaching.
Were you surprised by any of the findings?
Yes. We knew that overworking was part of the gender inequality equation, but we just thought it was part of it because women were less able to do it because they are still responsible for the lion’s share of child care and housework. But what this shows is that even when women put in the same 60 hours as men — say they hire nannies and housecleaners to work that much — what this study shows that I think is really surprising is that they are not going to get the same payoff as men.
What changes do you think need to take place to level the playing fields when it comes to gender in the workplace?
We need pretty large-scale, systemic, cultural change, and policy change. We need to get men more involved in shouldering the responsibilities in the home. Part of it is valuing caregiving and seeing the care of children, the elderly and sick people as a public good and not just a private problem. And I don’t mean just get-your-mom-a-nice-Mother’s-Day-card lip service kind of stuff, but really valuing it through paying people to provide care to their family members.
In the workplace, we need to look for practices, policies and cultural norms that look gender-neutral but are disproportionately women and other people with caregiving responsibilities. Having a stand-up meeting on a Monday morning at 8 a.m. is a gender-neutral practice at face value, but we know that most women are still responsible for child care responsibilities like dropping their kids off at school so that is probably putting extra pressure on women who have kids. So that’s an easy thing — move it to 9. And then I think we need to examine ways that we can work smarter so that people don’t have to work so many hours.