There’s a reason why, in my line of work, female managers over the age of 50 are preferable to the young’us. I was one of them briefly. I ultimately decided the bump in pay wasn’t worth the additional work.
I get your frustration, but do you realize why women, especially married women with children, want those “plum” days off? For almost every household I know ( and I run in progressive circles!), the holiday season remains the most sexist time of year. Women spend the lead up to Christmas shopping/wrapping for three families–their nuclear family, their extended family, and their husband’s family. This is often still true even if they are single moms because they have to handle gifts “from the kids” to that side of the family. Then there is the food shopping and cooking, which takes forever. The house has to be deep-cleaned if anyone will be visiting. There are decorations to set out, Christmas cookies to decorate, “small gifts” for places like the church and the office and teachers and neighbors to come up with and assemble (and only women are expected to do that sort of thing) And they feel enormous pressure to get all of this just right: the stakes aren’t just social disapproval, but the literal risk of denying their children treasured memories of a perfect Christmas.
I think most men are oblivious to this. They know it happens but they don’t know how much work it is. I didn’t get it until I “came of age”: up until about 22 I had really no clue how much work women were expected to do while children and men hung out, and it only accelerated as I got older and there was more and more expected of me.
Now, you can dismiss all that as stupid, but it’s the reality for a lot of women. And you can say that that isn’t your problem: you’re their boss and they are the ones who chose to have a family, so they need to make it work and not take it out on anyone else. And maybe your family is different. And that’s fair. But if you have a nice Christmas every year and you don’t think of that time of year as packed with endless chores and things that have to be done, you might ask the women in your life if they feel like the division of labor leading up to it (and on the day of) is proportional. I can understand a woman’s frustration that others want those “plum” days off to hang out with family when they are going to have to squeeze in the shopping and the wrapping and the cooking late into the night after work.
But in my experience the women (and men) that Roderick Femm is talking about are not simply frustrated or annoyed that other people want the days off. They often don’t even want the time off to do the shopping or cooking or cleaning you are talking about. Instead, they want the time off to travel just like their coworkers without young children do and will outright tell people ( including their bosses) that coworkers without young children don’t “deserve” to have those days off ( and it’s not only the day or two before Christmas, but often includes the week between Christmas and New Year’s) since after all, they don’t have a “family”. Because only people with young children would like to travel to see relatives for Christmas.
And while I won’t argue with the idea that women do a disproportionate amount of the work for holiday gatherings , I will argue with the idea that it’s women with young children who are doing most of it. When I had young children, my contemporaries were not doing most of the holiday work - their mothers and mothers-in-law ( who did not have young children) were.
Thank you for pointing this out! It’s amazing how oblivious people are, especially men, when it comes to women’s contributions to the household in addition to working and raising children.
I work in an office with mostly older women in their 50s; none of them have their own biological children and all stepchildren are grown. I’m the only one with a small child as well as family close by who expect the whole holiday shebang.
Luckily, we’ve worked out a system that seems to satisfy everyone. They cover for me so I can come in late/leave early to do my kid stuff or holiday shopping and I get these things done earlier in the month. My coworkers all have family that require a flight to visit and they take the few days leading to the holidays off to go see them. I don’t mind working in the office because I’ve already gotten my errands done and I get to work in a quiet office leading to the holiday which is fine by me!
It takes open communication and compromise and I know that I’m very fortunate that I work with people who are pretty understanding of life circumstances. Things happen, we cover for each other when we can and we just remember that we shouldn’t be mad when the other coworker is going through that PTO-sucking life event. Eventually, we go through those ourselves and that accrued PTO and goodwill is a lifesaver!
I work in an office and many of my male and female colleagues have spouses and children and while they might miss a few days each year it’s usually not a problem. We have Paid Time Off and if someone wants to use it to go to events involving their large extended family it isn’t a problem as how they choose to use their PTO is up to them. Of course if they run out of PTO and still take time off they might get a written warning and if such behavior persists they’ll be fired.
My friend had come to a meeting badly prepared, because his son had been sick the previous night. The co-ordinator took the question around the room, and as it turned out, almost everyone had come to the meeting badly prepared, because their children had been sick the previous night. Except one guy.
What? they asked him. No kids?
No, he explained, 8 kids. He was used to having kids sick at night.
Except that when we had the informal discussion about who gets the time off, this was exactly their attitude, often expressed openly in front of my face. Of course I could have always given in and let the have them most popular times off, and in fact I usually did before it was possible for me to institute the lottery, but frankly their attitudes pissed me off. Call me petty, call me mean, call me irresponsible, but I’m only a person, not a saint.
Makes me glad I’m Jewish. 'Course, so do lots of things. Once I worked in a place where I could work from 4pm Christmas eve, until 6am the day after Christmas (we got paid sleep time) and pick up double time for the whole thing. I also worked 24 hours on Easter, which was also double time. I usually had no trouble taking the Jewish holidays off; I didn’t get paid for them, but the people I was subbing for on Christmas were giving up pay as well.