The Gendered Discourse of Work-Family Balance in the Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract

U.S. corporations have been slow to adopt family-friendly workplace accommodations, despite decades of research demonstrating their value. Some hope that the millennial generation will spur corporate change because, compared with older generations of workers, young people purportedly strive for more balanced lifestyles and gender equality in their relationships. This study examines the experiences of early career scientists and engineers employed by a major oil and gas corporation that has not implemented family-friendly accommodations, asking whether these highly trained workers seek work-family balance and whether they parlay these desires into requests for accommodation from their employer. Interviews reveal a gendered discourse of work-family balance at this firm: mothers and prospective mothers describe intense work-family conflict, but they blame themselves and not their employer. A number of men, in contrast, express satisfaction with their work-family balance, yet their narratives reveal that their achievement of balance depends on a traditional gender division of labor in the home. Some men and women seek alternative forms of balance that do not involve family; if thwarted from pursuing this goal, they are inclined to exit the company. These discourses of balance reflect neoliberal assumptions, reproduce gender inequality, and suggest the need for an alternative to the voluntary approach to promoting work-family policies.

Keywords

sex and gender work-family balance oil and gas industry gendered discourse

Although work-family conflict has been a topic of research since the 1970s, scholarly and popular interest in the topic exploded in the 1990s (Ramarajan, McGinn, and Kolb 2012). Over the course of that time span, women’s labor force participation rate increased dramatically, including in many high paying and high status professions (England 2010). However, in a cruel twist, both the professional workplace and the middle-class home simultaneously ramped up their demands, creating acute stress for mothers in these two domains (Blair-Loy 2003). Feminist sociologists focused attention on the plight of these women struggling to combine their time-consuming jobs with “intensive mothering” (Hays 1996). Their research documented the extent of work-family conflict, its negative economic and emotional consequences for women, and the need for better policies to help them balance their work and family responsibilities (for reviews, see Glass 2009; Wharton 2012).

However, despite decades of research and advocacy on this issue, companies remain reluctant to implement workplace accommodations to promote work-family balance (Kossek, Lewis, and Hammer 2010; J. C. Williams, Blair-Loy, and Berdahl 2013). In their introduction to a special issue of a journal dedicated to this topic, Correll et al. (2014:8) lament that “most organizations continue to favor traditional one-off flexible work arrangements over those that affect all employees.” Even though research shows that carefully crafted work-family policies can enhance organizational productivity, improve work quality, and promote worker retention, they note, we are still left with a “puzzling and urgent” question: “why has organizational change been so limited?” (Correll et al. 2014:8).

Part of the answer lies in the fact that, in much of the United States, the implementation of family-friendly policy is voluntary. Corporations have few incentives to provide these accommodations. Generally, only top employees who possess highly coveted, specialized skills have access to these benefits (Kelly and Kalev 2006), and even these employees must negotiate and bargain to receive family-related accommodations. If workers do not ask, they do not receive (Brescoll, Glass, and Sedlovskaya 2013).

For this reason, some are hoping that a change in corporate policy might come from the new cohort of workers. The so-called millennial generation (b. 1980-2000) has developed a reputation as “agents of transformational change” (Kanter 2015; see also Milkman 2017). This generation purportedly values work-family balance. Aumann and Galinsky (2012), for example, argue that many young women and men today do not desire jobs that require high levels of responsibility and would prefer to spend more time at home; they suggest that age cohort—not gender—predicts a desire for work-family balance. A number of scholars also contend that fathers have become more involved with the rearing of their children, and that, like mothers, they wish to limit their time at work so that they can spend more time with their children. Young men in particular articulate the desire to participate equally with their partners in childrearing (Gerson 2010; Pedulla and Thébaud 2015). Scholars hope that the stated desire for balance among the millennial generation will be the impetus for corporations to adopt family-friendly arrangements.

This optimism about the millennial generation is not shared by all. A number of sociologists caution against generalizing about the characteristics of this demographic group, not all of whom endorse gender egalitarianism at work or at home (e.g., McDonald 2017; Risman 2017). Moreover, it seems unlikely that young people will be able to mobilize to alter corporate policy, granted our current neoliberal political culture that undermines workers’ rights (Crowley and Hodson 2014).

To explore the possibility that millennials could further organizational change, I identified a group of young workers who are in a unique position to bargain for work-family accommodations: scientists and engineers employed by a major oil and gas corporation. These are workers in whom the company has invested considerable resources in training, and thus have an interest in retaining. In this article, I investigate how these young men and women talk about their work and lives within the framework of balance, and how they express their desires for balance to their employers.

In my study, I found that these young science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals do desire balance, but most do not request it of their employers for reasons that are gendered. In the context of the male-dominated oil and gas industry, the women I interviewed felt that work-family balance was impossible to achieve at their company; they described intractable career disadvantages as a result of their responsibilities for children. Several men, on the other hand, felt that the company facilitated their work-family balance, which they redefined as being able to spend more—not fewer—hours at work. Others defined balance as unrelated to family responsibilities. In this article, I describe this gendered discourse of balance, and argue that it helps to explain why organizational change has been so limited. In the oil company that I studied, corporate policies align with the interests of several of the men I interviewed. Instead of advancing gender equality, I argue that this gendered discourse of balance reinforces traditional family dynamics and further entrenches male domination.

Literature Review

The sociological literature on work-family conflict is vast. A scholarly consensus has emerged that middle-class ideals of “intensive motherhood” and the demands of the “ideal worker” norm in professional careers are incompatible, such that devotion to one conflicts with devotion to the other (Acker 1990, Blair-Loy 2003, Hays 1996, J. C. Williams 2000). Feminists advocate family-friendly accommodations—including part-time and flexible schedules, paid leave, subsidized and/or on-site child care, and telecommuting—to mitigate this conflict. Such policies are said to promote work-family balance by better enabling working mothers to attend to their family responsibilities (Blair-Loy 2003; Glass and Riley 1998; J. C. Williams 2000).

Advocates argue that these workplace accommodations should be extended to men. Some young men do express the desire to play an active role in family life. Compared with previous generations, the majority of men in the millennial generation claim to prefer an egalitarian relationship (Gerson 2010; Pedulla and Thébaud 2015). Paradoxically, however, a large percentage of these same men say they also prefer what Gerson (2010) terms a neotraditional family structure, wherein husbands assume primary responsibility for breadwinning and wives assume primary responsibility for the care of children. This contradiction may reflect the dearth of workplace accommodations available to men. Currently, only 14 percent of U.S. employers provide men with the option of taking paid paternity leave, versus 58 percent providing paid leave for maternity (Matos and Galinsky 2014; Maume 2016). Even so, relatively few men take advantage of paternity leave or other forms of work/family accommodation (Blair-Loy and Wharton 2002; Hook 2006; Maume 2016). This discrepancy between ideals and practices is typically explained by the persistent “flexibility stigma” in workplaces—a hegemonic attitude that penalizes workers who stray from the ideal worker norm. Men may be especially sensitive to this stigma insofar as masculinity remains tightly bound to breadwinning in the family (J. C. Williams et al. 2013).

Not everyone shares the view that men would do more housework and child care if given the opportunity. Sociologists have long noted that a stated commitment to gender equality is not necessarily reflected in an equitable household division of labor (Gerson 1993; Hochschild 1989; Stone 2007). Even among young people, heterosexual partners committed to gender equality often revert to traditional gender behaviors when they transition to parenthood (Yavorsky, Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan 2015). Risman (2017) further cautions against generalizing about an entire generation. Although the majority of millennial men may claim to support gender equality in the workplace and in the home, her research shows that significant percentages believe that women’s primary responsibility should be to the family (see also McDonald 2017). These are reasons to be skeptical of claims that millennial men will spur changes in corporate policy.

Many young women say that they too aspire to egalitarian relationships. The millennial women studied by Pedulla and Thébaud (2015) claim that they would take advantage of family-friendly policies if they were available to them. Without such employer support, some may be tempted to pull back (Damaske 2011) or opt out (Stone 2007) in the face of irreconcilable pressures at home and at work. However, college educated women rarely drop out of the labor force “for the family” (Damaske 2011); the few who do so typically have employed spouses earning high salaries (Cha 2010; Glass 2009). Most mothers in the United States struggle with the conflicting demands of work and parenting without significant support from partners or employers (Collins and Mayer 2010; Weigt 2006).

Although most of this aforementioned research focuses on the difficulties of reconciling the conflicting demands of work and family, the concept of balance extends beyond family matters today to include interests outside of work. Stemming in part from a desire to promote gender neutrality in organizational policy, many employers now refer to “work-life” balance, recognizing that families constitute only one of a number of competing demands on workers’ time and energy (Gregory and Milner 2009; Smithson and Stokoe 2005). Programs focused on “wellness” and continuing education, for example, may be included under the rubric of work-life balance.

This article uses qualitative interviews to explore how young men and women STEM professionals conceptualize balance. These millennials arguably represent a best case scenario with regard to the employment relationship. With highly cultivated and sought-after skills, the men and women interviewed are in a better position than most workers to request accommodations from their employer—not that asking is ever easy or without consequence (Brescoll et al. 2013). I investigate whether this relatively powerful group of young professionals parlays their coveted skills into family-friendly accommodations. My goal is to understand how these workers perceive work-family (or work-life) balance and how they see their employer’s role in enabling them to pursue this balance.

In addressing these questions, this article sheds light on the limitations of the voluntary approach to work-family policy in the United States. In most states in this country, employers decide whether or not to provide access to family accommodations (four states are now among the exceptions to this rule), and workers decide whether or not to take advantage of them. In contrast, the European Union, for example, mandates workers’ rights to flexible schedules, part-time schedules, paid leave, and public provision of child care; in some countries (e.g., Iceland and Sweden), policy take-up is mandatory (Grabham 2014; Herman, Lewis, and Humbert 2013; Lewis and Campbell 2008). Although mandatory policies are not without controversy—some feminists argue that they can undermine gender equality in the labor force—most agree that public policy in the United States is more hostile to working mothers than that of any other country in the developed world (Glass 2009; Gornick and Meyers 2003; Pettit and Hook 2009; J. C. Williams 2000).

The voluntary nature of these policies in much of the United States reflects the market-based hegemony of the American political system in which corporate profits are prioritized over employee rights (Crowley and Hodson 2014). This neoliberal hegemony not only explains the dearth of work-family policies but also explains why workers make few demands of their employers (Pugh 2015). In keeping with neoliberal worker norms, the young people I interviewed construed any personal interest that impinges on their work as a personal choice, effectively absolving their employer of responsibility to accommodate them. Even so, in some cases, respondents felt balance was readily achievable at their firm. In particular, some young men who were fathers (or prospective fathers) felt that the company was amply and suitably family-friendly and promoted work-family balance. In this article, I ask why, if both young men and women seek balance, only men in this study felt able to achieve it. I discuss the gendered consequences of market logic, and conclude by suggesting alternative ways to promote work-family balance.

Method

Interviews were conducted with 43 scientists and engineers who worked for a large multinational oil and gas corporation that I am calling General Oil & Gas, or GOG (not its real name). The oil and gas industry is arguably the most powerful, global, essential, and lucrative industry in the world. Oil and gas industry giants occupy three of the top four positions in the 2013 Fortune 500 list. As a large and powerful employer, workplace policies in this industry can have wide ranging impacts throughout the economy. But despite its considerable wealth and influence, the industry offers very little in the form of work-family accommodations. Not a single U.S.-based oil and gas company made the 2016 Working Mother or the Fortune 500 “top 100” lists of best workplaces for women. Notwithstanding the industry-wide embrace of diversity, oil and gas companies are heavily male-dominated, with women comprising only 17 percent of the labor force, and having miniscule representation among executives and directors (Brady 2015; Herman et al. 2013; IHS Global 2016; C. L. Williams, Kilanski, and Muller 2014).

The oil and gas industry is highly dependent on “knowledge workers” (scientists and engineers). If these groups were to pressure their employers for workplace accommodations, the industry would be compelled to adapt. The young professional workers who are the focus of this study are in an especially powerful position in this regard. During the time of these interviews, oil was selling at over $100 per barrel, and companies were scrambling to retain young scientists and engineers in the face of impending retirements, what insiders were referring to as the “great crew change” (Gonzales and Keane 2011). In this context, the men and women in this study are better situated than most millennials to ask their employer to address their needs. This study explores how STEM workers express their desires for work-family balance, and how those desires are articulated to their employer.

The in-depth interview sample for this study was drawn from respondents to a longitudinal survey designed to track retention and attrition in the industry. Although the oil and gas industry is notorious for its sexism, in recent years, it has embraced diversity as a goal, in part to address its problems with retention (C. L. Williams et al. 2014). The company was especially concerned about losing women, a problem endemic to science careers in general (Glass et al. 2013). My colleague Chandra Muller and I designed a survey to follow a cohort of scientists and engineers hired by the company from 2007 to 2012 (N = 356). The company provided an email list of these new hires, including those fresh out of college (the overwhelming majority) as well as people who transferred into the company after working elsewhere. The survey itself was written and administered without corporate oversight. At Year 3 (2014) of the survey, respondents were given the chance to volunteer for a follow-up interview, and 57 of the respondents did so; of these, 43 were eventually interviewed (the others did not respond to repeated requests). The 43 respondents, who are the focus of this article, included five individuals (3 men and 2 women) who had left GOG since the survey began.

Interviews were conducted to understand career development from the perspectives of these professionals. Respondents constructed more or less coherent career narratives, which were then treated as such, that is, as constructed accounts offered to make sense out of their work experiences (Lamont and Swidler 2014; Pugh 2013). Although work-family conflict and balance were not the focus of these interviews, these topics emerged in every career narrative. The narrative accounts were then analyzed as discourses with the goal of understanding how they perpetuate (or resist) gender inequality (Bordo 2004).

The interviews were conducted over the phone or Skype, and lasted approximately 45 minutes. Although face-to-face interviews are preferable to phone interviews, they were impractical in this case since the sample is widely dispersed throughout the United States and abroad. By the time of the phone interviews, most respondents had filled in three surveys, so a great deal of background information was already known about each respondent, including their family status. In the interviews, I asked them to reflect and elaborate on their reasons for entering the industry, their work experiences, and their career aspirations. Questions covered the following topics: choice of college degree, job search, past and present job responsibilities, experience with corporate retention programs, relationships with coworkers and supervisors, and future plans. The interview schedule included follow-up questions related to each respondent’s specific answers to the survey. For instance, “In your survey, you indicated that there is a ___ percent chance that you will be at your current employer in the next 10 years. Do you recall why you wrote that?” Interviewees were also asked to clarify comments they wrote in response to the survey’s open-ended questions. For example, one engineer wrote on the Time 1 survey that he was “dissatisfied with current position,” while at Time 3, he wrote “very positive view of company.” In the in-depth interview, he was asked to speculate why his view changed.

Interview respondents included 24 men (16 engineers and eight geoscientists) and 19 women (five engineers and 14 geoscientists). The unbalanced gender ratio of engineers and geoscientists in the sample is a consequence of the different gender compositions of these professions. Most respondents were white; the only exceptions were one respondent who identified as Hispanic, and five who were foreign born (three Latin Americans, one Asian, and one African). The racial homogeneity of the sample reflects the gross underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minorities in this industry and in these professions (IHS Global 2016). Therefore, in the analysis that follows, the discourses that I uncovered reflect a position of racial privilege.

The average age of respondents was 33, with the engineering group about five years younger than the geoscientist group (30 vs. 35). This age disparity reflects the fact that the entry level credential for engineers is a bachelor’s degree, while a master’s degree is the minimum required for geoscientists. Twenty-nine respondents were currently married or cohabitating, 12 had children, and two were expecting their first child. The median income of the sample at Wave 3 of the survey was $155,000; the range was from $120,000 to more than $200,000, placing them in the top five percent of all income earners in the United States. Their discourses about work-family balance thus reflect a position of class privilege.

Interviews were recorded and transcribed by the author. Although many researchers outsource this part of the research process, I consider it a key step in the analysis because it generates deep immersion in the data. Following transcription, I read through the transcripts several times, underlining themes that I transferred to note cards, which I cross-referenced by hand. To double-check my analysis in preparation for writing, I conducted a computer search of the transcripts to make certain that I included all references to balance.

Findings

The desire for balance emerged in a number of the interviews, but the term held a variety of meanings. Several respondents associated the term balance with reconciling the competing demands of work and family, but stark gender differences emerged. The women I interviewed who were parents or prospective parents described difficulties reconciling their career ambitions with motherhood. In their narratives, work-family conflict loomed large, and few spoke of a hope for achieving balance; instead, many seemed resigned to the possibility of leaving the company or the industry altogether. In contrast, men who were fathers or prospective fathers talked about work-family balance as within their reach. In particular, those with stay-at-home spouses considered GOG to be accommodating and family-friendly. Far from reflecting differences in the essential natures of men and women, I argue that this finding reflects the privileged meaning of balance in this industry—one that reinforces conventional family arrangements as it promotes the ideology of the capitalist free market.

The discourse of balance also was used by respondents to describe interests not related to family obligations. Both men and women talked about their pursuit of work-life balance, referring to their desire for closer relationships at work, and for opportunities to pursue hobbies and other personal goals. When these interests were perceived as incompatible with work demands, some expressed an inclination to leave the company.

In this findings section, I report on (a) the experience of work-family conflict, expressed in this study exclusively by women who were mothers or prospective mothers, (b) the experience of work-family balance, described only by men in the sample who were fathers or prospective fathers, and (c) alternative meanings of balance articulated by both men and women. In the discussion and conclusion, I assess the implications of these findings for understanding the paradox of millennial values and for the limitations of voluntary corporate work-family policies.

Work-Family Conflict

The needs of family members featured prominently in the career narratives of several women who were interviewed. The women in the sample who had children or anticipated having them in the near future expressed great concern about reconciling motherhood with their career ambitions.

Like most U.S.-based oil and gas companies, GOG offers only the federally mandated 12 weeks of maternity leave (six weeks paid disability leave and six weeks unpaid leave), and no child care assistance. Also in line with most U.S. corporations (Correll et al. 2014), GOG gives individual supervisors discretion to negotiate flexible schedules with employees. Many of the women I interviewed lamented the paucity of these accommodations. For example, a 32-year-old married geologist contemplating motherhood described her situation:

The thing that I don’t like about GOG is so much of the entire maternity flexible work policy is at your manager’s discretion. Right now the group that I’m in, the management is fantastic about that. There are lots of options, they’re very supportive of whatever your plan wants to be, they’ll help work with you. And so if I’m within the same group when we have children, I have no doubt that we’ll find something that works. However, that’s not always the case. I have friends in other groups, who their boss doesn’t get it and says “Nope, you’re here or you’re not. I don’t want three quarters of an employee.” It’s hard when there is no real company policy.

This respondent hopes that her current supervisor will allow her to take a part-time schedule once she becomes a mother. Because this kind of accommodation is supervisor-dependent, she is reluctant to transfer to a different job within the company—which is an expectation for early career professionals, and also the pathway to promotion in this industry.

In contrast to GOG, a small number of oil and gas companies provide more extensive and standardized benefits for maternity leave, and a few offer on-site day care centers (McKee, Mauthner, and Maclean 2000). Women may consider these benefits when weighing job offers. A 32-year-old married geologist with one child told me that, in her graduating class of six women and two men, four of the women went to work for the same major corporation because of their child care facility. If she had gotten an offer from them, she would have chosen them, too.

In the oil and gas industry, where international placements are not uncommon, many GOG workers are also exposed to more generous maternity leave policies when they are stationed in foreign offices (see also Herman et al. 2013). These policies do not necessarily translate into more employment opportunities for women (Glass 2004; Pettit and Hook 2009). A 30-year-old married geologist working for GOG in the United Kingdom talked about her experience there as she contemplates motherhood:

Being a female in the industry can be quite difficult sometimes. And actually, you maybe wouldn’t have guessed it, but I found it harder here than I did in Houston . . . It’s a bit more traditional here. They often think of women as just the one who should be staying at home. Particularly my first supervisor when I got here said some rather upsetting things . . . .

Interviewer: I would think that being in the UK, the maternity accommodations would actually be better. That it would somehow be easier to bring together motherhood and career.

I can see why you would say that, but it’s almost the opposite. Because their maternity is so accommodating, they are almost encouraging you to be like—“Oh, just stay home! We don’t need you back.” Whereas they are not that accommodating to, like, flexible schedules and that kind of thing, really at all. It’s quite a bit different than what I expected.

Her perception of a tradeoff between a country’s generous maternity leave policies and gender equality in the workplace has been addressed by scholars (Pettit and Hook 2009). Both too much and too little leave pose a problem for women in professional careers. As a result of this tension, this geologist did not see working at GOG in her future. In fact, on her survey, she gave herself a 60 percent chance of leaving the industry altogether.

Work-family conflict was a prominent theme among virtually all the women interviewed (the one exception had moved to another company). They did not speak of achieving work-family balance (cf., Vair 2013); instead, they spoke of career sacrifices necessitated by family demands. For example, two women said they restricted their travel once they became pregnant, a decision that they thought would inevitably hamper their career development. And this 38-year-old geophysicist, mother of two, with a husband who also earned a high salary, further explained how “every time you have a kid, you get thrown down the ladder again”:

You just get stuck, right? You can’t possibly get the same promotions in the same time period because you’re gone on maternity leave. You just/I personally take some time off with each one. And your ratings make a huge difference in your promotion, and you just don’t get the ratings when you take time off.

She was the last one in her group to be promoted, and she was the only one interviewed who did not receive a salary raise over the course of the study. Yet she considered herself extremely lucky to be working at all. With her first pregnancy, she said she had to threaten to quit if she did not get additional unpaid time off; thankfully she did not have to “pull that card” the second time:

I didn’t really know what I was going to do if I had to leave. But I also know that my family comes first. So I love my job. Love, love, love it. But I am a mom first, well, a wife and mom first, and then I am a geophysicist.

This respondent demanded family accommodations, putting on the line a job that she loved—an act made possible by her husband who earned a high salary equivalent to hers. Her gambit paid off when her supervisor granted her request for additional unpaid leave for both of her children, but her career suffered as a result. Importantly, this is a cost she is willing to bear. In her mind, motherhood comes first, and it necessarily entails making career sacrifices. She said, “It’s a conscious choice I’m making, and I’m OK with it, to be honest.”

Other women in the sample also considered quitting their jobs once their children were born. This is an area where the whiteness of the sample is evident. In general, African American women (virtually absent from this industry) do not consider opting out or scaling back their career ambitions when they have children (Damaske 2011). The traditional model of a breadwinner husband and homemaker wife is a racialized ideal that applies only to families with high earning men (Cha 2010).

One engineer I interviewed, a mother of two who is married to another engineer at GOG, was tempted to opt out when her first child was born. Living in a rural outpost without family members or even day care centers available, she and her husband discussed whether she should quit her job. In the end, she said that they decided that she should “give it a shot for a little while,” but she is still tempted to leave the company and stay home. She said,

I don’t have to work. I don’t work for a paycheck, I don’t work to support my family or anything. I work because I want to. And because I think it’s important to set a role model for my/so I have a little boy and a little girl, and I think it’s important to be role models for them. Because I hear my son coming home from school saying stuff like “Mommy, girls do this and boys do that.” And I say, “No, boys and girls can both do this.” For me, it’s a lot about setting examples for my kids and letting them know they can be what they want to be.

For this respondent, having a career is her choice. She insists that she does not “have to work” because her husband, who also works in this industry, earns a high income. To be clear, she is devoted to her career: when I interviewed her, she was hoping her next promotion would lead to a management position. She considers leaving her job because she is exhausted from working the equivalent of “two full-time careers,” but she stays because she loves her job and because she is committed to gender equality.

For many of the women I interviewed, the strategy of exit (or “opting out”) was more viable than resistance or what Hirschman (1970) calls “voice.” Expressing discontent with corporate policies is taboo, according to a 31-year-old married geologist. She is eager to start a family, she said, but she is entirely unsure how to broach the subject with her supervisor. During our discussion of these concerns, she asked me to turn off the voice recorder. Although her story was not unique, her reluctance to tell it on tape reveals just how difficult it is for her to complain openly, much less to demand changes in corporate policy.

The company does support an affinity group for new parents that acts as an information and referral network. One geologist (married, one child), who is active in the group, told me that members were explicitly instructed by the company not to advocate for parents, a position she said that she understands. GOG “is not running a charity,” she said, “it is not up to them to take care of me. They are not responsible for my personal choices.” Even though she complained to me about the company’s policies, she did not think it reasonable to complain to the company.

Although structural constraints were apparent to these respondents, the rhetoric of personal choice infused their narratives. It was their choice to work for one company or another, their choice to put in for a transfer or stay put, their choice to have children or not, their choice to opt out or not. The consequences of their choices could undermine their career goals, but they seemed willing to live with those consequences—a situation no doubt made possible by their marketable skills and high earning partners—and to excuse their employer from making any changes to their work-family policies. As mothers, they will obligingly pay the costs for social reproduction in lost wages and lost opportunities.

In sum, for the mothers (and prospective mothers) I interviewed, work and family were experienced as conflicting domains at GOG. They wished that their company would be more accommodating and flexible, but they did not parlay their coveted skills into family-friendly policies. They perceived their lack of work-family balance as the result of their choices, a product of their decisions whether to have children, to work at GOG, or even to work at all. As these were all defined as personal choices, they did not feel it was within their rights to request better policies from their employer.

Work-Family Balance

In contrast to these women’s narratives, the notion of balance emerged frequently in interviews with men. In keeping with prior research on the millennial generation (e.g., Gerson 2010; Pedulla and Thébaud 2015), the men in the study who were fathers or prospective fathers talked about the importance of balancing their family needs with their careers. But unlike the married women in the study, all of whom were in dual-career relationships, several of these men had stay-at-home spouses. This traditional family arrangement enabled the “balance” they claimed to seek in their family lives.

One 30-year-old engineer referred to the needs of his family when considering different work assignments. He said that he would turn down any assignment that required substantial international travel because it is “not conducive to helping out” his homemaker wife who cared for their two young children at home. But he didn’t anticipate receiving such an assignment, due to the high demand for his skills. As a facilities engineer, he felt he was in a seller’s market; he could easily find another job if necessary to stay closer to home.

However, two years earlier, when his first child was born, he had been required to spend significant time away from home. He worked a rotation schedule on an offshore drilling rig (two weeks on/two weeks off), plus he had to travel frequently to company headquarters in Houston. On the survey, he expressed dissatisfaction with his job at the time. When asked why, he explained he was unhappy not because of work-family conflict, but due to the lack of leadership opportunities:

I like to be loaded down with projects and work to do. I don’t function as well if I only have one thing to do, so I had to ask for additional responsibilities, and I wasn’t given any at that time.

Interestingly, he did not complain to me about having to spend time away from his family. He said that even today, he works longer hours than required:

Even though I do work from 6:30 ’til 5 on a daily basis, I have the flexibility to be home much earlier. In general, the management here understands that my family life is just as important if not more so than my work life.

His assertion that his family life is more important than his work life does not mean that he needs to spend more time with his family, except to be available to help out occasionally. Instead, prioritizing family for him is consistent with spending more time at work climbing the corporate ladder.

This paradox—prioritizing family by spending more time at work—is consistent with other research that finds that new fathers tend to increase their work effort (Coltrane et al. 2013). This pattern also surfaced in an interview with a 35-year-old geologist and father of two married to a stay-at-home spouse. He was offered a position that required round-the-clock availability when his children were preschool age. He was reluctant to take the position at first for that reason, but he said that he and his wife eventually decided together that he should take the job. I asked him whether he worried about the career repercussions of turning down an assignment (others had insisted that doing so was “career suicide”), but he assured me that was not a concern:

I fully believe that I could have turned it down. I talked to a ton of people, and they all gave me different pieces of advice, but there was no one saying that I had to take it. And my supervisor was very clear in saying, we can find a different option for you. We understand where you are at in your life and why you’re hesitant to take this position.

Interviewer: So you did articulate the concern about being a father of young children?

Yeah. They definitely knew that and they were taking that into consideration. I never felt forced, never. I felt that everyone was very accommodating.

In his account, “accommodating” does not mean taking time off from work to spend with his children, nor does it mean working a schedule that would be compatible with contributing to child care, except perhaps to be available in case of emergency. What, then, does it mean to him for a company to be accommodating?

A clue can be found in a common thread in these two narratives. Both men allude to the importance of career development. Taking advantage of leadership opportunities (in the first case) and rotating through positions requiring a demanding schedule (in the second) are pathways to promotions and higher pay. Workplace authority and income are conventional metrics for evaluating fathers (Coltrane et al. 2013). It is striking that these two men increased their earnings significantly (by approximately 50 percent) over the three years of the survey. In these narratives, these men claim to seek accommodation and balance, but these terms have been appropriated to mean enhanced commitment to work—the opposite of the meaning endorsed by feminist advocates of work-family policies.

The notion that balance inheres in traditional gender roles in the family is also evident in this interview with a 37-year-old engineer and father of two who is married to a stay-at-home spouse. He takes advantage of the company’s optional 9-80 schedule, working 80 hours over nine days (instead of 10), which enables him to take off every other Friday from work.

Here it is pretty flexible. Also the 9-80 schedule, that is really good because you get every other Friday off, so you get to spend time with family. Here, they are very much into, “Hey, do your hours and then go home, go spend time with family.” So it’s easy to/like this coming weekend, we’re going to our manager’s house to have a BBQ. For team building and meeting people, it’s a great place to work.

For this engineer, balance refers to working the standard 80 hours every fortnight. Note that because these hours are spread out over nine days instead of ten, he works more than eight hours on the days that he does work, which is not conducive to caring for children. However, this “flexible” arrangement feels like balance to him because he can spend one extra full day with his family every other week. Notably, none of the women I interviewed mentioned the 9/80 schedule as mitigating their work-family conflict.

His gratitude for this balanced life makes sense only when compared with companies that demand many more hours, as described by this 25-year-old engineer (single, no children):

With GOG, I do think they have a really good work-life balance. They do a good job of not overstressing you, overworking you. I’ve heard of many companies that other people work for, that they work 100 plus weeks. That doesn’t sound too fun to me. And GOG is about/we have a 9-80 schedule, so you have every other Friday off. So you work nine days, 80 hours in those nine days, and you get the tenth day off. I can’t imagine going back to working five days a week every week. This every other Friday off feels like I’m on vacation every other Friday.

When working very long hours is the normal expectation, a 40-hour work week can seem balanced. Moreover, through the mechanism of 9-80, some workers feel like they get two extra days of vacation every month. Significantly, this comes without any cost to the company, which provides only two weeks of paid vacation per year to professionals in the first five years of their employment.

In the volatile oil and gas industry, labor practices are tied to the price of oil, and the 40-hour work week may depend on favorable economic conditions. As previously mentioned, these interviews were conducted when oil was selling at over $100 per barrel and professional workers were in high demand, undoubtedly contributing to their relatively reasonable work schedule. During industry downturns, work hours may be expanded either directly by corporate policy or indirectly through the threat of lay-offs.

The industry also expects those newly hired out of college to log considerably longer hours at work than experienced professionals. This is especially true for those stationed in the oil fields or offshore. Typically, engineers at this company are assigned to work on the oil rigs early in their careers as part of their training, but few take these positions permanently, and according to my respondents, those who do are almost all men. Nobody considers these rotations to be family-friendly. A 29-year-old unmarried engineer stationed off-shore described his work life as “less than ideal if you want to have a relationship or children.”

As a result, the men who were stationed on the rigs talked about delaying their family plans. A 32-year-old engineer talked about postponing his plans for marriage and children while he is working a rotation schedule. He anticipated that in the next few years he will be assigned a desk job—a likely occurrence if he is selected for a management position, which he expects will happen soon. Until then, his future family life is on hold, something he dislikes for now, but he does not think will last forever:

I feel like I am in a very good situation with my career. Or at least what my managers think of me. I’m basically 32, I have no children, I don’t foresee that happening ’til a few more years down the road, by mid-30s. I’m pretty sure by the time I’m 40 I would have moved up and not be in the field anymore, so I wouldn’t miss out much of my children’s lives.

In his case, his anticipated career progression dovetails with his ideal timing for starting a family. His comments suggest that those who do not sequence their careers effectively, or who do not merit promotion to management, may have more difficulty achieving their goals in these two domains. A career in management, he feels, is compatible with playing a role in his (future) children’s lives.

For some men, work-family balance is not necessarily desirable. For example, one 30-year-old engineer described working 10 to 12 hour days at the start of his career. Now that he is newlywed, his wife (who is also employed full-time) is insisting that “there’s got to be a balance,” a reality that he reluctantly concedes:

It’s going to slow down. It’s one more thing to be managed . . . I can’t leave the office every day at 6:30 and ignore her. But she knows that travel is part of my job. And working hard is a part of my nature.

This engineer no longer visits the oil field at every opportunity because he must take his wife’s needs into account. I sensed that he was unhappy about this: He did not really want balance, but it was being imposed on him by his wife. He said, “I really want to be out in the field right now, today. And I [realized], that doesn’t make good home sense” because his wife had just returned from a four-day business trip. In his case, the need for balance is taking him away from his work, a stressful situation that goes against his “nature,” but he recognizes is an inevitable part of being in a dual-career relationship.

In summary, for several of the men interviewed, GOG enabled them to achieve work-family balance. But for some, balance did not entail spending more time with their families, but rather, spending more hours at work, an arrangement enabled by their homemaker wives. Others thought that work-family balance could be achieved, but only once they had finished proving themselves by working long hours or rotation schedules early in their careers. Only in this last example was balance portrayed as requiring a tradeoff, spending less time at work and more time with family. But significantly, regret colored his narrative: balance goes against his “nature” as an ambitious engineer.

Another case of balance being perceived as a tradeoff was the narrative of a 30-year-old engineer and father of two, married to a stay-at-home wife. He explained that his career development was determined in large part by the needs of his family. For instance, his decision to seek employment in the oil and gas industry as opposed to the mining industry (his “true passion”) was made based on family considerations:

My wife and I love the lifestyle and the friends we’ve met through work. And so even though maybe the theory and the work weren’t as exciting for me as mining engineering, certainly the lifestyle, and being able to come back to Texas, where family was, was important to us.

Similarly, as he contemplates taking either the technical or managerial track, the needs of his family weigh heavily:

With responsibility comes commitment and time. So one of the big pieces that I’m weighing going down a managerial route is how much time am I going to have to commit and how is that going to affect my work-life balance, and family, and is that worth it? At the same time, I really enjoy/one of my passions is working with people. And so that is something that really attracts me to the management piece. Being able to coach and mentor individuals.

In the interview, he disclosed that he is Mormon, a religion that promotes a discourse of family values that he invoked frequently, and which might explain why his narrative of work-family balance stood out as an exception. Regardless of the source, it is significant that his discourse of balance does not entail reducing his hours or taking time off of work, but rather, not increasing his hours in pursuit of a managerial career. He feels that he can enjoy a successful technical career without sacrificing his commitment to his family. This is precisely the ideal of work-family balance that was missing from the women’s narratives.

From the perspective of these men, balance was achievable at GOG. However, it is clear from these interviews that achieving balance depends on the traditional gender division of labor in the home, in which husbands are the family breadwinners, and economically dependent wives provide most of the domestic and care work for the family. It perhaps goes without saying that this arrangement is not available to most professional women.

Other Meanings of Work-Life Balance

Not all of the respondents in the study mentioned family in their interpretation of work-life balance. Their definition of balance did not refer to intimate relationships or caregiving responsibilities at home.

For one of the men I interviewed, finding a congenial set of coworkers was crucial to achieving a sense of work-life balance. This 30-year-old married male engineer, who is white, described his problems making friends at work, due in part to the dearth of young people but also due to the diversity on his team:

A lot of the guys that worked for me were either (a) a different ethnicity, or (b) married with children living 40 minutes away from where I was with no intention of going out to a bar, etc. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with that. But it makes it challenging to have a work-life balance at work, where you’re emotionally invested in your team around you, as well as your team’s success.

In this narrative, “work-life balance” refers to cultivating friendships with members of his team outside of work hours. Because the people he worked with were not similar to him in age or ethnicity, he felt stymied in developing these relationships, and thus he felt that his life lacked balance. His narrative reveals how the discourse of balance can be deployed to exclude racial/ethnic minorities. For him, balance implies a blurring of the boundaries between work and life—not the strict separation of these spheres that is normally implied by the term (Adkins and Dever 2014)—but equating coworkers with friends can reproduce the good-old-white-boy network long characteristic of this industry.

The idea that balance accrues from personal relationships at work also emerged in an interview with a 32-year-old woman geologist (married, one child) who associated the term with receiving positive reinforcement from management. She said, “When people are 25 to 35, that is really all that matters, is that work-life balance stuff.” Then she described working on a project requiring long hours, and said, “When the going got tough and management didn’t respond with any sort of compensation/even with an accolade or an “atta boy”/people were just looking for a ‘well done,’ management didn’t respond.” As a result, she said eight people quit in a six-month time period. In her view, balance depends on achieving recognition and acknowledgment from management for workers’ personal efforts. This interpretation of balance requires sacrificing outside commitments for the sake of work—a completely unbalanced lifestyle. Thus, in these two cases, balance was perceived as inhering inside the workplace.

Others in the study used the term work-life balance to refer to meaningful pursuits outside of either work or family. Notably, this discourse emerged only in the narratives of men in this study. For instance, this 30-year-old male geologist (single, no children) expressed a common sentiment about living in Houston, the capital of the U.S. oil and gas industry, which he saw as a great impediment to “life-work balance.” When asked whether he ever considered leaving the industry he said,

I think a big driver is location and lifestyle. It’s more life-work balance. You know, the jobs are good. You work really hard, and you’ve done a lot of work to get to this point. It’s a very rewarding job. But friggin’ Houston sucks.

Explaining that “geologists are pretty outdoorsy people,” he expressed extreme dissatisfaction with the lack of outdoor recreational opportunities in Houston. He said that he and his geology friends are “all just kind of wallowing in like, what the f—do we do down here? So we leave as much as possible.”

This sentiment was shared by this 39-year-old geologist (male, single, no children) who eventually left the industry. He explained how living in Houston was an impediment to achieving balance:

And you know, I really want to strike a balance. And as much as I enjoyed working [at GOG], there was zero in the personal column. 90-95 in the professional column, and zero in the personal column . . . I made friends living there, some great people. But I never/it just never really clicked, and I never had a great network. Like for things to go do, I would escape off to the hill country or Matagorda or Austin to go do fun things. I just didn’t find them around the Houston area.

This respondent was one of two I interviewed who requested an accommodation from his employer to achieve his vision of work-life balance: He asked his managers to approve a telecommuting arrangement that would allow him to live outside of Houston. Getting no traction for that idea, he quit his job, moved to Colorado, and left the industry altogether.

The other respondent who exercised voice was a 28-year-old male engineer (married, no children), who left the industry when GOG prevented him from pursuing an MBA. He requested a six-month leave without pay to pursue an accelerated 10-month degree program, but was turned down. He was angry about this, suspecting that his status as an international worker (he was Indian) figured into the company’s decision. He pointed out to me that the company accommodated other requests for work-life balance:

I was pretty upset. I had made it really clear that I loved the company . . . To me, I had a hard time seeing how [my request] was any different than maternity leave when women take the time off and go have a kid and come back. And then they have the job waiting for them and everything is fine. At this point, I had saved up three months of annual leave. I had like a month of sick leave. It was silly/it was a 10-month program, so it’s only six months off. I couldn’t see why it was such a big stretch.

In his eyes, pursuing an advanced degree is equivalent to having a baby, and it seemed unfair to him that the company would deny him leave for this purpose. (Notably, he was the only man interviewed who mentioned the maternity leave policy at GOG.) He left the company, got his degree, and no longer works in the industry.

In contrast, a 36-year-old geologist expressed satisfaction with his job precisely because it enabled him to pursue a second career. This respondent is a residential counselor at a boarding school, where he lives with his wife and young daughter, resulting in an extremely hectic but still rewarding and, in his words, “balanced lifestyle.” He said,

There is not much sleep going on. But it’s fun. [The boarding school] is amazing. We keep ourselves young. It’s great for my daughter because she socializes with 250 kids that basically adore her.

In his case, balance refers to combining two careers. His predictable 40-hour work schedule enables him and his wife to take on a second vocation, an exhausting but deeply rewarding endeavor for them. Unlike in the previous two cases, his pursuit of this balance requires no concessions from his employer.

In sum, some respondents used the term balance to describe the pursuit of recognition and fulfilling relationships inside work, or to describe participating in meaningful activities outside of work and family. These interviews demonstrate that the concept has travelled well beyond reconciling professional careers with women’s caregiving responsibilities. For some, the meaning of balance encompasses the pursuit of personal relationships, hobbies, and ventures that have nothing to do with family life. Importantly, only two respondents requested accommodations from their employer to help them achieve this type of balance, but they were rebuffed. Like others who felt thwarted in their pursuit of balance, they ended up exiting the company and the industry altogether.

Discussion and Conclusion

Policies that are intended to promote work-family balance are a response to the time bind faced by mothers in professional careers. Flexible work hours, part-time schedules, telecommuting arrangements, paid maternity leave—these workplace policies are advocated to help alleviate the dual pressures on working mothers. Advocates argue that men, too, should have these accommodations available to them. This matter has become especially urgent to some scholars as research finds that men and women of the millennial generation aspire to gender equality in their relationships and want to spend more time with their families. Convincing companies to voluntarily institute more flexibility for everyone is seen as a path to gender equality at work and at home (Christiansen and Schneider 2010; Correll et al. 2014).

In this study, I investigated the career narratives of a sample of young scientists and engineers working for a major oil and gas company. I examined their discourses of work-family balance and conflict to better understand the discrepancy between their stated aspirations for gender equality and the lack of family accommodations at their employer (Gerson 2010; Pedulla and Thébaud 2015). Consistent with other research on the millennial generation, I found that the respondents in my study indicated a desire for balance. However, few women spoke of being able to achieve this goal. At GOG, new mothers receive only 12 weeks of maternity leave (half of them unpaid); any arrangement for flextime, part-time, or additional unpaid time off must be negotiated individually with their supervisors. Those who lacked a supportive supervisor perceived a forced choice between a successful career and motherhood. But instead of requesting more of their company—which they could do because of their highly sought-after skills and high earning spouses—they saw their only option as exiting the company, and in some cases, the industry altogether.

Men working at GOG did not receive any accommodations for family leave, aside from the unpaid leave mandated by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). However, the fathers and prospective fathers I interviewed considered work-family balance an achievable goal. Working full-time (40 hours per week with the option of a 9-80 schedule) enabled them to play what they considered a meaningful role in their family life. In this context, an “accommodating” supervisor is one who understands the need to be available for family emergencies, and putting “family first” means having the option to work more hours to pursue professional opportunities. In these instances, the discourse of work-family balance reinforces the traditional gender division of labor, in which men are breadwinners and women are responsible for housework and child care. In other words, these men’s description of balance depends on the availability of a homemaking spouse—an arrangement that is not widely available to employed mothers.

I also uncovered other meanings of work-life balance in the discourses of these professional workers, indicating that the meaning of “balance” has transformed from its original emphasis on gender equality. Two people in the study used this term to describe the elision of life and work. They sought personal recognition and friendship from their coworkers and managers, collapsing the boundaries between work and life. For others (in this study, only men), work-life balance is achieved by carving a space outside of work and family for the pursuit of hobbies, additional training, and a second career. For the most part, the company did not support these pursuits. Only the residential counselor seemed satisfied with his work-life balance, which he enjoyed despite working extremely long hours. Those who felt unable to pursue their personal goals were inclined to leave the company, the same result that the lack of family accommodation had for working mothers. When the two who exercised “voice” were rebuffed, they ended up exiting the industry.

This study examined the experiences of young professionals working for one of the richest corporations in the world and in an industry that claims to be committed to diversifying its labor force (Brady 2015; Herman et al. 2013; IHS Global 2016; C. L. Williams et al. 2014). Yet GOG did not spend its considerable resources on policies to accommodate the needs of working mothers. Instead, as these results make clear, they catered their family-friendly policies—such as the 9/80 schedule—to those who had few caregiving responsibilities at home. In contrast, the kinds of policies that would enable women to combine motherhood with successful careers are taboo to even discuss at GOG. Recall that the company explicitly discouraged the affinity group for new parents from advocating for family-friendly policies. The resulting attrition of women who feel overwhelmed by their resulting work-family conflict is a cost that the company is apparently willing to pay.

By uncovering the gendered discourse of work-family balance, this study sheds light on the limited organizational change in work-family policy in the United States (Correll et al. 2014). It makes clear why firm-level attention to these issues is not enough to alleviate problems for women and men seeking to have both full-time employment and a life outside of work. In particular, this study raises doubts about the voluntary approach to implementing work-family policy. Corporations will not voluntarily assume the expense of family accommodations unless they are compelled to do so, either by legal mandate or in response to requests by their top employees. And in this company, few workers requested accommodations from their employer: For the most part, the women blamed themselves for their intractable work-family conflict, the men were satisfied with their work-family balance, while those whose family life or hobbies conflicted with their work left when they perceived their company thwarted their needs.

Ruth Milkman (2015) argues that appeals to corporations to voluntarily redesign themselves to accommodate workers’ family responsibilities are especially unlikely to succeed today granted the political climate of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism endorses the tenets of minimal state regulation, the market as an organizing principle for social and political action, and the exaltation of an autonomous, self-serving subject. In keeping with neoliberalism, advocates for big business profess that public policy should not interfere with market forces; this is why many opposed the FMLA (which only mandates unpaid family leave). According to Milkman, companies’ commitment to market fundamentalism explains their unwillingness to implement family-friendly policies even if it means losing managers and professionals in whom firms have invested considerable resources (see also Blair-Loy 2003; Maume 2016).

But, as this study has shown, when companies abjure responsibility for social reproduction, the work falls on the shoulders of women. As a result, women’s “choices” are (a) to forgo having children, (b) to forgo having a career, or (c) to experience work-family conflict. Men, on the other hand, have a fourth option: to marry a woman who will take on this burden of care. In theory, this option is also open to women, but finding a stay-at-home partner (male or female) is unlikely granted the gendered foundation of the traditional division of labor and what is known about lesbian family arrangements (Moore 2011; Sullivan 2004). As long as the option of having a stay-at-home spouse is only available to men, the neoliberal approach to work-family balance promotes gender inequality.

However, neoliberalism is not only promulgated by corporate discourse but also reflected in the respondents’ discourses of balance (see also Weigt 2006). Market logic infuses their understanding of the problem of work-family conflict and the corporation’s role in facilitating work-family balance, and curtails the possibility of organized resistance (Cf., Herman et al. 2013). From the perspective of the elite millennials in this study, caretaking responsibilities are a matter of personal choice. Like the decision to pursue hobbies or education, having children is an individual decision for which only the individual bears responsibility. As one woman put it, the company is “not responsible for my personal choices.” Because they define their family needs as private concerns, the women I interviewed do not feel they deserve or are entitled to accommodations from their employer. The definition of these choices as intensely personal also discourages organizing for change.

It is crucial to bear in mind that the people in this study are in the top tier of income earners. Motherhood may compromise women’s success at GOG, but not their livelihoods, since these highly educated workers can and do move to other companies or other industries. They also perceive that they have the fallback option of leaving the labor force, an option made available by their spouses who earn enough money to support them and their children. This may help explain why they do not parlay their coveted skills into work-family policies. From their perspective, working at GOG is a “choice,” just as is the decision to have children, and thus they absolve the company of any responsibility for making accommodations. However, for the vast majority of women workers, the choice between motherhood and a job can be economically devastating. Unlike the women in this study, most wage earning mothers do not have the power to negotiate for family accommodations or opt out of the workforce; they risk destitution if they lose their jobs (Collins and Meyer 2010; Weigt 2006). Putting corporations in charge of implementing work-family policy thus contributes to gender inequality at the top of the income hierarchy, and the feminization of poverty at the bottom.

This study is limited because it examines the discourse of balance among a small sample of young professionals working at one particular corporation in the United States. Additional research is needed to document these findings for larger samples, in different companies, and in different industries. Other oil and gas companies do offer more generous work-family and work-life policies than GOG; more research is needed to understand why. Future studies might also explore the discursive construction of “balance” in contexts where neoliberalism is not hegemonic and gender inequality is less pronounced.

In conclusion, this study has contributed to understanding work-family balance as a gendered discourse. These findings suggest that the millennial generation is unlikely to spur organizational change in our current neoliberal political climate. The mothers (and prospective mothers) I interviewed at GOG said that they do not experience balance, but they blame themselves and not their employer, drawing on a hegemonic discourse of personal choice. A number of men, in contrast, told me that they achieved balance, but it is an anachronistic type, based on the traditional division between breadwinning husbands and homemaking wives. In addition, some men and women look for balance by collapsing work and family, or by seeking meaningful pursuits outside of work and family. Like the working mothers, they perceive their personal choices as entailing personal sacrifices—a position that absolves their corporation from implementing accommodations. It is important to underscore that these are professional workers with skills in high demand, yet with rare exceptions, they do not feel empowered to make demands. For this reason, it is unlikely that this company will voluntarily implement family-friendly policies.

Instead of trying to persuade corporations to voluntarily adopt family-friendly policies (Correll et al. 2014), advocates for working parents should instead focus their efforts on strengthening state intervention (Milkman 2015). In the United States, a new push is on for mandatory paid family leave. Federal, state, and municipal governments are making strides in this regard (Miller 2015; Steinhauer 2017). To realize these goals, a new discourse about gender equality and collective responsibility for social reproduction—and not voluntary corporate policy—is sorely needed.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

For their generous feedback and advice, I thank discussant Erin Kelly and other participants at the ASA session; my colleagues Chandra Muller, Caitlyn Collins, Jennifer Glass, and David Pedulla; and the editors and reviewers at Social Currents.

Author’s Note

This article was presented at the American Sociological Association meetings in August 2016.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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