The Ultimate Jugglers :

Women in operations

The following article appeared in the May issue of the World Bank Staff Association Newsletter. It is reprinted with their permission. After reading the article, you will agree that the issues raised are not particular to the Bank. The ultimate jugglers are not only women in Operations but women at all levels — General Service staff as well as Professional; in all kinds of work- places (the private and public sectors as well as the international civil service); and in all geographical locations.

“How do women in operations manage their lives, and how much help do they get from the Bank? How do they juggle missions, children, spouses, heavy workloads generally, managers, their own ambitions and, often, their desire not to mimic the career pattern of men? In interviews with more than a dozen women, the SA Newsletter tried to find out. All the women interviewed are grade F staff or above, stationed at headquarters, and working in operations.

In the work/life tug-of-war, women in operations are at dead center. One senior- level woman with a long Bank career and three children muses, “I can’t believe I have coped. I don’t think I would have done it if I hadn’t had such dedication to the work. I’m not sure I would have been as dedicated to manufacturing cans or selling toys.”

Enormous Workloads

Bank workloads weigh heavily on women in operations, in addition to the specific burden of going on mission. A female manager in one Region says with resignation, “The biggest issue right now is the workload. The workload is just too much—enormous. I don’t see any hope for improvement.”

When asked about management’s recent push to simplify procedures, she replies, “That’s been done before. It doesn’t relieve the structural imbalance of the workload. Either we’ve got to get rid of some of the work or get more people. Women feel this more than men because they do have to go home and shoulder the responsibilities of the household.”

Many women report working at home at odd hours of the night or in the early morning. One woman puts in an hour of work at home while her kids watch morning cartoons. Another woman reports that she found herself weeping with fatigue as she walked to the Metro each evening; she had been rising at 4
a.m. with her baby and then going to work and trying to meet several deadlines at the same time. A single mother who’s a manager in operations says that when her son was younger, “Basically I used to run out of the office to take him to a ball game, then run back. I took work home at night and worked after he went to sleep. I was exhausted through the week, and exhausted on the weekend.”

When women in operations travel on mission, the work/life squeeze gets even tighter. Some report they are not successful at limiting missions; others say they are more able to control missions than they were in the past. Overall, they say they do not want to be considered ineligible for travel if they have small children—but they also want some consideration for their needs. LAC is said to be a favorite Region for women because the missions to Central and South America can be limited to one or two weeks, and there is no jetlag.

Paying a High Price

Several women report that they have paid a high price for working in operations. They especially worry that their children have not had enough family time, or are being short- changed in other ways. Besides the needs of children, spouses can present a problem for women in operations. Undoubtedly, husbands of women in operations and wives of men in operations would have a good deal to commiserate about concerning marital stress.

On the plus side, two spouses of high level women in operations have been supportive enough to move with their wives’ jobs. But about half the other wives in operations reported that their husbands are sources of pressure they have to cope with. One woman’s husband would say sarcastically when she got home from the Bank, “Well, have you saved any babies today?” Eventually he left the marriage, although the couple had children. Two women in operations whose spouses also travel for (non-Bank) jobs say that their own mission travel is viewed as secondary—the husband schedules trips without first checking with his wife.

One sector specialist says her missions have “caused a lot of really severe problems in the marriage.” She recalls that once when a mission got extended for four days, her spouse was “furious.” Another woman, who married late and has no children, says her husband gets dissatisfied if she is gone for more than two weeks, especially now that he has retired. A third woman comments that when she eased off travel for her kids’ sake, it improved her marriage as well. Prior to that, when she traveled, her spouse would complain of his loneliness and would envy what he saw as the “camaraderie” of the mission team.

More Supportive : Some Spouses from Asia, Africa

And what of women’s liberation, and the notion that a couple should equally share home and family responsibilities? A number of women say their husbands pitch in a lot at home—but note that the husbands still consider it helping. Says one woman manager in operations, “Gender roles affect my family tremendously.” For example, she has to pick the kids up after school and says that “conditions have to be extraordinary for my husband to agree to do it.”

Generally, Western women who were interviewed reported less support from their husbands than women from Asia and Africa did, though the sample of each group was small. One Asian woman relates, “I put the little one to bed and then start working on the laptop. My husband is okay with this. He is very supportive, I’m lucky.” An African woman who’s recently moved out of operations says she does cooking and shopping because she’s better at them, but “on everything else my husband just pitches in. If the tub needs to be scrubbed, he just does it.” When she had to travel, he took time off from work to care for the children. Cultural differences may account for these spouses’ more supportive attitudes. It is possible that husbands from some Part II countries feel the paramount value is the overall economic good of the family, not sticking to gender roles.

Managers : The Good, the Bad, and the So-So

Women in operations need supportive spouses and, equally, they need supportive managers. The women who were interviewed reported a range of understanding from male and female bosses.

Perhaps the worst manager cited during the interviews was a man who wanted his lower-graded female staff member to go on mission right away, although she had just come back from maternity leave. When she pointed out that she was breastfeeding her four-month-old baby, he informed her that four months of breastfeeding were “enough.” (The baby’s doctor recommended 12 months.) Fortunately, the staff member held her ground. But this woman was not the only one interviewed whose boss thought he knew more about breastfeeding than she did.

At a higher grade level, another woman who was ordered to go on mission despite having an infant simply took the newborn and a nanny along with her—partly to make a point. The woman who was mentioned earlier, who was so tired she cried on the way to the Metro, asked her manager (a woman) if she could move back some of the work deadlines that were pressuring her. She recalls the manager saying, “We’re all busy. You’ve just got to get it done.”

One woman says she gets especially annoyed at the mixed messages from her manager. The manager, also a woman, simultaneously gives her more tasks and tells her she should not have to take work home.

On the plus side, one woman reported that when she was on mission and illness sprang up at home, her manager told her to “get on the next plane.” And a second woman found that she was taken more seriously at work when she became a parent, as if she became more valuable and mature.

Making the Tradeoff

Most women interviewed believe that there is a tradeoff between career-building and child-rearing, and some say they’ve opted for the second. They accept slower career progress as a necessary consequence. One woman comments, “My daughter already cries when I leave. I’m not going to jeopardize my children’s happiness with six week missions.” Another with a new child is firm that she is “prepared to pay the costs of saying ‘I can’t do that.’” Some women say they will accept heavy workloads, missions, and so on—but must be home at a certain time in the evening. “I realize there’s a cap on my career because of it,” one female manager remarks.

But should such a tradeoff be necessary? Several women said no, that with teleconferencing and the many other ways of getting operations work done, it should be possible for women to have families, private lives, and satisfying careers too. Higher-graded women especially were impatient with the idea of women’s having to compromise their careers. One insisted, “We should be able to have it all with a good employer like the Bank. There should be lots of jobs available” that are compatible with a regular homelife. Another echoed, “We should make it perfectly legitimate for women to find nontravel ways to do their job. These are solvable problems. We’ve got to get the mentality against women changed.”

A high-graded woman comments that the Bank does not use all the skills that women often bring: “Women have more activities than men. The Bank doesn’t capitalize enough on people’s whole skills sets.” Diversity adviser Julie Oyegun carries this point further: “What’s rewarded is the masculinist in most organizations—the tough workaholic-type person. We may not say that, but that’s the image of the hard worker. How many women should fit that norm? How many men should? The ultimate diversity is the diversity of values, or cognitive differences….If women are not able to bring in woman-ness to the team, if they have to become men, why bother?

What’s the point?” !