Ep. 379: The Flexibility Myth

I recently came across an op ed in the New York Times that caught my attention. It was written by Corinne Lowe, an economist at Penn who studies gender in the workplace. In this piece, she says the following. This is the quote that that really, grabbed me. She says, almost two thirds of corporate leaders who mandated return to office policies after the pandemic saw disproportionately higher numbers of women leave their companies. Now why is this happening? As Lowe notes, there's an obvious answer here. You can you can blame the the call to return to the office. Right? Maybe women came to count on the flexibility that was afforded by remote work. And given that women have much higher, household labor and childcare labor burdens than men, they would be the group that you would expect to struggle most when you took some of this flexibility away. But as Lowe goes on to argue, this is not the full story. There is another major factor that disproportionately impacts women, but is a real problem for all knowledge workers, an issue with the knowledge sector that has been quietly making all of us miserable. In today's episode, I wanna talk about this mystery factor. I wanna describe where it came from, and then using this knowledge, suggest some concrete tactics that you or your employer can deploy to help reduce it. So if you felt exhausted or frustrated by aspects of your job and can't quite figure out why, you need to listen to this episode. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode, The X Factor, Making Us Miserable at Work. Alright. So I wanna start by resolving this mystery of what drove women to disproportionately leave the workforce after the pandemic. I'm gonna return to Corinne Lowe's op ed here to help us come up with this answer. I'll load it up on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening, the the relevant portion. Alright. I'm reading now from the op ed. Women's choices don't back up the idea that in office work is entirely to blame. Nursing, which can essentially be done only at the site of care, remains almost 90% female. Most medical students are now women too, as are about 70% of physician assistants and almost 90% of nurse practitioners. Both occupations are growing quickly. In fact, in the past two years, nearly 40% of all new jobs have gone to women working in health care. So if women aren't inherently adverse to in office work, then what is the issue? That's where I point back to boundaries. Nursing shifts are typically rigid, often set far in advance. While hours on given shift can be grueling, they're also a known quantity. Even on call time, common in the medical field, is predictable. Your phone might ring on Saturday night, but only if it's your assigned time to be on call. It's not a matter …