He Works / She Works ®

Dr. Jim Carter and Dr. Jaine Carter

Sampler

More than two out of three married women with children between the ages of six and seventeen are working outside the home, up from one out of four only thirty-five years ago. Statistics support that most American mothers are still full-time employees. Standards of living are higher. Modern homes are more complicated and filled with a multitude of objects demanding attention, and we tend to expect our homes to be in perfect order. Dinners must be healthy, multi-choice gourmet feasts and children given quality time. The cost of help, when we can find it, is so prohibitive that it eats up half our salaries.

Studies show that women still do the majority of the household chores. In The Second Shift, a study of fifty mostly middle-class, two-career couples, Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, found that wives typically come home from work to another shift, doing 75% of the household tasks. In another study, Family Diversity and the Division of Domestic Labor, David H. Dems and Alma C. Acock asked, "How much have things really changed?" In the study, the percentage of chores done by the women in the partnerships ranged from 80.2% to 83.5%. But before you take a club to your significant other, read on. You may discover that the enemy is neither man nor woman, but a system that rewards our self-defeating behavior.

Identifying the Enemy
Women, by nature or by conditioning, want to establish small groups of intimate friends. While that's fine in the general scheme of things, we need to transfer our skills at bonding to a more universal goal. We need to help each other succeed. No matter what you think, we still don't do an adequate job of supporting one another. I have seen the enemy and it is us. All too often, women hurt each other, through their facades of efficiency, and do not offer true support. When we pretend to be in perfect control of our various roles, women who are struggling may feel as if they are alone in their perceived inabilities. Look at the way we treated First Lady, Hillary Clinton. We called her a bitch and created jokes about her having the real power in the family. Both women and men resent, as presumptuous, any power she may have gleaned by association with her husband. We did the same thing to Nancy Reagan, another Presidential wife, and continue to sling mud at any female celebrity who hints at being successful, unless she is extremely overweight or "damaged" in some other publicized manner.

It's not much different for the rest of us. After talking with thousands of working women managers throughout my career, it is clear that the majority of female secretaries and administrative assistants still do a male manager's work first before tackling a female manager's work. These secretaries also talk negatively about their female bosses, referring to them as nitpickers. Over 80% of the women attending my classes responded that they would rather work for a man than a woman. While the percentage is decreasing, it still remains distressingly high. The reasons women give for not wanting to work for another woman include a perception that women are harder to work for, less likely to support other women for promotion and less able to move materials and budgets upward because they have less power within the organizational structure. They also proclaim that women are perfectionistic nitpickers who are catty and jealous of other women.

Remember, I have been asking working women if they would work for other working women. They are enrolled in classes I teach that are designed to improve their management skills, in order to gain more credibility and create cooperative teams. Yet they have admitted they really don't want to work for women. Is this a dilemma? How can we expect other people to work with and for us if we won't work for ourselves! If we are to succeed in our careers, as well as our personal lives, we must stop waiting for the "messiah" of women--big brother government, women's lib, transitional men or benevolent organizations-- to come to our rescue, and begin taking personal responsibility for our lives.

Just as we learned to "fry the bacon" while achieving career goals, we can learn how to enjoy being a woman, fully bonded with the man of our choice, and still climb the career ladder. The challenge, as we endeavor to fulfill our potential, is to accomplish these objectives without burning out, burning bridges or breaking babies. In order to successfully merge these goals, we have to find acceptance, support and plain old physical help.

Men as Partners
Women are not the same as men. We are physically, emotionally and creatively different. We even define the word "career" differently. In one study, when asked to define job satisfaction, the majority of women responding chose personal growth and self-fulfillment, making a contribution to others and doing what they wanted to do. Men have been programmed differently into a game-playing behavior pattern that endorses learning specific rules, adapting strategies for specific goals, obeying signals and operating in an overall framework of teamwork, risk-taking and competition. Instead of just complaining about the differences or lamenting that, "he just doesn't understand me," women must begin to use their knowledge of these differences to structure communications, adapt strategies to reach specific goals, and establish boundaries (rules) toward developing the team framework men prefer. . . .