Equality or Equity?

We Americans, it seems, are at the end of our pandemic ropes. Whatever collective actions we were going to take to whip this virus, it sure looks like we've already taken them.

We are tired, tired of all of this, and we want to return to some sort of normalcy. Return the kids to school because we're told we have to return to the office. We want to return to our favorite restaurants and vacation spots. To sports. To campus. To the way it was before.

Safely, of course. With masks and distancing. We don't want anyone to get sick. We are good and caring people, but we can't stay inside forever. Life must go on.

But until things are back to the way they were before, we have to struggle through. Mrs. Done by Forty and I are still trying to figure out how to juggle work and watching Baby AF long term, while also trying to use the online & print out resources we can find to make sure he's learning things, something, anything, while he's here with us instead of at daycare. I watch Baby AF for an hour in the morning & an hour in the afternoon, so Mrs. Done by Forty can get some work in. And we both try to do as much work as we can from noon to two thirty or three, while Baby AF naps. That's our crunch time, where we can put our heads down and get some deep work done.

I will be burning through my vacation time the rest of the year, taking 6 hours off each Monday. Mrs. Done by Forty is trying to convince her employer to keep letting her work from home. We sometimes put in some hours at night to catch up. 

We're making it all work, if only barely. It seems like an endurance race. The key is to keep going.

I read an article by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Sheera Frenkel about tech companies that tried to help working parents deal with the added stresses of the pandemic. Salesforce & Facebook, realizing the extra burden being placed on parents, gave six and ten weeks of paid time off, respectively, to workers with children. Twitter allows unlimited time off, which parents could now take more of. And Facebook recently announced parents could take an additional 10 weeks off next year. From the article:

That angered some nonparents. A few wrote openly about how isolated they felt, living alone and not seeing anyone for weeks at a time. The company, they said, seemed less concerned about their needs....

Resentment from employees without children about extra parental benefits existed at companies before the pandemic, of course. But the health crisis has amplified that tension.  

Being a new parent, I can understand the non-parent position because I shared it not too many years ago. Why should parents get additional time off, while non-parents on a team are left to shoulder additional responsibilities in their absence? We know what happens when a colleague goes on an extended leave, or a long vacation, or unexpectedly leaves the company: someone has to pick up their work. 

When a worker takes ten weeks off, that cost is born by the workers who remain. It's the same dynamic that is impacting the parents themselves: when the childcare worker is no longer there to provide childcare, when the school is no longer there, that work has to fall to someone. 

When that work falls on you, it might not seem fair. Why should you work more? They chose to have children, not you. Shouldn't they bear the entire cost of that? 

And by the way, this pandemic is not easy on non-parents, either. It's hard to be in isolation for months on end, staring at the same four walls every damn day with no one to talk to. No one to hug. And, yeah, it's really hard to take on extra work from colleagues because they're taking ten weeks of paid time off.

Why shouldn't non-parents get ten weeks off as well? 

There's a logic to this. Maybe benefits should be equal: everyone just gets the same time off.

Perhaps parents shouldn't be the only ones getting six or ten weeks off during the pandemic, or even immediately after the birth of a child. Shouldn't all workers get this sort of time off, if any of them do?

What we're running into is a conflict of ideologies: equality versus equity. The approach aiming for equality says that if something is being given to someone, it is given to everyone. The pie is divided equally. We have a pizza and a family of six people, everyone gets exactly two slices.

The approach aiming for equity is different. It looks at each individual's need and might give decidedly unequal shares to each person, based on their needs. The family of six has three babies: each only needs a slice. The adults & the teenager need more to feel full, and each get three.

In America, a country that is an outlier in how we approach benefits of all sorts, we are closer to an approach that, at least superficially, aims for equality. Not actual equality, of course: that would be absurd. But we prefer an approach that nominally aims for equal, universal opportunity and access to benefits. The common example is that everyone gets access to Social Security, even the rich retiree with the fat portfolio who has no need for that monthly check.

An approach aiming for equity is more targeted: giving greater benefits to those with greater needs, and perhaps none at all to those who don't have that need. These sort of targeted programs are under constant attack. SNAP, Medicaid, housing vouchers, disability benefits, Affirmative Action: with any program that aims for equity for a targeted population, the question is always, "Does this person deserve the benefit?"

No one ever asks whether a retiree deserves Social Security, because we all get Social Security.

That's why the programs that are never really on the chopping block are those with universal access, like public K-12, where everyone can go and get an education. Or FMLA, where anyone can take twelve weeks away from a job for a medical reason, even though it's completely unpaid.

We prefer these sort of universal programs over targeted ones because they tap into the American version of fairness. It seems fair that everyone pays into Social Security, and then everyone gets a retirement benefit: even the guy who makes a million a year,  and who technically paid a lower tax rate into Social Security than someone earning minimum wage.

The rub is that this American idea of fairness makes it harder to achieve certain policies, like universal paid parental leave, because they aren't truly universal. Parents who no longer have very young children and those who have no plans to have children, as the New York Times article notes, aren't going to be enamored with policies that only benefit other workers, while increasing their workload at the same time.

Simply put, we Americans hate the idea that someone else might be getting a benefit that we don't get.

When it comes to paid parental leave, or any leave specific to parents with young children, this is a benefit that many employees can't access in the near term, and maybe not ever. And that makes it an uphill battle to institute these sort of policies in our country.

The sad part is that when we are talking about paid parental leave, we're specifically talking about a benefit that primarily helps women, since they take on a disproportionate amount of the work raising children.

When we look at how many more men work at the technology companies that are seeing employee push back, another possible explanation emerges.

Salesforce Figures from December 2018:

Within this context, one has to ask whether we should frame the criticism of these parent-focused policies as primarily from "non-parents", or whether the criticism is just primarily from men. If it's the latter, then the resistance to policies that aim for equity takes on a different meaning.

In that context, the desire for policies that equally distribute benefits might not actually be aiming for any sort of equality at all. Rather, when faced with a policy that might primarily benefit women, a policy that might partially address the existing inequalities in the workplace, perhaps the male dominated workforce prefer to leave well enough alone.

Because why would they want to materially address that sort of inequality, if that just means more work for them?

*Photo is from Floris M. Oosterveld at Flickr Creative Commons.

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***It appears all the blog comments from March on have been deleted. I suspect this is user error. I'm so sorry! I'm going to go through my emails and manually copy & paste them back, at least as much as I can.