It's our fault, installment #5,726

As if we needed more proof that mothers can’t win, the Boston Globe recently ran an editorial claiming that the long hours Americans work are women’s fault. The next day the Wall Street Journal reported on a study that found lawyers who are mothers are less productive than non-mothers—whereas lawyers who are fathers are more productive than non-fathers. Which is it—are we women cold workaholics or slackers?

As both Broadsheet and Carolyn Elefant in a letter to the WSJ noticed, there’s a problem with the lawyer study’s definition of productivity. The researchers in fact measured billable hours, which they equated with productivity, which isn't necessarily the same thing at all. Elefant wrote, “I’d be curious to see, for example, whether women lawyers manage to complete tasks more quickly precisely because they have less time. If that’s the case (and I suspect it is), perhaps having children makes them [more] productive, not less.”

Exactly.

The study also found that women without children are more “productive” (bill more hours) than anyone else, male or female, though that brings us back to the Boston Globe’s diatribe against women for working such long hours and upping the ante on all of us.

And then there’s that depressing bit about father lawyers working extra hours, which fits with what researchers have found in other fields. As Joan Williams, Ann Crittenden, Edward McCaffery, and others have explained, the depressing fact that men tend to work even longer hours after they have children is the result of the gender role specialization that our culture—including our tax code—drives parents into. Combine the presumption that mothers be the primary caregivers with the likelihood that the wife in a couple earns less than her husband, add in the lack of public subsidies and meaningful tax deductions for childcare, and, just to really slant the deck, toss in a tax code that heavily taxes the wages of the secondary earner in a family, and you’ve got a recipe for fathers specializing in breadwinning and mothers in caregiving—fathers working longer hours, mothers fewer. Bingo.

Which would seem to suggest that it’s men, or at least fathers, not women, that the Boston Globe should be blaming for the trend to long hours—or that she’s on the wrong track altogether in blaming workers, rather than corporations or government policies. In part because of the perception that mothers are less committed to their work, mothers get paid 40 percent less than men (see that item in my list of facts over to the right). A woman wouldn’t be irrational if she felt the need to overcompensate for this assumption by working extra hours (or, if she’s paid hourly, compensate for her low rate of pay by working more hours), thereby demonstrating her devotion to work. Many mothers will tell you that after they had babies their bosses subjected them to extra demands beyond what other employees faced, as if to test their commitment to work. So give me a break (yet again) with this it’s-our-fault business.