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House served as HISD's superintendent from 2021 until last week, when he was replaced by Mike Miles as part of a long-planned takeover of the district by the Texas Education Agency.
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This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
I recently talked with a reader who used to work as a household manager for a rich family — a job I have always wanted to hear the logistics of. Here’s our conversation.
How did you end up in this job?
I was working as a nanny, but I was already in a place where I knew I was ready to move forward. I couldn’t really afford the next step. There was a training program for parent coaching I wanted to do, but it was linked to a graduate program at a university and priced accordingly, so seriously far out of my budget without taking on loans and that felt too risky.
The family I was working with wasn’t a great personality match and I was already casually looking for another job. I had a profile up on some nanny search website and a woman reached out and asked if I’d sit down and hear her out about a nanny-adjacent job she thought I’d be a good match for, which turned out to be a household manager job. On paper, the details of the job were great — big pay increase, health insurance, company car, retirement savings. I knew immediately that this person was going to be an absolute nightmare to work for, but I also knew if I could tough it out for a year, I could save up enough to pay for my coaching course outright and I was willing to make that trade.
What did the job entail?
My official title was household manager, but the role was really more of a hybrid house manager (manage staff, inventory, event planning) and personal assistant (personal errands, email inbox management), with lots of personal errands that they didn’t want to ask the housekeepers to do.
I managed a full-time staff of three and part-time staff of between 3-6, depending on the season, across three properties (one main home, one seasonal home where the entire household moved for part of the year, and one vacation home). This included housekeeping, cooking, and child care staff. I was only responsible for interior duties/staff. I had a counterpart who managed the exterior duties/staff (and the pets, hunting gear and the wine collection).
I was a salaried employee with health insurance, 401k match and a “company” car.
My daily duties were a walk-through when I got there in the morning, and before I left, basically making sure the house always looked perfect, like people didn’t live there. I opened and sorted the mail, kept an eye on one boss’s email, and made sure the housekeepers had what they needed to keep the house running. I was in charge of the staff and family credit cards, checking for fraud, I guess? So once a month, sorting through eight people’s worth of receipts, making sure everything lined up. The housekeepers did the grocery shopping, but it was my job to oversee the lists, and I did most of the rest of the household shopping — clothes, gifts, etc. I did all the hiring and scheduling for an ever rotating list of babysitters, lots of travel planning and booking things, and sometimes I would travel with the family so if they needed anything while there, they could delegate. I did pretty regular event planning — holidays, and big dinners with visiting scholars, politicians, etc. They were the kind of uber wealthy where they sat on the boards of several major nonprofits and were pretty heavily involved in the behind-the-scenes stuff that happens in politics at that financial level.
In practice my job was like 90% errands, internet shopping and what I can only describe as ADHD side quests — someone would say, “Oh, I heard this bakery across the state sells the best croissants” so I’d drive four hours to buy some, or “oh, camping sounds fun” so I’d be responsible for finding the best campground in the area, researching and buying all the best gear for X number people for X nights in the current weather, packing it all and leaving a map and their reservations printed out on the seat of their car (my “exterior” counterpart would be concurrently making sure the cars were ready — washing, gassing, loading the cars for me and also pulling wine for the trip), or “we want to try a gluten-free diet now, please replace everything in the pantry with similar gluten-free options by the end of the week.”
The most absurd food request was I had to transport three yogurts to another country. The family was on vacation in a foreign country known for its high-quality dairy products. I got a call from my boss asking me to bring three yogurts from the fridge, and I actually laughed, I thought it was a joke. It was not. I had to figure out how to pack and keep cool individual yogurts over three connecting flights and through customs in two different countries.
How did you transport the yogurts?
Okay, I was actually super proud of this. The yogurts were 4 oz and weren’t going to fit in a quart Ziplock anyway, so I had to keep them cold and un-crushed in my checked bag. The other limiting factor was that I have that kind of vague ethnic look that people tend to project their assumptions/prejudices onto and in an airport that looks like being “randomly” pulled out of line for an extra search, and then finding one of those little love notes from TSA inside my checked bags about how they also “randomly” selected my bags for an extra search. So random! This meant I needed to pack this in a way that wouldn’t get pulled apart and ruined by some overzealous agents. I was afraid an actual cooler would look too weird on an X-ray, so I bought a bunch of soft pearl ice packs, like the kind you use if you hurt yourself, and a big, clear Tupperware container. I put the yogurts in a large Ziplock and sealed it shut with tape, in case the pressure change exploded them. I put that in the Tupperware (to add structure to keep them from smashing) with Ziplocks of ice (so it would mold around the yogurts more completely). My hope was that if the TSA agents could easily open the package and see that it was really just yogurt, they’d leave it alone. I wrapped the Tupperware in a beach towel layered with the pearl ice packs and put it in the center of my suitcase, so that it would be as insulated as possible, both for temperature control and so they wouldn’t get smashed. I hand-wrote a note for TSA explaining that my boss was completely unreasonable and I would likely be fired if I showed up without this yogurt so please don’t throw them away, and please re-wrap them after you’ve decided they are, in fact, yogurt.
TSA did an extremely half assed job re-wrapping them, but it was enough to keep them cool and only partially smooshed (but not broken!). When I triumphantly handed over the yogurts, he was like, “Oh, I forgot I asked you to bring these,” and then didn’t eat them.
That’s amazing. Can you share any other ridiculous/over-the-top things you found yourself doing?
Gosh, so many. I think the yogurt was the most absurd, but the camping, pantry and long-distance bread pickup are all real scenarios. My boss once decided at the last minute she didn’t want to sit on the planning committee for a major fundraising gala, and sent me instead. That one was actually really fun. Lots of weird little stuff, like having a toy thrown on my desk that they picked up on vacation and being instructed to track it down in every color, every permutation it comes in because the kid liked it and now they need ALL OF THEM. Or I’d find a stack of catalogues on my desk and have to leaf through page by page to find all the circled items to order.
What did you like most about it? Dislike most?
In the beginning, the novelty of how chaotic it was made it interesting. I love problem solving and having lots of variety in my day. Turns out I also like hiring and am really good at it for household staffing, after being on the opposite end of it for so long. It’s something I still do for my clients now, helping them hire nannies and housekeepers. I have a good eye for if personalities will mesh well in close quarters, something people do not put enough weight on when hiring inside their house. I really liked most of my staff, I definitely stayed longer than I should have, for them.
The worst part was hands down my bosses. Once you get to the top few percent of income, you likely haven’t heard the word “no” in years and it shows. There’s a level of wealth that I think warps the realities of even once-kind people. It was easily the most erratic, toxic work environment I’ve ever been a part of. You talk all the time about how a toxic enough work environment can really warp your sense of what’s “normal” and seep into your regular life and that’s so true. I think I have a clearer understanding of how people get stuck in abusive relationships now. After a long day of screaming at me, my boss would be like, “Oh, today was rough, get yourself the nicest flowers you can find, on me, tonight” and then have left jewelry on my desk in the morning, but if it took me more than a half hour to send a thank-you email, she was back in my office berating me for being an ingrate.
By the end, it was really starting to affect my health and I realized I was only staying to shield the rest of the staff from the worst of our bosses’ behavior. I knew I needed to get out before things got worse.
What were your hours typically like?
In theory, I worked 9-5 — I was salaried and “some weeks you’ll work 50 hours, some weeks you’ll work 30” lol. In reality, my bosses were boundary tramplers so my actual schedule was all over the place, I never worked only 40 hours. My boss called my work phone and sent texts and emails that they expected responses to at all hours. If I was lucky, I was able to shove a quick snack in my face at my desk, but if the family was home I never got a real lunch break because my boss could not handle seeing anyone sitting down and not looking busy. If a babysitter called in sick, that was now my job to stay through until the parents returned. If there was an event, I was there 12 hours in the days leading up to it and 18 hours the day of. My vacation days were purely theoretical. The housekeepers could take time off, because I could hire a temporary replacement to do extra cleanings while they were gone, but not me. It wasn’t even strongly discouraged, but explicitly “no one else can do your job and you can’t leave her (my boss) unsupported like that.”
What surprised you most about the job?
I don’t think I realized that this was less a structured job and more they were essentially paying me to be on call. I definitely did not have 40+ hours of real work to do, I was just expected to be there in case anyone wanted anything. This was especially true for travel, I’m still shocked someone was willing to fly me all over the world just to guarantee I would drive out and grab their paper every morning on vacation, and be on call to, like, run up to the pharmacy if someone ran out of sunscreen.
I’ve always thought that if I ever became fabulously rich, I wouldn’t want household staff because I value privacy and solitude too much! Can you talk about that a little — how did that work, with people living their private lives alongside paid staff? Did they just give up a certain amount of privacy? Pretend staff weren’t there? Something else? And how did you get comfortable with that on your end?
I’ve spent my entire career inside other people’s homes. I started babysitting when I was 11 and have done work in this realm ever since. It would probably be a really weird transition to this work as an adult, but I’ve been doing it for three-quarters of my life, and I can’t really imagine anything else. It helps that I am also an intensely private person, so the urge to pretend I never saw something to preserve someone else’s privacy is very strong. You know everything about people’s lives — you know what kind of marriage they have, how they treat their children, you know if they’re getting a divorce or having a baby before they tell their friends or family.
How this looks is so, so different just based on the kind of people you’re working for. For this family, there was such a clear delineation — we were staff. They would often pretend we weren’t there, and the expectation was definitely that we would make ourselves as invisible as possible. We were not allowed to call them by their first names, we were only allowed to use the staff bathroom, I was allowed to use the front stairs but the housekeepers were not. It was definitely my least comfortable job.
That being said, if I miraculously become that rich, I would definitely hire someone to help my family. If you’re paying someone a good living wage and treating them with respect, it is such a luxury to have someone around whose job it is to help you. But I had so many other good experiences as a nanny, so that colors my opinion. Two of the girls I used to care for were bridesmaids in my wedding and I’m still in touch with most of the families I worked for.
How long did you stay in that job?
About two years and I was the longest lasting person in that role. I think the previous record was 14 months and I’ve heard no one has lasted even a year since I left. Still unsure if that’s something I should be proud of!
Did you ever do this kind of work for another family afterwards, or was this a one-time thing?
It was a one-time thing. It gave me the funding I needed to do my coaching training and get my business off the ground without working another job to stay afloat. And because of how unpleasant the family was, the work itself was really … hollow. I like doing work that feels like I am helping people, like it matters. There was just no amount of volunteer work I could do on the side that felt like it came close to balancing out the fact that I was just facilitating rich babies behaving badly. I suspect a lot of what was the worst about this job was specific to these particular bosses, but I didn’t want to find out.
Tell us a bit about the work you’re doing now, with this behind you!
I work as a postpartum doula and parent coach now, and I have a really narrow specialty. I only work with disabled/high-risk and otherwise Covid-cautious families. As so much of the world “moves on,” a lot of families are really struggling to find connection and support from someone who will affirm their choices instead of minimizing their concerns. That means I do a lot of virtual work, and have a really comprehensive in-person safety policy requiring masking and testing.
I love my work. I genuinely enjoy supporting families and this work combines all my expertise of years of nannying, coaching, and being a mom and some skills I picked up as a household manager, like hiring. The household manager job helped me get here in a really obvious way, in that it literally paid for my coaching training, but also in a surprising way. While I was working for the family, I was running an errand to the head office of my boss’s company and I ran into an old friend in the lobby. They were someone I’d known since high school and always enjoyed spending time with (we’d actually even lived in a house together with friends in college) but had lost touch over the years. We made plans to get together and catch up. We’re married now and have three kids.
Without that job, I never would have reconnected with my partner and become a mom. I thought after all my years of childcare, having a baby would be easy but my postpartum phase was the most humbling experience of my life. It made me realize I wanted to refocus my work on families who had just had babies, and my amazing, supportive partner was the one who encouraged me to train and certify as a doula and shift my care model (in the middle of a pandemic!) and refocus on families like ours who need care and support from someone who is still serious about avoiding Covid. As awful as the job was, it put me on a path to something (and several someones!) I love very much, so I don’t regret my time there.
After the tech company introduced the Apple Vision Pro, The Onion asked Apple fans what they thought about the new VR headset, and this is what they said.
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This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Employee called in sick on a day I knew she didn’t want to work
I manage a department which operates 24/7. To be honest, the job is low pay and the work is challenging and stressful and under strenuous conditions. This leads to high turnover, plenty of call-ins, etc. In short, it is not my company, so there is little I can do to change the pay, but I do my best to improve the working conditions and make it more friendly and inviting to work there.
I have an employee on one shift, Amanda, who rarely ever works weekends, since she took care of her mother-in-law with cancer on those days. Of course I was accommodating to this.
Her mother-in-law passed away 1-2 weeks ago. When I was informed of this, I started to schedule her again on the weekends and she was surprised and not happy and requested a change via email, though I explained I needed to be fair to others on the team who do not get weekends off as often as she did in the past. Amanda has a lot of personal issues and calls in sick more frequently than the average individual.
Today is Saturday and she has called in sick due to vomiting. I have a hard time believing that she is being honest based on the fact that she does not want to work Saturdays. I saw her last night and she looked fine, but obviously things can change quickly. The interesting thing is that she mentioned she would be okay to come in on Sunday (tomorrow) and she knew this, as though she can 100% work that day, but not Saturday due to feeling unwell. Not sure how someone can be positive they’ll be fine the next day, but not today.
Should I drop this and accept it and see if a pattern arises on the days which are less preferred for her or ask for a doctor’s note (even though she has said she cannot get one)? I know little good can come from arguing about how reliable and trustworthy she is being, but I worry that letting it go sends a message that people can call in sick and give literally any reason why without it being discussed.
There are two separate issues here: First, Amanda’s mother-in-law, who she’s been caring for, only died one to two weeks ago! That’s much too recent to have just put her back on the schedule for weekends without even discussing it with her first. Why not give her some time for bereavement, and then have a real conversation about her schedule before changing it? If I were Amanda, I’d be feeling pretty put off by that — like you weren’t treating me as a fellow human who had just experienced something awful.
The sick day is a separate issue. As a general rule, you should default to believing your employees unless there’s a clear and compelling reason not to. If someone develops a pattern of unreliability, then you address the pattern — but in general, pushing back on a single sick day is a bad move. If Amanda’s overall reliability is an issue, talk to her about it (although ideally you’d give her some grace right now because she just had a death in the family), but wait to see if there’s a pattern before you act. Don’t ask for a doctor’s note for a single day of sickness, for all the reasons here.
2. My boss slept with my boyfriend
I recently had a horrible break-up with my man of four years, and we just had a baby boy back in October. When I came back to work because we really needed the money, shortly after I found out that my boss was the reason for all this. She was sleeping with him, and when he left he moved right in with her. I’m devastated and heartbroken. I had to quit because I could not bear to think of working and having to listen to her tell me what to do. What do you think I should do? I lost everything because of her?
I’m sorry that happened. It would be awful under any circumstances, but to find out that your boss — someone with whom there’s a certain vulnerability built into the relationship and who you generally assume isn’t actively working to destroy your personal life — was the person your partner was cheating with would add a whole additional level of betrayal to an already horrible situation.
When you ask what you should do, I think you’re wondering if there’s something official you can do professionally — like filing a complaint? In theory you could try that (most companies do not want their managers sleeping with employees’ partners and it’s possible they’d be interested to know that’s why you quit) but there’s not really anything for you to gain by doing that (and the potential for a lot of drama on top of what’s already happened). I’d rather see you leave her in your past and focus on moving forward.
3. Was I wrong to be bothered by my coworkers’ coffee clique?
Years ago, I worked on a small team (six people) that would have several meetings a week at the beginning of the day. Often just the six of us, sometimes with an extra few people from other teams. We were very tight-knit and worked really well together.
Three of the people on our team were a little more social outside of work — they attended the same church. I was also closer to one of those three; we had attended grad school together recently. The thing I’m wondering about is that every Friday those three would all show up to the meeting with coffee for each other, and not anyone else. It always had one of their names on it so it was obvious it was like a rotating, reciprocal scenario. I am not saying I expect other people to buy me coffee, but it 100% made me feel left out and sad about not being included. I was young and it was my first real job so I never spoke up, but I’m wondering if I was too sensitive and should have just let it go, if it really was as rude as I perceived it, and if there was anything I could have said or done.
I’d say it was mildly rude.
Not if it only happened a few times, but because it was a regular thing it feels a bit cliquey — it sends the signal (presumably inadvertently) “we’re our own closer group of three that the rest of you aren’t in.” Of course, it’s absolutely fine for people to have closer relationships with some coworkers than with others; that’s natural and there’s nothing wrong with it. But when you have a recurring meeting of only six people and three of them are constantly bringing coffee for each other, there’s a point where politeness requires asking if the others would like to be included.
Ideally it’s something that you would shrug off — some people are closer with others at work, and the coffee thing is more thoughtless than anything else. But in theory you also could have said, “Hey, can I get in on this coffee rotation?” (And ideally they would have asked.)
4. Putting projects that went badly on your resume
I am applying for jobs at the moment. One thing a lot of roles I am interested in ask for is experience planning projects. While I was part of a team that created and implemented projects in my most recent job, there is one project I took charge of. However, this project went very poorly. It was intended to get feedback from our user base about how we could support them during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic and not one person responded. My job at the time was intended for young people just out of college and I can very clearly see now why it went so badly. However, I estimated staff time needed, I figured out how to get the technical side working, and I gave the awkward presentation where I talked about a dozen things we should have done differently.
Does this experience need to stay relegated only to answering “tell me about a time you failed” or can I mention it as an example of leading a project? Is it okay to talk about some of these things in a cover letter and gloss over the outcome?
Unfortunately you shouldn’t use it as an example of leading a project — it’s very likely that interviewers will want to delve into the details, and “the one project I led failed badly” won’t make you a strong candidate for an employer who’s looking for someone with a track record of leading projects successfully. That doesn’t mean the experience is useless — it sounds like you learned a lot and, as you said, it’ll be a good answer if you’re asked to talk about a time you didn’t succeed. (It also sounds like your employer didn’t set you up to succeed, and that’s not on you.)
5. Can my employer make me use PTO if I’d rather take the time unpaid?
I took time off for my wedding this year before I had accrued any PTO. I told my employer I would be more than happy to take it unpaid, but they said that it’s not allowed as “the expectation is that I am here 40 hours a week.” As such, I know have a negative PTO balance that I would have to pay back if I left, which I am trying to do. However, when we close unexpectedly early, we are not expected to us PTO on those days so I’m confused what “expected to be there 40 hours” means. I guess I’m wondering: (1) can employers force you to use PTO you don’t have? and (2) is it legal to make you pay back a negative balance even though you didn’t want to use that time in the first place?
They didn’t word it well, but I think what they meant by “we expect you be here 40 hours a week” is: “We’ve planned our staffing with the assumption that you’ll be here every day minus your annual allotment of PTO — so we don’t want you to take additional time off unpaid, because then you’ll be working (for example) only 45 weeks a year rather than the 47 we were counting on. Therefore, we’re going to deduct this time from your annual PTO allotment rather than add to it with unpaid time off.”
To answer your questions: They can indeed require that your time off come out of your annual allotment for the year, even if that gives you a negative PTO balance. In most states, you can be required to pay that back when you leave (although check to see if your state is an exception to this).
INDIANAPOLIS—Announcing that landmark new laboratory methods had made the once dreamed-of medication a reality, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly unveiled insulin Wednesday that doesn’t work on poor people. “Thanks to our proprietary advancements in cellular technology, the active ingredients in insulin will now only…
Get your murder puns ready because iconic copaganda show Law & Order is heading north of the border! And while we could focus on CityTv’s choice to make yet another American spinoff instead of a Canadian original or the fact that this screams ‘cheap way to get around the WGA strike that stopped production of […]
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
For the last three years, I have been running a consulting company which grew off the back of a long career in my industry. Last September, I hired an account manager to free up my time for business development. He is new to my industry but has relevant experience in another field and was full of ideas which I loved.
He recently handed in his notice, along with a scathing personal breakdown of everything he feels I do wrong with the business. Things that I’ve included him in and we’ve actively discussed together at length — project management, workloads, outsourcing, etc. The catalyst was that we’re advertising for a part-timer to help reduce burnout and it’s made him feel undermined as he feels he can take on that work. This decision was discussed before advertising the role and no concerns were raised. The tasks that role will cover are very junior and I want his focus elsewhere. He is my only full-time employee (there are four of us).
I don’t want to end our relationship negatively, but his response was so unexpected and rude that I’m truly taken aback. I’m by no means perfect but I felt like we’ve had a great working relationship up to this point. How do I acknowledge his feedback while also letting him know that the personal criticism is totally unfair and uncalled for? Ultimately he’s leaving and this response feels very emotional so I’m not sure if I should respond to this at all.
I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.
Other questions I’m answering there today include:
employee chats on the phone with a coworker under guise of work
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
Life has given me a cruel and hilarious plot twist and I’m at a loss of what to do or how to address it. Back in 2020, peak pandemic times, I was doing what many singles did and went on virtual dates with people through apps. One particularly memorable Zoom date was a guy who just randomly started taking his clothes off. Didn’t ask, no indication of why, just … started disrobing. He legit was naked-manning me (How I Met Your Mother clip to explain). At no point was the conversation flirty or sexual in nature — in fact, it wasn’t going well at all.
We had made dinner in our respective kitchens on Zoom, and after eating I was drinking wine and he was making himself cocktails while we talked about our interests, family life, the typical early dating topics. Then suddenly, he just took off his shirt out of nowhere while I was talking about my family or friends. I stopped and said, “Uh, what’s going on here?” and he just shrugged and ignored the question, and said he was going to relocate. So I kept talking thinking it was weird, but whatever, people can be quirky or maybe his AC went out. He started walking back to his bedroom and next thing I know he literally dropped his basketball shorts on the camera and plopped down on his bed in his boxer briefs. I made a comment about it not being that kind of date and suggested clothing stay on, he didn’t acknowledge it and started talking about his family, so I pretty immediately after that noped out of there with a “it’s late, gotta go” for fear of my eyeballs being subjected to the full monty without any kind of warning, and never talked to him again.
That is, until the first day of my new job. Two minutes before joining my first team introduction call, I looked at the org chart and saw that not only is he in my organization, he’s on my immediate team. I swiftly played dumb during the team call, and just pretended to have no idea who he is. He seemed to take the same approach for now.
Sadly, I’ll have to work with him somewhat and he’s the most tenured on the team for questions and internal processes.
My question to you is, how on earth would you handle this going forward? Do I tell anyone? Do I address it with him?
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE MEN
I once had a date do this in-person. We were at his apartment for a drink after dinner and I was standing looking at his books and when I turned back around … yeah.
Anyway.
I very much hope he remembers you and is humiliated … but sadly, I suspect he’s oblivious. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s done this so much that he doesn’t even have a clear memory of doing it to you.
In a world where I controlled all things, he would be mortified and apologize to you and every other woman he’s attempted to push a non-consensual strip tease on and perhaps would voluntarily retire himself from society for his remaining years. In this world, though, most likely he’s either going to pretend it never happened or he’s going to hit on you again at some point. The former is preferable, so let’s hope for that.
As for what you should do … I wish you had better options, but treating him like you don’t recognize him at all is probably your best one. If you pick up on any weirdness or creepiness — if he’s doing anything that makes you uncomfortable or your experience at work less pleasant — at that point it’s reasonable to seek assistance from either your boss or HR, explaining the history. But as long as he’s treating you the way you’d expect from any other new colleague, both of you acting as if the Zoom debacle didn’t happen is likely your easiest path.
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This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
Even posing this question, I am asking myself: AITA?
A colleague of mine had his first child during the pandemic. Obviously, like parents worldwide (myself included), he was at a loss for childcare. During that time we all worked from home, and children, pets, and partners appeared in and out of Zoom screens. My colleague had the benefit of having a family member (not the child’s other parent) provide primary care for the child in their home, an arrangement that continues to this day.
Three years on, however, we are back to work in a hybrid way. My colleague continues to have his child cared for at home, and the now toddler still regularly appears in Zoom meetings. My issue is that my colleague’s family member is sometimes unavailable. And on days my colleague is required to come into the office, he brings his toddler to work.
I know that now and again we all suffer an unexpected gap in childcare, and that may result in bringing a child to work. But this is becoming more than a once-in-a-blue moon phenomenon.
I get it: daycare is expensive. I have to pay for it for my own children, and all my other colleagues with young children have also provisioned for more stable child care arrangements. While the disruption that this situation causes is fairly limited, I am reminded of that children’s book “What if Everybody Did That?”
The situation also raises two equity-related concerns for me. First, my colleague’s job description means that he can work remotely more than 50% of the time, and his on-site work does somewhat accommodate a child in tow. But we have other staff members who can work off-site no more than 20% of the time, and their on-site work is not at all child-friendly. Employees who can avoid paying daycare fees effectively enjoy a $10,000-$18,000 annual perk. My second equity-related qualm is that this seems to me like a behavior that male employees can get away with and be seen as a “good dad,” while female employees could be considered “unprofessional.”
I’m not sure how to raise this in my organization, for fear of being seen as unsupportive of working parents. Any advice?
This is so tricky. First and foremost, is there still a child care shortage in your area? Since you and your other coworkers all have secured child care, I’m going to assume there’s not — but if there is (and if, for example, everyone else who has it is relying on family members rather than outside carers), none of the rest of this answer applies. If people in your area literally can’t hire child care right now, then your coworker is doing what he can. But assuming it’s available…
The biggest thing I’d focus on is the impact on your work (and if you manage a team, on your team’s work). If he’s unavailable when you need to reach him during work hours because he’s tending to his toddler, or if he’s letting his child disrupt or delay calls, those are legitimate work issues to raise, with him directly or with your manager or his. (And those are real problems — there’s a reason that before the pandemic and subsequent child care shortage, most companies had policies prohibiting working from home if you were caring for young kids at the same time. It’s the same reason why so many parents desperately needed some slack when schools and daycares were closed and they had no choice but to watch their kids at the same time they were working.)
It’s also reasonable to ask, “What if everyone did this?” It’s not fair for one person to regularly bring his kid to work if others wouldn’t be allowed to do it (and it’s reasonable to be concerned about the impact on the work environment if lots of other people did). Your equity concerns are real ones, too.
Whether you’re well-positioned to be the one raising those questions is a different issue, though. If you’re new or very junior or not in great standing or recently used a bunch of political capital on something else, you might not be well-positioned to raise it. On the other hand, if you have some seniority and are in good stranding and you have some capital built up — and especially if you’re in a role with some management responsibility, although that’s not essential — you might be better positioned to bring it up within your organization.
What that should look like is harder to say. If you have the ear of someone who has the authority to deal with this more broadly, you could use that route — framing it as, “I’m glad we’re supportive of working parents, especially as one myself, but now that child care is more widely available again, I’m concerned that letting one person regularly bring their kid to work when everyone else is paying for child care risks becoming an equity issue … or causing problems if multiple people decide it’s okay to do.” You could also ask for clearer policies on working while caring for children — perhaps suggesting, for example, that working remotely while caring for a young child be explicitly allowed in emergency situations (such as when an employee’s regular child care falls through or a child is home sick) but not as the default plan because of the distractions created. (That doesn’t get at the fact that not everyone has a job that will allow for those emergency exceptions — for example, some people will have jobs that can’t be done from home at all — and so you might suggest a solution like this one to counter that.)
There’s still a risk that someone will feel you’re coming down too hard on working parents — I assume someone’s going to accuse me of that for writing this answer! — or on this one colleague in particular, but these are reasonable positions to take and reasonable concerns to raise.
Our norms around this changed so much during the pandemic — because they had to change for a while or parents wouldn’t be able to be in the workforce at all — but if indeed child care is once again accessible in your area (if), companies need to be having these conversations openly and resetting expectations to fit the situation now.
This Pride Month, we’re proud to stand with the LGBTQIA+ community. We believe everyone has a part to play in doing The Work of eradicating injustice and homophobia for good. And we thought our part could be coloring in our social media logo for a month.
Some fight for equality on the legislative front; some raise funds for hard-working charities; some mentor homeless LGBT youth. Our weapon of choice is an AI drawing of a rainbow.
From July through May, we’d probably say we identify as a heterosexual, cisgender financial institution slash legal person. But when June comes around, we don our digital rainbow background and become a Big Gay Bank of Gays (BGBG).
We are thrilled to make this brief, flimsy gesture that angers some and accomplishes little to commemorate and celebrate those who fought and gave their lives for LGBTQIA+ rights. Without their sacrifice, there would be no corresponding and totally unexpected 5 percent gross uptick in profits during this sudden gay interlude. We’re even more thrilled about that.
For us, Pride Month is all about raising awareness and taking positive action, like opening our social media account and clicking “Add Temporary Profile Picture.” But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be about turning a little profit too. You know, in the short term.
The Pride flag is a powerful symbol of love and freedom. On our social media, it also signals how virtuous we are as a corporation (in all of our non-Middle East locations). As a bonus, this bare-minimum bandwagon hopping actually takes care of our mandatory Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion training too. If there’s one thing we stand for, it’s diversity. But we stand efficiently—two exotic polychrome birds, one big ol’ gay stone.
Not stones like stoning stones. God, no, we didn’t mean that. We don’t endorse animal cruelty either.
Let’s go with a different metaphor. We’re flying the flag for Pride; we’re raising a banner. Except we decided against flying a literal flag or banner because we already have the logo thing. For now. It’s just like a flag but cheaper in every conceivable way.
Just look at all those pretty colored pixels. Almost like thousands of flags, but with much less effort. It might be for 720 hours only, but we’re making enough song and dance about it, internally and externally, to last all year long. Repeatedly (and proudly) pointing out our little collection of multicolored dots on a screen to our staff serves the dual purpose of demonstrating our superficial commitment to equality, and making our gay, bi, trans, queer, inter, and ace employees feel super conspicuous and uncomfortable.
When it comes to righting injustice, we all have our parts to play. Our part is this tokenistic little doodle before we go back in the closet for the next eleven months. Yours could be taking on the Supreme Court, but who’s to say any one part is more important than another? We are all doing The Work, which ironically was barely any work at all.
You’re so welcome, gay community—it was literally the least we could do.
Thousands of people and human rights activists gather on the Dam Square to attend a rally for abortion rights worldwide on May 7, 2022, in Amsterdam. | Pierre Crom/Getty Images
Yes, even the 12-week ones.
Republicans scrambling toaddress mounting backlash to abortion bans havelanded on what they hope they can market as a moderate political compromise: limiting abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Over the last month, Republicans in North Carolina and Nebraska have passed 12-week abortion bans, a dramatic reduction in access for states that previously allowed abortion up until 20 weeks and 22 weeks, respectively.
Republican politicians are casting these new 12-week bans as “mainstream,” comparing them to even more extreme GOP-led states that have banned virtually all abortion, and pointing to other countries, particularly in Europe, that also impose gestational age limits at 12 weeks.
The rhetorical strategy of invoking other countries to justify banning abortion will sound familiar to those who followedthe overturn of Roe v. Wade. In that case, Dobbs v. Jackson, Mississippi lawmakers defended their 15-week abortion ban by pointing out that most European countries have even earlier restrictions.
In the Dobbs Supreme Court hearing itself, Justice John G. Roberts claimed the proposed 15-week ban mirrors “the standard that the vast majority of other countries have.” In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito cited a study published by a leading anti-abortion group that argued the US was out of step with the rest of the world in terms of abortion after 20 weeks.
The study, published by the think tank arm of the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said 47 out of 50 European nations limit “elective” abortion before 15 weeks, meaning before then doctors are not required to attest to a particular justification for the abortion.
But differences between the US and European countries are more complex than that simple comparison suggests. In practice, abortion limits in the United States are far more restrictive than what exists in most of the Western world, including in nations with gestational age limits at 12 weeks, like Germany, Denmark, Belgium, and Italy.
This distinction between “elective” abortions (or “abortion on demand,” as it’s more provocatively called) and “therapeutic” abortions, which are done for medical reasons, might seem like a key distinction between the US and Europe. But in practice, the line is much blurrier. All abortions are ultimately elective — no one is forced to end a pregnancy, even if a doctor recommends it. Plenty of elective abortions are done for therapeutic reasons.
Moreover, European countries that have 12-week limits on “elective” abortions still make it fairly easy for women to get abortions later on, with relatively broad exceptions for mental health or socioeconomic circumstances. Republicans have aggressively fought against similar exceptions, and in particular have worked to bar consideration of mental health risk — even the risk of suicide if a pregnancy continues — as a factor.
And in other ways, European countries make it easier to get an abortion than in even relatively permissive jurisdictions in the United States.Across Europe, abortion services are coveredunder national health insurance, meaning the cost of accessing care is a far lower barrier for pregnant people facing time constraints.
By contrast, in the US, cost is one of the biggest hurdles to ending a pregnancy. Even though more than90 percent of abortions occur within the first 13 weeks, roughly 75 percent of all US abortion patients are low-incomeaccording to 2014 numbers, and researchers find Americans needing care in the second trimester tend to be those with less education, Black women, and women who have experienced “multiple disruptive events” in the past year, such as losing a job.
Republican lawmakers are also bucking international trends in working to aggressively restrict access to telehealth abortion care and medication abortion generally — which allows patients, especially those who live in remote and rural areas, to get the abortion services they seek on a faster timeline. Both North Carolina and Nebraska have fully banned abortion via telehealth, despite research affirming its safety and efficacy.
Across the globe, the clear trend has been to expandaccess to abortion, decriminalizethe procedure, and loosenrestrictions. While restrictive policies, including earlier gestational limits, still present barriers for international abortion care, per the Center for Reproductive Rights, nearly 60 countries have liberalized their laws and policies on abortion since 1994. Only four — the US, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Poland — have further restricted rights.
Even with earlier gestational limits, abortion in Europe is broadly affordable and accessible. This is not the paradigm Republicans are proposing in the United States. They are fighting to keep abortion expensive, particularly for low-income patients who rely on Medicaid; to limit the reasons like mental health for which patients can access legal abortion; and to restrict access to care, all while imposing bans on telemedicine, ramping up criminal penalties for providers, and shortening the legal timeline for pregnant people to raise funds, arrange travel, and book mandatory medical appointments.
Understanding international abortion access in practice
Republicans have been eager to point to countries that restrict “elective” abortion after 12 weeks to justify the supposedly mainstream nature of their new bans. But across Europe, the cost of abortion care is fully paid for by federal governments, making first-trimester abortions simply easier to do. Abortions in the US can easily exceed $500 out of pocket, and only 17 states currently cover abortion under their Medicaid programs, which they must do with state funds, not federal dollars, as Congress prohibits it.
Another difference is that abortion exceptions for “health of the pregnant woman” in Europe take into account mental health, too. In Germany, for example, while abortion is permitted upon request throughout the first 12 weeks, someone can seek legal abortion through 22 weeks if it would help them “avert the danger of grave impairmentto [their] physical or mental health.”
In Britain, which allowslegal abortion up to 24 weeks, it’s similarly clarified that a pregnant person can access careif it’s determined that ending the pregnancy would cause less damage to the patient’s physical or mental health than continuing to carry.
“This is always granted [by doctors] under the correct assumption that continuing a pregnancy is always more dangerous than terminating, and that continuing an unwanted pregnancy is always detrimental to a person’s mental health,” said Maria Lewandowska, a reproductive and sexual health researcher at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Any doctor can provide this authorization, she said, and in practice, patients often get approval directly from doctors at abortion clinics. Advocates in the UK have been encouraging the government to authorize nurses and midwives to grant this permission, too.
Some countries don’t explicitly state “mental health” in their statute, but recognize that maternal health includes psychological health. The author of France’s 1975 abortion law clarified during legislative hearings that “the very term ‘health’ covers, it seems to me, the mental aspect as well as the physical aspect.” The World Health Organization’s definition of “health” includes “mental health.” In Canada, leaders make no formal distinction between physical and mental health, which Joyce Arthur, executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, says allows providers to “better integrate abortion care into the broader health care system.”
Meanwhile, research on the psychological harm associated with carrying unwanted pregnancies continues to mount. The Turnaway Study, a longitudinal study on the effects of unwanted pregnancy on patients’ lives, found that the mental health of women able to end unwanted pregnancies was significantly better than that of women forced to carry to term. Another report published in 2022 found that suicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant people during pregnancy and the first year following it.
Anti-abortion activists in the US, for their part, continue to dismiss these studies. “Having an abortion will not mitigate mental health issues,” said Laura Echevarria, a spokesperson for the National Right to Life Committee, which has lobbied state legislatures to exclude mental health.
In addition to providing exceptions for mental health and paying for abortion care, pregnant people in European countries can also seek legal abortion beyond their country’s 12- or 14-week limit for broad socioeconomic reasons, like feeling too young or too old to have children, feeling consumed by existing children, being a single parent, or lacking a stable housing or financial situation. The Center for Reproductive Rights counts at least 16 European countries that permit abortion on socioeconomic grounds.
In Denmark, for example, though the country has a 12-week ban on paper, it’s considered relatively feasible for residents to get approval for abortion beyond that. In 2021, 803 pregnant people applied to get an abortion in Denmark beyond 12 weeks, and 750 were approved.
Thousands of pregnant women living in countries with 12-week abortion bans travel internationally to end their pregnancies
Even with broader grounds for legal exceptions and greater financial assistance available in countries with earlier gestational age limits, first-trimester bans in Europe still force thousands of pregnant people to travel internationally every year to end their unwanted pregnancies. (A French parliamentary report from 2020 estimated that as many as 4,000 French women traveled abroad for abortion annually due to gestational limits. In 2022, French legislators extended their limit to 14 weeks.)
One study published in March looked at people who traveled from countries like Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, and Italy to the Netherlands or England for later abortion care. Over half of the pregnant people surveyed hadn’t learned they were even pregnant until they were at least 14 weeks along, when they had already surpassed the limits in their home countries.
The reasons participants cited for not knowing they were pregnant hold strong relevance for pregnant people in the US living in states with new 12- or six-week bans. The participants all said they would have preferred earlier abortion care but didn’t know they were pregnant due to reasons like irregular periods, lack of clear pregnancy signs, misinformation by doctors about contraception, or their gestational age.
While European passports make travel to other EU countries relatively easy, pregnant people then have to shoulder the cost of travel and the abortion, as national governments only fund abortion care for their own residents. Feminist activists help fundraise for pan-European surgical abortion, as well as the distribution of medication abortion to regions where it’s illegal, but second-trimester abortions for non-Dutch residents can cost up to 1,100 euros. Abortion travel also delays care, which increases a pregnant person’s health risks.
Twelve-week bans in the US won’t end the need for abortion care in the second trimester, because there will always be women who lack the knowledge that they’re pregnant before then. But if Republicans wanted to reduce the need for abortion after 12 weeks, they could back straightforward policies to make the procedure more accessible and affordable.
It was immediately unclear who was responsible for the the damage of the dam and power station on the Dnipro River. The damage risked to flood areas where hundreds of thousands of people live.
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