Housewife Careers

This is something I’ve been wanting to write about for a very long time, but have kept putting it off. The ultimate trigger for writing this is this article about women with children in Amazon asking for backup child care at work. Since this hits rather close home, this is a good enough trigger to write.

Quoting the article:

“Everyone wants to act really tough and pretend they don’t have human needs,” says Kristi Coulter, who worked in various roles at Amazon for almost 12 years and observed that many senior executives had stay-at-home wives.

(emphasis mine)

While this might be true of Amazon (though not necessarily for other large tech companies), it is true for other careers as well. The nature of the job means that it is impossible to function if you even have partial child-care responsibilities. And that implies that the only way you can do this job is if you have a spouse whose full time job is bringing up the kids.

Without loss of generality (considering that in most cases it’s the women who give up their careers for child-rearing), we can call these jobs “housewife jobs”.

Housewife jobs are jobs where you can do a good job if an only if you have a spouse who spends all her time taking care of the kids. 

The main feature (I would say it is a bug, but whatever) of such a job is usually long work hours that require you to “overlap both ways” – both leave home early in the morning and return late every night, implying that even if you have to drop your kid to day care, it is your spouse who has to do so. And as I’ve found from personal experience, it is simply not possible to work profitably when you have both child-dropping and child-picking-up duties on a single day (unless you have zero commute, like I’ve had for the last eight months).

Housewife jobs also involve lots of travel. Whether it is overnight or not doesn’t matter, since you are likely to be away early mornings and late evenings at least, and this means (once again) that the spouse has to pick up the slack.

Housewife jobs also involve a lot of pressure, which means that even when you are done with work and want to relax with the kids, you are unable to take your mind off work. So it turns out to be rather unprofitable time with the kids – so you might as well spend that working. Which again means the spouse picks up the slack.

Sometimes a job may not be inherently stressful or require long hours, but might be housewife because the company is led by a bunch of people with housewives (the article linked above claims this about Amazon). What this means is that when there is a sufficient number of (mostly) men in senior management who have housewives taking care of kids, their way of working percolates through the culture of the organisation.

These organisations are more likely to demand “facetime” (not the Apple variety). They are more likely to value input more than output (thus privileging fighter work?). And soon people without housewives get crowded out of such organisations, making it even more housewife organisations.

Finally, you may argue that I’ve used UK-style nurseries as the dominant child care mechanism in my post (these usually run 8-6), and that it might be possible to hedge the situations completely with 24/7 nannies or Singapore-style “helpers”. Now, even with full time child care, there are some emergencies that occur from time to time which require the presence of at least one parent. And it can’t be the same parent providing that presence all the time. So if one of the parents is in a “housewife job”, things don’t really work out.

I guess it is not hard to work out a list of jobs or sectors which are inherently “housewife”. Look at where people quit once they have kids. Look at where people quit once they get married. Look at jobs that are staffed by rolling legions of fresh graduates (if you don’t have a kid, you don’t need a housewife).

The scary realisation I’m coming to is that most jobs are housewife jobs, and it is really not easy being a DI(>=1)K household.