09 Feb Balancing Act: The New Work-Life Balance

Recent developments are making work-life balance more challenging

By Carla Bell

Between attacks on corporate DEI initiatives—a ripple effect of the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action in higher education last June—and post-pandemic return-to-office mandates, there are mixed signals at the intersection of race, gender, and age, especially for Black women in the workplace.

Diminished diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and reduced efforts to redress institutional harm inflicted upon underrepresented groups mean that balancing life and work just got harder. That’s according to New York Times best-selling author Kimberly Latrice Jones, who was counted among the Root 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2020. Among Black women and other women of color, this sunsetting of DEI at work has increased apprehensions about career advancement.

According to the report Women in the Workplace 2022 by McKinsey & Company, “Two-thirds of women under 30 say they would be more interested in advancing if they saw senior leaders with the work-life balance they want.” Even as the world rebounds toward a new normal, more than three years later, work-life balance is elusive.

A staunch advocate for Black working women, STEM professional Christine “Tine” Zekis is CEO of Getting Black Women Paid. She says, “Already, the premise is jarring, because work should not be first.” Noting the trend toward life and work being seen as equally valuable, she says, “I want a life-work imbalance.”

Black women have taken lessons from their workplace experience. They’re setting intentions and reprioritizing to make their own interests first on the list.

Out of chaos, order

Life first. It’s a proposition with plenty of support. Forward-thinking companies are getting on board. With every other Friday off, employees at Dolby US enjoy more than 26 three-day weekends a year. At Jumio, employees create their own schedules, and Bounteous observes what they’re calling Quiet Hours, a four-hour block of focus time, to combat Zoom fatigue and boost overall well-being.

At the onset of the pandemic, everything shifted, says Angelique Adams, PhD, who’d been commuting twice a month as she split time between work in Paris and family in Knoxville, Tennessee. “I realized that everybody was reevaluating their lives.” So, she leveraged COVID downtime to write a career guide for women in STEM. Then, encouraged by good traction from her book, Adams quit her “dream job” and launched Angelique Adams Media Solutions, a leadership training and coaching consultancy.

Work wiser: use your time well

Aim to spend as much time as possible on “the core stuff” of the job, says Laura Vanderkam, who has authored books on time management and productivity.

Try to limit the amount of time you spend on tasks that don’t promote your career, advises Laurie Weingart, a business professor at Carnegie Mellon and a coauthor of The No Club: Putting a Stop
to Women’s Dead-End Work.

After conducting a research review, Weingart and her colleagues found that in various industries—law, tech, engineering, airline security, grocery stores—women are overburdened by non-promotable work in a way that men aren’t.

Women are 44 percent more likely than men to be asked to do a non-promotable task. And when they are asked, women are 50 percent more likely than men to say yes.

For those who must contend with the “angry Black woman” stereotype, add to the equation smiles ear to ear and the mildest of desk-side manners.

Weingart suggests focusing on tasks that showcase your expertise. And when saying no to a non-promotable task, keep your explanation brief. You might also help problem solve. Perhaps suggest another team member who could take it on.

Mental health: know when to say “when”

To know when we’re not in harmony, we have to know when we’re out of tune.

“What can you eliminate?” asks Ashley McGirt-Adair, a psychotherapist and racial trauma specialist. “Not forever, but for a season.”

Michelle Bess, senior vice president of talent and DEI at fintech company OppFi, warns women not to miss the signs that change is needed. Bess knew she had been “checked out” at work and that she was running low on empathy, but “I don’t think I was aware enough to realize that I needed the time [away]. I had a weekend where I just broke down crying. I cried for a whole week. Then I was like, Okay, it’s time, and that really put me on pause,” says Bess. “I went on medical leave. I throttled down in my career.” She underwent three months of intensive therapy, but slowing down can look different for everyone.

Work-life balance has been a moving target, different at every point in her life, Bess says. “Work-life integration”—weaving together life and work—has been helpful when balance doesn’t feel possible.

Now Bess, 36, holds her most senior role to date and enjoys more autonomy around her work and schedule. “I’m ‘good,’” she says. In the entirety of her
career, she’d never been “good.” She makes a conscious effort to practice the balance she learned. “I don’t feel like I’ve figured it out.” It’s a work in progress.

Workplace balance: representation, racism, and tokenism

Angelique Adams, 48, says she was often passed over as a student in the late 1990s. “I just wasn’t the prototypical person” pursuing a PhD in engineering. “Wrong race and wrong gender,” she says. “These were white men at Penn State, a predominantly white institution, and they were sort of like, Ha ha ha, you can’t be serious, you know?”

Homogeneity in a given field of study is mirrored across the profession and the workplace. For Adams, this began in undergrad and simply continued. “In my early career, I was faced with the reality that I was always going to be the only woman and person of color.” This is the foundational imbalance that creates silos, she says.

Janine Yancey, 55, is the founder and CEO of Emtrain, a tech-based workplace-culture education firm. According to her, healthy inclusion happens when “people are feeling accepted, they’re feeling strong social connections with each other. It drives good employee relations and good respect amongst employees.”

Workplace culture: psychological safety

The historically low numbers of Black women in white-collar environments, especially at higher ranks and in tech,
stir an unhealthy competition that’s hidden in plain sight, says Kimberly Latrice Jones. It’s another element of workplace culture that Black women manage in a balancing act under the corporate gaze.

Black women suffer invisibility on one hand and hypervisibility on the other. They’re “less likely than white women to say senior colleagues have taken important sponsorship actions on their behalf,” according to the 2022 McKinsey report. While the same is true for Latinas, nearly half of Black women in these settings (45 percent) “worry they’ll be penalized for mistakes.” For a small group in a workplace, the fishbowl effect can further entrench imposter syndrome and raise the stakes in an already charged environment, taxing overall health and wellness.

Software engineer Tine Zekis says, “Because no one else is promoting us, we need to be championing each other.”

Black and Brown women, including executives, shoulder a unique pressure and responsibility to be well received at work because the degree to which they are appreciated is the same measure by which the door will be propped open for the next woman and opportunity. This is both a social-cognitive burden and another silent inequity.

Losing at the start line: the requirement to be excellent

“I am undeniably excellent,” says Michelle Bess. “I had to be to get where I am.” She recalls, “One of my mentors told me your work has to be excellent before you come to me and ask for help or to move in another direction.”

Excellence can be a nearly impossible standard that throws the whole of Black women’s lives into critical imbalance. Black people, women in particular, tend to be overworked and underpaid. And sometimes one’s personal life must take precedence.

We’ll know we’re approaching equality in the workplace when Black women too can be average performers, even as they meet and exceed performance reviews, retain their jobs, and see raises and promotions, says Zekis. “Black women shouldn’t have to be the best of the best to be there,” she says, adding that equality in workplace mediocrity is the goal.

Considering the more than 50-year-old racial wealth gap in America, Black women should work smarter, not harder.

Whole-life balance: pay equity

“We have senators and congressmen [in office today] who [established] Jim Crow,” says Latrice Jones, 47, author of How We Can Win: Race, History and Changing the Money Game That’s Rigged. The stink of that truth doesn’t fade away with time, she says. These legislators “are making laws for us right now, in their 70s and 80s, through a lens of a superiority complex.”

Tine Zekis, 38, is a triple threat: educator turned software engineer and salary negotiator. She offers advice to realize and promote pay equity.

• Negotiate every time.
• Before approaching the negotiation, know the market value for the work you do. Sometimes bonuses come out of a different budget, and that can be important to determine early.
• To set your number, research using websites like Glassdoor. “We’re not even interested in anything below the average,” Zekis says. “Look at that middle point and above.”
• Come with a list of non-fiduciary requests too. Consider making specific asks. If you can’t get the salary, say you need scheduling flexibility or more days off. There are various things you can negotiate for, and many ways to get money out of the company.
• Show your collaborative spirit. Convey gratitude and excitement about the offer. Use “team” language to set the tone for an amicable, productive conversation.
• Always ask for more, even when the offer exceeds your expectation.

An array of thoughtful, creative, and practical employer-provided benefits can help.

At Stryker, new parents traveling for work can get their breast milk shipped—one thing checked off the list—and the Global Recharge Program at Riskified is a twice-annual corporate shutdown, a reset for everyone.

The only way to achieve work-life balance while retaining top talent and maintaining productivity is through systemic change. It is a responsibility shared among lawmakers and employers, both accountable to workers.

Federal action on pay equity is past due. Parity in wage earnings carries the potential to give balance a fighting chance at home and at work. Employers must take concrete steps to ensure that their workers feel supported and also build a work culture where everyone can be their true selves and flourish. The onus is not on the individual employee to simply adapt. DW

Carla Bell is a journalist and editor in Washington, DC. Her work has been published by Ebony and Essence magazines, The North Star—the publication first established by Frederick Douglass in 1847 and relaunched in 2018—and many others.

“We’ll know we’re approaching equality in the workplace when Black women too can be average performers. Black women shouldn’t have to be the best of the best to be there.”