Why Work Life Balance Feels Impossible for Women

Work-life balance. Three simple words, everybody knows them. But I want you to pay attention to something the next time you hear someone say it because those three words mean something completely different depending upon who is saying them. So first, let's talk about this term work-life balance and what it means when men refer to work-life balance. For men, when they are saying the phrase, I need better work-life balance, ultimately what they're saying is that they need to pull back from one thing, usually work, to have more time for other things such as life. And typically when a man refers to needing work-life balance, they're referring to not working late at night, meaning that they are home and present with their families, and or not working over the weekends so that they have the weekends available for family time, housework, maybe going to the kids game. All right, so it really is pulling back from work to then have more time for family. Let's shift gears and talk about what does work-life balance mean when women are referring to it. When women are referring to work-life balance, the experience that they are talking about is saying, okay, I have a very full calendar, a very full life, full of all sorts of responsibilities, maintaining home and family life. Now women are entering the workforce, either working corporate careers or building their own businesses, right? And for them, work-life balance means how do I now work a full-time job while also continuing to maintain the full-time job I already have as the, I like to call it, chief operating officer or chief information officer of the household. It is very, very different. It's how do I get all of my work done while managing everything in the household? Whereas for men, it's, okay, maybe I need to cut back on work a little bit to spend more time with my family. This was brought forward to me just the other day. My husband works a very demanding job where it is quick, it's fast-paced, the phone is ringing all the time, things need to be turned around very, very quickly. And at the time I'm recording this, the weather is warming up, which means that the volume of work comes in because his work definitely corresponds to weather in a lot of ways. It got to the point there were some computers, some technological issues that slowing down the ability to get certain stuff done. And it started bleeding into his evenings where after dinner, typically we're all done with work, but he was having to go back up to his desk here at his home office and needing to work for a little bit more in the evenings. And this had been going on for several weeks in a row, which is not the norm. It had been a particularly trying day and we were kind of cleaning up after dinner together and he just said, man, I have got to get better work-life balance. And it jarred me because here I'm the CEO and founder here of The Pink Bee where we are on a mission to bring work-life harmony into homes, right? And he was sharing with me that basically what he was saying is, I've got to stop working after dinner. That is what work-life balance meant to him. And again, it started a fantastic conversation because it gave me the opportunity to go, well, hang on, my version of work-life balance looks very different than yours. So again, in that situation, needing work-life balance meant I need to be working less in the evenings. When I am looking at work-life balance, which again, I call harmony instead of balance, it just doesn't mean what am I doing in the evening. It involves me creating a plan for the week that includes the ability for me to absorb all the uncertainties that come with our family, our daughter, our dogs, household repairs, all of that kind of stuff. Half days early releases from schools, right? The unplanned trip to the orthodontist because the bracket falls off the braces. All the things that have to happen during standard working hours that every family faces, right? Because the answer can't be, I'll wait and do it on the weekend if the orthodontist does not open on the weekend, right? So somebody has to be absorbing the stuff that has to happen between nine to five when traditionally, if you're working, that's when people are working. So for women, when they hear the phrase work-life balance, that's what they are holistically thinking of. And so this is why there are so many women right now when they hear the phrase work-life balance, they're like, I don't like that. I don't feel like it's possible. And for women, it's not. Because what it's ultimately saying is take a full-time job and then add another full-time job on top of it and figure out how you're going to manage that. That is mathematically impossible. For most working women, there is no clear definitive line between work and life. So when someone is now implying that you need to balance doing a full-time job at home while also now doing a full-time job outside of the home, what they're asking you to do feels impossible because it is. And this is why more and more women are going, I don't like the phrase work-life balance. And a phrase that I hear people using some now is work-life integration, which is better because it's acknowledging, oh, I've got to figure out how to integrate these together because there isn't distinct boundaries on work lives between nine and five and life lives outside of it. That's just not the reality in the world that we live in today. But again, I don't feel like work-life integration perfectly nails it either. This is why I love the phrase work-life harmony. Now, when you look up the word harmony, one of the definitions of it I absolutely love. And it says it is a pleasing arrangement of parts. And that really comes from music, right? When we think about listening to music, it is a pleasing arrangement of parts, all of the instruments, the voices, et cetera. They are arranged in such a way that creates something beautiful. And notice there is no requirement on percentages of time or percentages of instruments, right? It's just a pleasing arrangement of parts. And sometimes certain parts might get more of a focus, other parts. There's no one way to write that music. And everything isn't getting equal focus, which is what balance implies, right? Balance thinking of a scale means everything gets to be equal. Now, the goal with when you're thinking about why I like harmony over balance, the goal is not to divide ourselves into equal parts where everything is getting equal time and equal play. It would not be mathematically possible to do that. And it's time to stop pretending like that is possible, right? Especially if you're working a full-time job and you have a family, the math just simply isn't going to add up. So instead, what we get to do is stop pretending that balance is possible and lean into the idea of how do I create a pleasing arrangement of parts? And women, I need you to hear this because this led to a great conversation with my husband and I the other night, is it should not be solely our responsibility for figuring out what that harmony looks like. It needs to be the responsibility of everybody in the household, right? And how it looks gets to be completely different from one household to another. Again, there is no one right way to do it. So if you've been struggling with the phrase work-life balance and you're like, that doesn't feel quite right for me. The next time you hear that phrase used, pay attention to who is saying it and what it means to them when they use it. And maybe it is an opportunity for you to introduce them to this concept of harmony instead of balance.