The Best of Systers Blog 401k & a Maid
Laurian Vega
As a working mom of two boys it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that someone comes to clean my house every other week. I walk in after the house cleaning service has left and no matter how bad my day has been I am delighted with the smell of the cleaning chemicals, the vacuum-cleaner-created carpet lines, and the fact that everything looks like it is in its right place. The feeling is wonderful. It is so wonderful, in fact, that it is the first thing I generally suggest to technical women who are about to have kids. If you thought you had little time before, I tell my friends, just wait.
How strange is it, then that I felt a bit off when I read this recently posted article about Evernote paying for a cleaning service to come to your home, or about Deloitte paying for marriage counseling, and Facebook letting you bring in your family for dinner. The idea is that too much effort is going into work-life-balance rather than work-life integration.
I guess the punchline is that rather than trying to establish boundaries in a field where it is now possible to always be on call (and thus burn out at a much faster rate), women are now expected to try and integrate work and life together. I have a different suggestion; one that would might work in tandem with this recent push to give benefits that are more gender oriented. Rather than cleaning my house, saving my marriage, or paying for my kid’s dinner, how about companies also work on not expecting employees to work so much that the two need to bleed together? That goes for both women, and men. I’m looking at you Silicon Valley.