The pandemic illustrated how difficult it is for one parent to manage the demands of work and parenthood simultaneously. Working moms are the most visible examples of this challenge. Single dads are in a similar situation and face their own unique difficulties. In this episode of All Things Work, host Tony Lee speaks with Josh Levs, leading expert on the experiences of modern dads in the workplace, on how to create workplaces that better serve and accommodate every parent.
The pandemic illustrated how difficult it is for one parent to manage the demands of work and parenthood simultaneously. Working moms are the most visible examples of this challenge. Single dads are in a similar situation and face their own unique difficulties. In this episode of All Things Work, host Tony Lee speaks with Josh Levs, leading expert on the experiences of modern dads in the workplace, on how to create workplaces that better serve and accommodate every parent.
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Tony Lee:
Welcome to All Things Work, a podcast from the Society for Human Resource Management. I'm your host, Tony Lee, head of content here at SHRM. Thank you so much for joining us. All Things Work is an audio adventure, where we talk with thought leaders and taste makers to bring you an insider's perspective on all things work. Something the pandemic made abundantly clear is the sheer difficulty for one parent to successfully manage the demands of work and parenthood simultaneously.
All through 2020, working moms who took care of their children while doing their jobs at the same time were the most visible examples of this reality. But single dads, or fathers without a partner, are another group of employees whose experiences reflect the stress and difficulty of both being a parent and having a job. But single dads also have their own unique difficulties and challenges.
Similar to working moms, single dads simply have less bandwidth to do the things that advance careers, like taking on more work and growing their professional network. At the same time, single dads are less likely to receive the same accommodations and treatment routinely provided to moms, such as schedule flexibility and paid time off following the arrival of a new child. The experiences of working moms and single dads highlight the need to create workplaces that serve all parents. And joining me to discuss gender equality in the workplace is Josh Levs.
Josh is a former CNN and NPR journalist turned entrepreneur and consultant who specializes in working with corporations, organizations, and universities to build policies that support men as equal caregivers. He received widespread recognition in 2013 for taking legal action against Time Warner, the parent company of his then employer CNN, for gender discrepancies in the amount of paid leave available to new parents. Named by the United nations as a global champion of gender equity and author of the award winning book, All In: How Our Work-First Culture Fails Dads, Families, and Businesses - And How We Can Fix It Together, Josh is a leading expert on the experiences of modern dads at work and solving for the inequities parents experience in the workplace. Josh, welcome to All Things Work.
Josh Levs:
Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. And I know the subtitle of my book is quite a mouthful. You can thank HarperCollins for that. But they're right. That is what it's about.
Tony Lee:
That's great. Well, it says it all. It says it all. So let's start with what happened in your case with CNN and how it came about.
Josh Levs:
Sure. So what was interesting in my case partly was that I was already on the air covering fatherhood. I was a fact checker at CNN on air and online, fact checking politicians and pundits. And at the same time, I became a dad and started to discover that there are all these myths about the modern family, especially about dads, things that people just didn't know. So I was reporting on that as well and doing columns. And that's when my wife got pregnant with our third child. We already had two boys.
We looked at what was going on in our family, and we realized that I would be needed at home to do caregiving after our daughter was born. Now, I was already reporting on the fact that this is normal. Dads are caregivers too, in this age. But the policies that so many people in this country are under have not kept up with the reality. So the policies I had at the time, at CNN under Time Warner, was that anyone could get 10 paid weeks after having a kid, except a biological father. Anybody except a dad in a traditional scenario, who could only get two weeks.
So I found out the protocol, how you're supposed to handle requests for changes in these policies. It was just that you go straight to benefits in my case, so I did. I met with them totally in secret, said, "This is the situation. It had to be an oversight. When you were adding all these groups of people who could get 10 paid weeks, you couldn't possibly have meant to leave out dads in traditional scenarios." And they said, "That's interesting. Put it in writing." I did. Months went by with no answer. Then my daughter was born prematurely in an emergency. My wife had severe symptoms from preeclampsia.
Everything worked out fine, fortunately. But there I was, two weeks after the birth, holding my four pound preemie and caring for my sick wife and my two boys, asking work, "When do I get an answer? Am I coming back now, or do I get the 10 paid weeks?" That's when they said, no, I could not have the 10 paid weeks. So, that's how it came about. And then, when I announced the legal action, all this support came in from across the spectrum, from business leaders, from women, from men. And I came to see that this case was galvanizing people all over the country and around the world.
Tony Lee:
Wow. What an amazing story. And of course, you kept your job?
Josh Levs:
I did, yes. I continued working there. A lot of people... This surprises a lot of people, but I filed an EEOC charge. Yeah. I was still an employee there for almost two more years. So the company ended up revolutionizing its policy, making it much, much better for almost all parents, moms and dads. I also had my book come out, All In, and that opened up new opportunities to me. So a couple years later, after my book came out, that's when I left.
Tony Lee:
What a success story. That's wonderful. So let's pivot a little bit. The All Things Work that this podcast is associated with talks a lot about single dads. I mean, we have published, it feels like, reams of content about single working moms and the support that they've gotten. And that continues to be such an important area, but we haven't really spent much time talking about single dads. And it seems pretty clear that they often lack the support systems that a single mom has. I mean, sometimes, it's legislative, in state law, that a single dad doesn't get the same paid leave, doesn't get the same rights. So, why do you think that is?
Josh Levs:
Well, a lot of it has to do with the way that policies are organized. So I always say it boils down to three things. There are laws, policies, and stigmas. But the whole structure is based on a 1950s model, a mad men model. Our workplaces were designed... Even the idea of what it is to work, this ideal that you had a briefcase, and went to an office in the morning, and came home at the end of the day, I always say it was absolutely designed for work life balance, but the balance was that one person, the man, goes to work and does all the work stuff, and the other person, the woman, does all the life stuff.
So in general, our structures are built on this model. So, absolutely. When it comes to support from men as caregivers, there are incredibly few. And so, when you talk about single dads, or solo dad, as I like to say, because single can mean unmarried, solo for me is solo parenting, imagine a solo dad in my position who couldn't get that time. It just doesn't make sense. And there are different ways that people become solo parents.
In my book, one guy, who has been a friend of mine since we were very little, elementary school, his wife died. He has several daughters. And what he found when he became a widower was that even private institutions, a lot of the churches around him, organizations, didn't have anything to help solo dads. They had things for widows. They had things for solo moms. But there was nothing in place. So in general, we have not had a cognizance, in our society, of men as equal caregivers. And when we do that, when we come to understand the reality that we live in now, that's when we can naturally and sensibly reform our laws and policies and just end the backwards stigmas.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. I mean, what's amazing to me is that, if you had just asked me without me looking at this, "Well, how many single dads are out there compared to single working moms," I would've thought, oh, it's 10 to one or something. But it's not. It's like three to one. I mean there's about seven and a half million households led by single moms, 2.4 million led by single dads, which was kind of surprising. And the other thing that surprises me is that dads are much less likely than single working moms to do something about their situation, to seek out other single dads, or to get therapy or mental health counseling if they need it. I mean, is that your experience as well?
Josh Levs:
Oh, it's a fact. I mean, absolutely. And look, so a few things. You remember my background here was fact checking, right? And so, I came into this looking, what are the facts? What do the data show? And I can tell you something about the numbers you just used, that the number of single dads out there is actually even higher than that, because household figures end up being misleading. They are the best figures we have, so it's good that you're using them. But what happens is, when there's a divorce or the parents just aren't married, they often live in two homes and kids are only allowed to have one legally listed home for school purposes.
So what often happens with these numbers is that the number of homes that are listed as being single moms sends the message that there's no dad in the picture. But in reality, the kids in those homes also might spend half the time over at their dad's house. But their dad's house is not counted as a home with children, because kids can only have one legally listed home with children. So there are actually even more single dads out there who are splitting time with their ex-wives, or with the kids' moms who they were never married to. So it is millions of people out there who are dealing with this.
And these challenges end up really defining someone's life. But you're absolutely right, that men, in addition to having fewer resources, have been traditionally less likely to seek help. And that has to do with how we're conditioned, the lone wolf mentality, the idea that some guys have with this older vision of masculinity, which is kind of backwards, but that you don't ask for help.
So yes, this is why I do a lot of work in the men's mental health space. Men are much less likely to realize that they're suffering from depression or anxiety. Doctors and even their friends are less likely to notice it because we're not trained to notice it in men. So we need to bring all this out into the open, and drop all the stigmas, and realize the extent to which moms and dads, men and women and non gender conforming people, non-binary people, really are in this together.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. And another research stat that's appropriate of what you're discussing, single dad mortality rate is double that of other parents, primarily because they're more likely to have unhealthy habits, like smoking, and binge drinking, and things like that. And if they're not seeking support, it only exacerbates that problem, right?
Josh Levs:
Yeah, absolutely. And I would encourage people to think of times that they have heard of or knew a man who committed suicide, or who died via suicide. And how often were they completely shocked because they thought that person was completely happy, and had it all, and everything was going wonderfully? That's another part of the problem that people really don't realize. And yes, you're talking about negative habits.
I interviewed men who are currently raising children, so dads. I said, "On a scale of one to 10, how stretched out do you feel?" And most of them said 10 or eight. It was very rare to get a number lower than that, just like moms. There was a lot of stress. In fact, during the pandemic, there was all this reporting about the stress that moms are under. And so, there was this automatic assumption that, therefore, there's a finite amount of stress to be doing, and dads aren't doing enough.
So I reached out to the American Psychological Association, and I asked them for dads and stress, those figures, and no one had crunched them. So they went into their raw data. They crunched the figures for me, and they got back to me and they said, "Actually, there's no statistical difference, that men and women, dads and moms, are suffering from equal amounts of stress during the pandemic." But no one knew this about dads. And this is why a lot of that struggle happens in silence. And that can lead to real dangers.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. It's fascinating you say that. SHRM did some research in July on single fathers versus coupled fathers, and I was very surprised. Some of the questions were, because I'm a working father, I work longer hours. 79% of single fathers versus 48% of coupled fathers. I feel like I'm less productive, 54 to 29, so not even close. I miss out on promotions, 60 to 34. So single fathers really feel like they're carrying the burden of this, compared to everyone else they work with.
Josh Levs:
Yeah. And this is what moms and single moms, solo moms, go through all the time as well. And a lot of the work that I do... I work directly with organizations, with businesses of all kinds. And a big piece of what I do is reform the mentality around what a good worker looks like. Going back to that mad men idea, there was this idea that a good worker is someone who's first in and last to leave, someone who's available all hours, someone who's working all the time. And unfortunately, it's ingrained, even subconsciously, in our mind.
But I work with organizations and change the metrics. So instead of having those general impressions, we look at how much did this person get done for the organization across any block of time you want? A month, a quarter, a year. Very rarely are the most productive, innovative, successful people the ones who are working all the time. And very often, it's people who have caregiving responsibilities who become excellent at multitasking.
Often they are the ones who, when you really take a look at it, are getting the most done and deserve the promotions, they're just not able to performatively come across that way by sitting at their desks all the time. So in order to fix this, we need to just get more and more business leaders to the data that proves the amount of work people are getting done, so that we can get genuinely fair in how we advance people up the workforce.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. Well, it's a tall task. One of the things we see from an HR perspective is everyone says, "Well, HR, what can you do to address this?" And the first thing HR will respond with is, it's the line managers that are the issue. We're trying to educate the people managers to understand the needs of a single working father, as well as single working moms. They're the ones with the hardened attitude and are the toughest to convince. So it's not even the leaders. It's the person who's at the line management role.
Josh Levs:
Right. And if you think about it, why are they doing that? This is part of what I look into. So managers are under the impression, which on the surface, sounds like it make sense, that the last thing you want is for someone to be off more or away more, so the more you can get someone to be working, the more you'll get done. That is what seems natural to them. The problem is that people's productivity and innovation levels really do go down substantially after those eight hour days. So we need to change the mindset for managers.
And part of what I do is managerial training to help change that mindset. And there also are data points that can help with this. If you look at what kind of caregiving time is available, like paternity leave, maternity leave, go look at how much is available and how many people actually use the amount of time they are given. What you'll find is that, in general, men don't, because of the stigmas, because there are guys who have been fired or demoted for taking time for caregiving or seeking a flexible schedule for caregiving.
And when you see that, when you see how incredibly much of that time and those opportunities go unused, you realize that you have a cultural problem. And that cultural problem is also costing you. There's one other data point I'll toss in here. I know it's a lot, but you can find this information at my website, joshlevs.com. But Ernst & Young did a study and they found that in the United States, men are even more likely than women to switch jobs or careers, or take pay cuts, turn down promotions, or even move in order to have more time with their families.
The difference I've found is that men are less likely to tell our businesses that that's why we left. So what's happening is, it's incredibly expensive to replace an employee. It can cost up to 200% of annual salary to replace an employee. All these men really are leaving their jobs for other jobs that will support them more as fathers, but businesses don't realize this is happening. So businesses are losing so much money through these problems with their policies and their cultures that prevent these guys from being able to find work life balance. Short version here, the more you do for men and women, for all people, whether you have kids or not, to help them find work life balance and integration, the more you keep them and the more you save money.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. One last area I want to cover. Obviously, the pandemic had a major impact on everyone. But in terms of working parents, we've published reams of data on shrm.org about how remote working has, in many ways, helped single parents, gave them much more flexibility, they could jump on a Zoom meeting or work on a project on the weekend or at night, and no one cared as long as the work was getting done.
But now that we're getting back to the office or are back at the office, some of the fallout, especially for working moms, has been, they're really not ready to come back. They've gotten into a new structure that they like a lot, that their kids like a lot. They may still be having some school issues or public transportation issues. I assume all of that applies to single dads as well. I mean, do you have a sense of how single dads have been impacted as companies return to work?
Josh Levs:
All the same things that impact single moms, every single thing, all of it, it's all the same. What you do find is that people still want to provide for society. They still want to have careers. A lot of what's happening is that, now that people have had the chance to be home and work from home, they are standing up against some of these old expectations. Some bosses out there who still oppose the idea of remote work, even though productivity went up during the pandemic, imagine how much more it will go up working from home when our kids are at school.
So there are a lot of people who are saying, "Wait a second. The rat race life, the extreme hours, I don't have to do that. I'm missing time with what matters most, my family." Or if you don't have a family, the people you love, the things you love to do. So people are looking for greater work life balance and standing up against some of these old expectations. Workers can still be wooed back, brought back, because they do still care about their careers. But the places that will get these awesome, talented, creative, hardworking people are the places that are willing to be most creative and flexible in how folks get their jobs done, which really should be the new norm. All of the real data points in that direction.
Tony Lee:
That is going to do it for today's episode of All Things Work. A big thank you to Josh Levs for joining me to discuss workplaces and how they can better accommodate both single working dads and single working moms in their responsibilities and work life balance. Before we get out of here, I want to encourage everyone to follow All Things Work wherever you listen to podcasts. And also, listener reviews have a real impact on a podcast's visibility. So if you enjoyed today's episode, please take a moment to leave your feedback and help others find the show. Finally, you can find all of our episodes on our website at shrm.org/atwpodcast. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time on All Things Work.
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