The Crisis of Care: A Curated Discussion

To begin, Claudia Goldin puts our conversation within an historical context of how the intersection of caregiving and work has changed through time, particularly in the case of women's care for children. This piece lays out the challenge of flexible and nonflexible hours and how social norms and economic concerns within couples sustain gendered labor market inequalities and couple inequities. Goldin notes that organizational changes are needed for both and affect men as well as women. This context provides a frame for the rest of our discussion.

Our goal in this curation is to shed new light on assumptions that have for far too long kept management research, practice, and policy segmented from care work. The essays we have brought together put on display the intrinsic interrelatedness of these issues. Are we covering all relevant ground? Certainly not, as the crisis of care has myriad contextual dimensions and historical nuances, impossible to cover even by our 23 member, cross-disciplinary author team. But, drawing across the themes in the essays in this collection, we believe that we illuminate core issues and lay important groundwork for future research. We wrap up this overview by offering three research areas that we see as having particularly rich, important potential.

First is the relevance of time: “on-the-clock” or time-greedy work, historical time, and the timing of caregiving within a career. Authors in this curation, including Goldin, Kelly, Kossek and Bear, Beckman and Mazmanian, Van der Heijden and De Vos, and Dokko, Rothbard, and Wilk, all address dimensions of time in different ways. New perspectives might include an historical time lens that explores intergenerational learning and role modeling among workers with caregiving commitments; and how the timing of taking on care versus work roles, and the overlap between the two, may affect sustainability and balance. In the latter case, the challenges of a newly fledged professional juggling a toddler and a junior consultant's schedule are very different from those of an established midcareer professional who must coordinate doctors’ appointments for aging parents with college visits, teen crises, or the complex early-career dilemmas of adult-in-name-only children. Regardless of the type of time examined, perspectives over time will allow scholars to better capture the broader effects of career-caregiving tradeoffs.

Second is including underrepresented caregiver voices and experiences. Although we frame this discussion as particularly relevant to the human, business, and social drama experienced by largely mainstream, white-collar caregivers in the U.S. context, it is with a desire to legitimate the topic space and, in doing so, open possibilities for research on experiences currently less visible in the literature—both within U.S. populations and worldwide. We leave largely unaddressed discussions around race, social class, and heteronormativity, although it is clear that the overlap between work and care may look and be experienced differently by people with different family structures (Sawyer et al., 2017) or family identities (Masterson & Hoobler, 2015). Moreover, within social groups where women have a long history of working outside the home, the so-called “mommy wars” that pit high-performing absorbed mothers against each other are largely irrelevant (Caviness (2015) describes Black mothers’ solidarity and Philyaw (2015) explains the influence of class dynamics). Even within more mainstream conversations on the crisis of care, certain caregiving-related topics still remain invisible, as Clair and Thomas's essay points out (see also Gabriel et al.'s (2023) research on postpartum depression) and, to a diminishing extent, men who want to be involved in care (Harrington and Hall).

Third is technology's role in facilitating and structuring care. The day-to-day of work- and family management now relies on technology (Beckman & Mazmanian, 2020). The gig work that permits caregivers to work flexibly (Reid & Ramarajan) often occurs on technological platforms; online social networks may expand caregivers’ professional and support systems (Carboni), and virtual work arrangements may help families balance care work and careers or inhibit women's progression while changing their work–life boundaries (Kossek & Bear). However, techonology is a double-edged sword: providing the potential (and norms) for 24/7 connectivity that privileges traditional ideal workers, whose lives can revolve around their jobs. For caregivers who work on-site, technology may allow instant access to in-home or in-daycare camera connections to and from loved ones. However, the benefits or drawbacks of distanced, tech-based supervision depends on perspective. Such supervision and peace of mind for privileged clients may strip workplace privacy for individuals—likely of lower socioeconomic status (SES)—whose work is caregiving so that caregivers can work outside the home. So, too, as biotechnology advances at an ever-quickening pace, the choice of when to become a caregiver is changing, which shifts conversations about balance (Dokko, Rothbard, and Wilk) and sustainability (Van der Heijden and De Vos). Reproductive health services (e.g., egg freezing) are offered as an employee “perk.” But, the same technology that (without guarantee; The Economist, 2023) can allow delayed parenthood may translate to norms around putting off caregiving roles during workers’ prime reproductive years—benefitting employers (Mertes, 2015)—in a reversal of Bailyn's (1980) argument for role staggering (children first, career advancement later) that allowed a “slow burn to the top.”

In sum, the care work that individuals and families perform, and that societies structure, affects business and is affected by business. Individuals who need, receive, and give care are embedded at the center of colliding business- and care-work social systems. Workplace management and the management of care are, and must be studied as, inseparable. Both in the moment—when discrete business decisions and decisions of care are being made—and over time—as business-, career-, and life needs coevolve. Yet the crisis of care also requires a policy-based response; without changes to how care is valued, families inevitably will still be left on their own. We hope that this perspective, which we collectively voice, piques the interest of future management scholars (and managers and policy makers) and provides meaningful pathways to allow our field to lead the charge in researching and resolving the crisis of care: for individuals, families, business, and society.

For women, the road to achieving career and family has been long and winding. We can divide the winding road into five distinct birth groups called birth cohorts, that form a set of overlapping generations. I book-end them on the one end with the first Congresswoman, Jeanette Rankin (elected in 1917) representing the first group, and Senator Tammy Duckworth representing the fifth. Tammy Duckworth was the first to bring a baby into an active congressional session—although many would claim that there have always been babies in Congress. Betty Friedan is in the middle, the third group. It is a succession of cohorts shifting from those that had either family or career (in group one, Jeanette Rankin, of course, had a career), to those who put family ahead of a job—both by timing and priority—as in group three. Group four aimed for career first and then family, and group five would like to have family and career together. Women's ability to get both has improved greatly over time.

We know from U.S. Department of Education data that ever since those cohorts born around 1960, who graduated college around 1980, women have had higher college graduation rates than men. And among those who are college graduates, women are catching up in terms of various higher degrees. The only reason that women's rates were lower than men's is because Master of Business Administration (MBA) degrees were growing in popularity and in professional degrees: as many of you know, MBAs are a very large fraction of all degrees. Plus—and this is the surprising part—college graduate women by age 44 are now having more babies than since the end of the baby boom (Goldin, 2021). If we consider the fraction of women without any births, it is about 20% for women born in the 1940s (for both the 35- to 39-year-old group and the 40- to 44-year-old group). The fraction without any births peaks at around 25% for 40- to 44-year-old born in the 1950s, at over 30% for 35- to 39-year-old born in the 1960s, and has been declining ever since—back to the 20% range (for 40- to 44-year-olds born in the early 1970s and about 25% for 35- to 39-year-olds born in the late 1970s). Finally, the fraction of women with both family and career (thought of here as a measure of “success”) has increased for the 35- to 39-year-old group. In general, things are looking up.

But, if things are looking up, why is there so much discontent today, as shown by the spike in The New York Times of mentions of gender discrimination and inequality? We can put a number on that discontent, by looking at the use of phrases such as gender discrimination and gender inequality, scaled by the amount of newsprint. The (gender) earnings gap for all workers and for college graduates trend the same. If we consider the numbers, suddenly, in the mid-1980s, the earnings ratio narrows for all, but less for college graduates. The gender gap for college graduates, in fact, is much wider. What is going on? Well, one answer why there is so much discontent and why gender earnings convergence (even for those at the top, in terms of education) has been slow, is succinctly provided by Claire Cain Miller's April 26, 2019 piece in The New York Times, “Women Did Everything Right and then Work Got Greedy” (Cain Miller, 2019). The problem is “greedy work.” Let's consider a couple who are thinking about one of two jobs. First, the job with what I’ll call noncontrollable time (or “nonflexible time”) has a steep upward pay curve as hours increase. Second, the job with controllable time has a steady, much slower pay increase as hours increase, and a total increase in earnings of roughly half that of the first job. A couple who does not have children and does not have other caregiving roles can both work jobs with noncontrollable time. But, the couple with children cannot both work these jobs because you cannot contract out everything; the kids would perish without some parental oversight. And, why have the children in the first place? Both members of the couple can work jobs with controllable time. That, however, would involve giving up a lot of income. So, they opt for one job with noncontrollable time and one with controllable time. In heterosexual couples, this generally means that women take the controllable-time job and the men take the non-controllable-time job. And that produces both gender inequality and couple inequity: men are on call at the office, women are on call at home.

But if the costs of controllable time were much less, or if that job became more productive, they could both have controllable-time jobs that pay more. In this case they would purchase couple equity, and couple equity would be higher and gender inequality would be lower. So, many positions have a widening gender gap in earnings as the years since highest degree or first job elapse. The widening for women versus men with MBAs is astounding.³ But there's no widening for the same group of MBA women who don’t have children in that same interval. And that is, of course, relative to all men, many of whom have children. If we add to the mix a regression of years of job experience on work hours per week, then the gender earnings difference just about disappears for this group. This is just one example of how hours and temporal flexibility and controllability matter for the gender earnings gap. So, the costs of temporal flexibility appear to be a major factor. The greater the costs, the greater couple inequity (and the worse, in terms of heterosexual couples, is gender inequality).

So, how can this be fixed? One way is to create really good substitutes for particular workers. If you have a perfect, and I mean a perfect, substitute, you can take a break whenever you want. To do that, one must convey information with little loss of fidelity. Having teams of substitutes—like what exists in pediatrics, veterinary medicine, or anesthesiology—and not of complements—something that often exists in consulting—is a big step in the right direction (Goldin & Katz, 2016). Creating other conditions so that pay is more linear with respect to hours will also help.

In sum, one solution is to decrease the cost of flexibility, restructure jobs to make the flexible job more productive. Most important is to understand that gender inequality is not just about women: it involves men being on-call at work as well as women being on-call at home. And that isn’t equitable for couples, even for same-sex couples. So, in conclusion, gender equality and couple equity are the flip sides of the same issue, and organizational changes are needed for both.

It is generally accepted that the association of women with caretaking is rooted in the gendered dichotomy of separate spheres whereby men and idealized masculinity are strongly associated with the public work sphere and women and idealized femininity with the private sphere of home and family (Harding, 1987). As with all dichotomies, the spheres are differentially valued, with the public sphere designated as the valued half of the dichotomy and the private as the devalued, with each deriving its meaning in opposition to the other. As I have noted elsewhere (Fletcher, 1999, p. 29) this gendered dichotomy has given rise to several assumptions about each sphere which I suggest are important to consider in any discussion of integrated workers or the future of caregiving work in society. The first has to do with affect and motivation. Work in the public sphere is conceptualized as something one must do, with money and ambition as the motivators. In contrast, work in the private sphere is generally conceptualized as something one wants to do, with love being the motivator. The second has to do with the work itself. The work in the public sphere is assumed to be complex requiring skills that can be taught whereas work in the private sphere is assumed to be not complex and the skills associated with it are innate. And the third has to do with output, where public sphere outcomes are marketable goods and services in contrast to work in the private sphere whose products are people, community, and social relations.

Economic explanations for the separation of the spheres suggest it is an artifact of industrialization and simply reflects a natural division of labor into two, separate but equal complementary domains (Parsons & Bales, 1955). Feminists disagree. They argue that rather than explaining the split, the demands of industrialization simply took advantage of preexisting patriarchal dichotomies and provided an economic rationale for the split and the inequities on which it rests (e.g., Ferguson, 1984). Or, as I and other postmodern feminists suggest, the public/private dichotomy and the narrative that supports its underlying assumptions can be conceptualized as an exercise of power that acts to maintain the status quo of capitalist production and silences any challenge to it (Weedon, 1987; Fletcher, 1999).

Placing the caregiving crisis in its larger context—power dynamics inherent in the separate spheres dichotomy—calls attention to the difficulty of changing societal level cultural norms that are not benign but instead are powerful forces acting to maintain the patriarchal system of power on which capitalism has relied. Indeed, the deeper purpose that the dichotomy serves helps to explain its persistence despite disconfirming evidence that it is not helpful to society, workplace efficiency, gender equity, or work practice innovation (Bailyn, 2006; Rapoport et al., 2002) and may be used as a social defense against acknowledging its harmful effects (Padavic et al., 2020).

And yet, progress has been made. Women have advanced into leadership positions in the public sphere and many skills associated with work in the private sphere such as relationality (Villamor & Aguinis, 2024) and developing others (Griffiths et al., 2019) are beginning to show up in narratives about skills important to achieving success in the workplace. I would suggest, however, that the asymmetry of efforts to relax the separation (legitimating the female body and the skills associated with it in the public sphere) may be in danger of reifying rather than challenging the differential valuing of the two spheres, increasing the perceived value of public sphere activity and further devaluing, indeed obscuring, the value of private sphere outcomes. Gender equity efforts, for example, have focused primarily on access to the public sphere, reinforcing it as the valued half of the public/private split. Comparable focus on equity and clamor for access in the private sphere is less evident. In terms of skills and labor, some progress may have been made in dislodging idealized masculinity as essential to outcomes in the public sphere but images of idealized femininity and vestiges of the cult of true womanhood (Fletcher, 1999; Lorber, 1991; Welter, 1966) continue to exert influence, particularly in the narrative surrounding work/life issues (Ely & Padavic, 2020; Padavic et al., 2020). (I am reminded of interviews I conducted as part of a work/life consultancy in a Boston consulting firm. Senior women who worked long hours in response to workplace demands talked of the angst they experienced with coworkers judging that they were bad mothers. I heard no such comments from fathers.) Perhaps the most steadfast assumptions about the split—and those with the greatest implications for a discussion of caregiving and careers—are ones about work in the private sphere as a labor of love, where outcomes are their own reward. Dislodging these assumptions, of course, poses the greatest threat to capitalist systems of power where society's future workers are “produced” at no cost.

In sum, I would argue that it is good to be reminded in any discussion about a crisis in caregiving that the public/private split is not simply a separation but a dichotomy that operates as an exercise of power. That is, assumptions underlying the split, particularly assumptions about work in the private sphere, are resistant to change not only because they are long standing but also because society depends on them to ensure that essential caregiving work is done with no shift in societal level economic priorities. Firmly in place, these assumptions obscure the importance of the outcomes of private sphere work and reify the belief that these outcomes can be achieved with little disruption of our economic system or the power dynamics on which they depend. This suggests that research efforts to address the caregiving crisis, particularly in the United States, focus on identifying societal level policies that encourage and support both men and women to be active, competent, skillful agents in both spheres. There are models of these types of policies in other countries (e.g., Israel, Sweden), which would be a good place to start.

In 1989, Tim wrote an article in Personnel identifying a nascent phenomenon in work–life activities: moving beyond the “mommy track” and the rise of interest by men in spending time parenting (Hall, 1989). This was in the context of national attention in the United States on the topic resulting from a provocative Harvard Business Review article, “Management women and the new facts of life” (Schwartz, 1989). At the time, there was strong debate about the cost of employing women in their childbearing years, the costs (legal, moral, motivational, and performance) of not doing so, and what organizations might do to reduce these costs and reap returns by providing flexible employment arrangements for people who want to integrate family and career.

Tim's observation, based on anecdotal evidence, had been that men were taking time for family in subtle ways—leaving early for a soccer game, taking a day off for a sick child, turning down an optional business trip in favor of time with family, or perhaps declining a promotion or transfer that would involve a difficult family relocation or more frequent travel. Some men did seem to take time off after a baby's birth, but when that occurred it was usually only for a few days.

More systematic research on this phenomenon began in 2009, with Brad as executive director of the Center on Work and Family. After spending nearly a decade in the work/family field, it was glaringly apparent to him that when it came to work and family research and actions, fathers were mainly conspicuous by their absence. Although most fathers desired to be defined as far more than simply breadwinners, the field and society as a whole seemed content to maintain that narrow definition. Brad and his colleagues took up the task of painting as accurate a picture as possible of today's working dad, focusing on fathers who worked in the corporate sector. And now after 15 years, what can we say with confidence about these dads? Based on the findings of extensive qualitative and quantitative studies, involving over 6,000 fathers, here are a few of the takeaways:

First, dads today aspire and need to be much more hands-on with their children than fathers were a generation ago. They no longer see their role solely or even primarily as a breadwinner. The majority, slightly more than two-thirds, say they want to share parenting responsibilities equally with their spouse/partner. However, a significant percent of dads (in our studies between 34% and 38%) are Conflicted Fathers: those who aspire to share caregiving equally with their spouse but are unable to do so (i.e., their spouse does more) (Harrington et al., 2017). What contributes to this high level of conflict?Second, things are fortunately changing. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center conducted a study of parental leave at four major U.S. companies (Boston College Center for Work & Family, 2019). The employers, all members of the Center's Workforce Roundtable, had expanded fully paid parental leave for their employees ranging from 6 to 16 weeks and offering equal amounts to mothers and fathers for the bonding period (following birth and recovery or adoption). This study included responses from more than 1,400 employees, and, importantly, 43% of the participants were men. Two-thirds of the responding fathers took the full amount of leave offered. Because this study was conducted in the U.S. corporate sector, 40% of fathers saying they “were expected to take the leave” suggests that the recent development of offering gender-equal parental leave has begun to take hold. By contrast, we would expect that if a comparable study were conducted in countries that have offered fathers paid leave for decades (e.g., Europe), 40% of fathers being “expected to take leave” would be a rather disappointing number. This said, over 80% of (again, U.S.-based) fathers agreed that fathers taking leave has become more acceptable, and 74% agreed that their employer is equally supportive of mothers and fathers taking leave.

Through all of the Center's New Dad studies, we have consistently found that most dads aspire to be more equal caregivers, but there are impediments to their doing so—and these cannot be solved by individual men, women, or families alone. Employers and government policies must better support men in their caregiving role. If this occurs, we believe that we are on the threshold of significant changes for today's fathers which will lead to greater engagement and equality for men and women at home and in the workplace.

Although an increasing number of men are taking on caregiving responsibilities, women—as individuals with significant caregiving responsibilities outside of the workplace (i.e., caregiver employees)—are particularly at risk for both workplace isolation and for its associated negative career outcomes. Workplace isolation can take different forms, including a lack of social support, social interaction, learning opportunities, developmental opportunities, and even physical proximity (Sahai et al., 2020). Individuals experiencing workplace isolation tend to have reduced job satisfaction (Itani et al., 2019; Riggle, 2007), organizational commitment (Mulki et al., 2008; Riggle, 2007), and job performance (Itani et al., 2019; Mulki et al., 2008), as well as heightened occupational stress (Dussault et al., 1999) and turnover intention (Mulki & Jaramillo, 2011), and these outcomes affect women more than men.

Compared to their male counterparts, women report spending less time socializing with friends and taking part in education and training opportunities as a result of their caregiving duties (Lahaie et al., 2013), and isolated women experience greater occupational stress than men (Dussault et al., 1999). Those who share their personal and family-related challenges may be considered distracted and unfit to contribute to organizational goals, forcing women to hide their caregiving identities at work (Moore, 2020). Not surprisingly, caregiver employees often avoid seeking available support in order not to be stigmatized (Bear & Glick, 2017), further isolating them from social and professional opportunities.

Workplace networks have the potential to reduce workplace isolation for caregiver employees. Networks of informal relationships emerge from social relationships (e.g., friends, colleagues, mentors) and can reduce workplace isolation in at least three ways. One, social interaction through informal networks reduces workplace isolation directly by providing social interaction and social support. Working mothers of young children, for example, often face uncertainty in determining their identities as mothers and professionals (Ladge & Greenberg, 2015). Positive social support—from colleagues, managers, or other working mothers—can help reduce uncertainty and increase confidence in both maternal and professional identities. Two, conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989) suggests that informal networks provide access to socioemotional resources—for example, caring, validation, affirmation—which can help caregivers shore up their emotional reserves, thereby creating a buffer that protects them from the stress caused by increased demands on their time, energy, and general resilience. Caregiver employees can then leverage their increased resilience to reduce stress and improve work productivity. Lastly, informal networks can also connect caregiver employees to instrumental resources such as practical advice, personal support (e.g., running an errand), and work support (e.g., offering to cover a shift) that can reduce some of the caregiving burden.

Despite the emotional and instrumental benefits of maintaining a robust informal workplace network, however, informal networks can also reinforce gender inequity. Unlike men, women often bifurcate their professional relationships into separate affective and instrumental networks (Ibarra, 1992); they turn mainly to women for emotional support and to men for instrumental support. Men, in contrast, tend to build multidimensional (i.e., multiplex) relationships which tend to be stronger than unidimensional ones. Individuals involved in multiplex relations are more motivated and capable of providing a range of critical career- and work-related resources such as advice, strategic information, and emotional support (Oh et al., 2004). Given their natural tendency to form relationships with other women, women have fewer men in their networks than do men (Woehler et al., 2021). With the continued predominance of men in positions of influence, fewer men in a woman's network means reduced access to status and power. As a result, the more that women caregivers tap their own (very likely women-dominated) professional networks, the more likely they are to further deplete the resources of women who already have fewer resources to give and thus keep them from focusing on activities that could lead to their career development, and the less likely they are to get support from powerful (male) allies. Thus, the more that women caregiver employees seek support in their informal networks to avoid workplace isolation, the more they reinforce gender bias and inequity.

Partly to address gender bias in informal networks, well-meaning companies have instituted networks of formal relationships, which are a result of deliberate decisions and organizational design. One example of a formal network is the Employee Resource Group (ERG): an employee-led and organizationally supported professional network for socioemotional support, practical advice, a sense of belonging, and professional development for employees who share a common identity (e.g., women, young professionals, or those of a specific cultural identity). An estimated 90% of Fortune 500 companies offer one or more ERGs (Huang, 2017).

Although far less studied than informal networks (Villesèche & Josserand, 2017), ERGs may paradoxically reinforce caregiving as a gendered activity. Companies rarely offer an ERG for caregivers per se. Instead, issues related to childcare and elder care tend to be addressed in ERGs for women. The obvious implication is that caregiving is primarily a “woman's issue” and not an organizational or societal issue. ERGs may also isolate employees and their identity-associated concerns from senior management, many of whom do not identify with any ERGs (Catalino et al., 2022). ERGs for women, for example, may support internal community but fail to build external engagement, allyship, leadership connection, or career advancement. The end result? Even when women caregiver employees join a formal network, their concerns may remain segmented from individuals who have the power to address gender inequities in organizational policy.

Some organizations have experimented with other types of formal networks. For example, Ford Motor Company created the Ford Re-Entry Program. The program targets individuals who have left the workforce for extended periods of time but want to rejoin. Participants get access to mentoring, professional development, and networking opportunities to jump-start their return to the workforce as part of a 6-month integration into the company. Within these cohorts, individuals reentering the workforce join others with similar concerns and challenges, forming a network of people who can rely on one another and, as they are in different functions within the organization, immediately form advantageous connections to different parts of the organization, along with new information and knowledge. The Re-Entry Program is open to all caregivers, but it was designed explicitly for women, who were much more likely than men to take career breaks due to family caregiving responsibilities. Not surprisingly, 90% of the participants in the Ford program are women. This is another example whereby focusing on caregiving as a gendered activity, company programs may reinforce and thereby perpetuate gendered networks and bias.

Informal and formal workplace networks do have the potential to provide caregiver employees with the emotional and instrumental support they need to avoid workplace isolation and its associated professional disadvantages. However, we as scholars must parse the ways in which networks affect caregiver employees’ outcomes. Doing so through a gender-based lens, challenging norms that treat caregiving as a “women's issue,” holds promise for informing policies that might dismantle existing gendered network disadvantage.

A given individual's ability to put their paid work above all other obligations and needs over a long period of time relies on an outdated and gendered system of separate spheres in which men's occupational roles were often supported by women's household and care work, with these arrangements more common in middle- and upper-class white families (Acker, 1990; Davies & Frink, 2014; Moen & Roehling, 2005; Williams, 2000). Despite the broadening of women's labor force participation in the last 50 years, cultural pressures and a traditional division of labor in many families means women and particularly mothers are still more likely to visibly violate that ideal worker norm and to shift their labor force participation, hours, and jobs in response to caregiving (e.g., Cha, 2010; Goldin, 2014; Reid, 2015; Stone, 2007).

Somewhat ironically, responding to the crisis of care requires looking beyond mothers or parents and caregivers of all genders, for at least two reasons. First, when employers focus on work–family supports and frame these options to meet family needs rather than organizational goals, the policies and programs that are supposedly available to address workers’ concerns are not fully utilized. As Bailyn noted more than 30 years ago, when firms offer work–family supports like leaves and flexible work arrangements, they are usually “[p]resented as solutions at the margin” and “Men prove to be unwilling to take advantage of flexible work arrangements when offered and reluctant to take time off when it is labeled paternity leave” (p. xv in Bailyn, 2006, from the preface to the 1993 edition). When flexibility is offered as an accommodation for a specific individual who is seen as needing something special, many individuals—and especially men—will not pursue that flexible schedule or leave in order to avoid “flexibility stigma” (Chung, 2020; Coltrane et al., 2013; Rudman & Mescher, 2013; Vandello & Bosson, 2013).

Second, when employers consider caregivers specifically, they miss the bigger problem and ignore the costs of the current ways of working. Caregivers face specific challenges, but the intensive work patterns described above negatively impact many, if not most, employees. Intensive and unpredictable work demands and schedules create stress and erode the health of workers of all ages, life stages, and genders (e.g., Kelly & Moen, 2020; Lovejoy et al., 2021; Pfeffer, 2018; U.S. Surgeon General's Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being, 2022). Sophisticated models suggest that 5% to 8% of annual healthcare costs are attributable to work conditions (such as long hours, high demands, shift schedules, and more), so the current ways of working have real costs to employers (Goh et al., 2015). In professional and managerial jobs, long hours and blurred work–life boundaries are the focus, but there are impacts beyond those occupations. For example, unstable schedules common in service-sector jobs are associated with higher psychological distress, poor sleep quality, and lower happiness (Schneider & Harknett, 2019).

Beyond harming employees’ health and well-being, current ways of working have negative consequences for organizations. When employees faced with unrealistic demands “vote with their feet” there are real costs to employers, due to the costs of recruiting, hiring, and training new employees, and lower productivity and performance. Some employers interpret those exits as reflecting women's work–family conflicts—even when the evidence is that turnover is just as high for men and that stressful work conditions, not work–family challenges per se, are driving exits (Padavic et al., 2020; see also Artz, 2024, reporting no gender difference in parenthood's impact on quits). Turnover may be recognized as more problematic in professional and managerial settings where it is harder to recruit and performance relies on firm-specific skills that take time to develop, but high turnover also creates operational problems and reduces the quality of service (Ton, 2023; see also Park & Shaw, 2013) because employees who have less stable, predictable schedules are significantly more likely to leave their jobs (Choper et al., 2022).

Long hours, unpredictable schedules, and overload (feeling being pressured to do more than is feasible) also prompt burnout and reduce engagement, with implications for the quality of the work performed. Employees are unlikely to come up with particularly efficient, creative, or innovative solutions to thorny technical or business problems or to offer compassionate and effective service when they are run down and stretched thin (Kelly & Moen, 2020). In health care, burnout clearly threatens care quality and provider retention (Meredith et al., 2022). Over time, working with an unrealistic workload and fast pace can also erode teams’ capabilities to perform at a high level, because employees feel they must concentrate on the immediately pressing work and fix recent mistakes (engage in “firefighting”) rather than investing in the training, skill development, or relationships that will support strong work (Rahmandad & Repenning, 2016).

But change is possible, particularly when there are broad changes in policies or practices rather than negotiated accommodations to select employees. Changes in public policies can shift work conditions for many, and work-time regulations—like expanding overtime pay, requiring more stability in scheduling hourly workers, and encouraging part-time parity and rights to flexible work—could complement improved access to paid family, medical, and sick leaves (Berg et al., 2014; Kelly & Moen, 2020). For example, a new regulation to make schedules more predictable improved sleep quality and happiness, while also reducing economic hardship for employees (Harknett et al., 2021).

Organizational changes are also feasible, and research finds dual agenda work redesign initiatives are a valuable approach to addressing employees’ personal needs and advancing organizational goals, ideally while reducing gender inequality (e.g., Bailyn, 2006; Ely & Meyerson, 2000; Kelly et al., 2010, 2014; Moen et al., 2016, 2017; Perlow, 1997, 2012; Rapoport et al., 2002). A work redesign strategy asks insiders to look at current work practices and assumptions critically, deinstitutionalizing what was taken-for-granted as “the way we work around here” to interrogate the implications of intensive work patterns and ideal worker norms for employees, families, and for teams and organizations (Kelly & Moen, 2020; Perlow & Kelly, 2014; Rapoport et al., 2002). These initiatives often involve a collective process (e.g., team meetings, participatory workshops) that aims to explore and legitimate new ways of working that are more flexible, supportive of personal and family life, and critical of treating work devotion as an indicator of productivity and commitment. Though more research has been done in professional and managerial settings, work redesign strategies focused on a dual agenda have also proven effective in retail and health care (e.g., Kesavan et al., 2022; Kossek et al., 2019).

While family needs and gender equity concerns may be part of the motivation for these initiatives, a dual agenda work redesign approach focuses attention on the organizational routines, policies, cultures, and reward systems (not the individuals who don’t fit the ideal worker norm) and on the potential payoff for the organization. Researchers and advocates should still be attuned to challenges with work redesign strategies, including staying alert to unequal access (Kossek & Lautsch, 2018; Lambert, 2014) and gender inequality being reinforced if new ways of working are not utilized broadly (Kelly et al., 2010; Villamor et al., 2023), but this approach provides an innovative and exciting path to addressing the crisis of care while also benefiting organizations.

A key aspect of “modern work” is intensified boundary control tensions between individuals and organizations and increased work–life inequality based on occupation type and SES (Kossek & Lautsch, 2012, 2018). Boundary control involves the ability to manage temporal, physical, and psychological boundaries between work and nonwork domains (Ashforth et al., 2000; Kossek et al., 2012). Examples include controlling scheduling, location, or cognitive and emotional boundaries. Given the rise of personal computer devices (smart phones, laptops) and remote and hybrid work, managing boundaries includes informal role blurring practices governing connectivity (e.g., work-related communications during personal time and nonwork communications during work time) and formal flexibility policies (Kossek et al., 2023). With experimentation during the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have redesigned work to increase flexibility, with remote or hybrid arrangements. These policies permit employee discretion over work role boundaries, to modify location (telework), hours (flextime), size (reduced-load), permeability (connectivity), and continuity (leaves, breaks) (Kossek et al., 2023). Despite these advances, implementation gaps persist and work–life inequality (i.e., inequitable access to and outcomes from using policies) is increasing.

Employer and employee views on boundary blurring are increasingly misaligned, and are “contested terrain” (Edwards, 1980). Organizational perspectives often emphasize boundary control to keep employees’ time and energy focused on the work domain, encouraging overwork (Perlow, 1998). Employees seek autonomy to control boundaries in order to align work and family identities and responsibilities (Kossek et al., 2012). Yet, work–nonwork boundary control has not evolved equitably and is increasingly stratified within and across occupations, which often correlates with employee demography and job level (Kossek & Lautsch, 2018). Women, typically heavy users of virtual flexwork policies, experience lower pay and career progress (Villamor et al., 2023). Front line workers with lower labor market power (often women and racioethnic minorities) have less access to flexibility policies (Kossek & Kelliher, 2022).

We argue that work–life equality—equal access to, experiences during use, and consequences of work–life boundary control in line with employee needs and preferences—is a critical aspect of job quality (Kossek & Lautsch, 2018). The time is ripe to make work–life boundary control and equality a basic job right. We identify challenges and areas for needed innovation pertaining to boundary control.

Organizational employers are often treated as key providers of policies that enable people to combine work and care. Private companies were the targets of 19th century labor strikes for the shorter work days necessary for people to combine work with their family lives, across industries as diverse as mining, printing, textiles, and masonry (Hughes, 1961; Kealey, 1984; McCormick & Williams, 1959). Subsequent development of policies for combining care and work have focused largely on the plight of workers formally employed in organizations. In the United States, for instance, federal labor laws require companies to provide benefits to permanent employees, but not contract workers, although advocates are attempting to update these laws (Gurley, 2024).

However, the destabilization of formal employment and growth of short-term, freelance, contract-based work—referred to here as gig work—means that an increasing number of people work outside formal organizational employment (Ashford et al., 2018; Barley et al., 2017; Reid et al., 2025). These gig workers, who include child- and elder-care workers (Pulignano et al., 2023), Instacart workers (Cameron et al., 2021), as well as more professionalized workers such as graphic designers and scientists (Caza et al., 2022), lack access to employer-based caregiving supports. This mismatch between the societal location of care-work policies in full-time, long-term organizational employment and shifts in employment arrangements creates three critical issues that we view as deserving of further attention from scholars of care, work, and organizations: a deeper individualization of care-work, a removal of carers from pathways to organizational leadership, and diminished individual capacities to participate in and care for broader communities.

First, gig work deepens the individualization of responsibility for care work. Workers often move outside formal employment to open up time for care. Indeed, in our study of how journalists build careers we noticed that women in particular often cited the need for flexibility for care work, and employer discrimination against mothers, as reasons to leave news organizations and become freelance reporters (Reid & Ramarajan, 2022). Yet, in doing so, these individuals both give up access to employer supports for care (meager though they may be) as well as the stable incomes that enable one to provide for dependents. Somewhat ironically for those who moved to gig work in order to care for others, freelance journalists often find their own finances so unpredictable that they must rely on other family members, including spouses as well as parents, for financial stability (Reid et al., 2024).

A second, longer-term issue is that, just as women professionals who “opt” or are “pushed” out tend not to return to the roles they left (Lovejoy & Stone, 2012), returning from gig work to organizational jobs that might put one on a pathway to the senior roles that involve organizational leadership is likely rare. Yet, those who leave regular employment to free up time for care see clearly the challenges of combining paid work and care. These individuals might therefore be ideally positioned to envision and champion novel care-supportive policies and practices. Their loss to organizations as potential leaders and changemakers is significant, and likely diminishes organizations’ capacities to envision and create new models of working and caring.

Third, there are also collective consequences that emerge from the spread of gig work and the attendant individualization of care work. People exist not just as workers and carers for their immediate families: they are also citizens, neighbors, and members of broader communities. Communities thrive when their members are able to care for each other—as Girl Scout leaders, food bank volunteers, election volunteers, Rotarians, volunteer gardeners in public spaces, and so on. Yet, as care work in the family becomes increasingly individualized and employment increasingly insecure, people's capacities—in both time and in energy—to participate as active neighbors and citizens who can care for and contribute back to their broader community are eroded.

What can be done? We suggest that society must stop treating organizational employers as the key providers of care policies. Rather, policy makers could regulate and fund care provisions for workers at national levels, and create meaningful programs such as free childcare. Indeed, as the opening for this discussion notes, the United States stands out for its lack of federal labor laws and regulations protecting carers and care work. More gravely, the lack of national protections systematically disadvantages women. As sociologist Jessica Calarco observed, “Other countries have social safety nets. The United States has women” (Petersen, 2020). While the United States is an extreme case, we caution that other countries also have much work to do to consider how to protect workers in nontraditional forms of employment. This is an area ripe for political leadership.

Additionally, just as past labor successes were gained through social movements, we may need to reimagine workers’ power in employment relationships. Collective action for gig workers to gain benefits and protections are often stymied not just by employers, but the very structure of their work, including lack of face-to-face contact, common schedules and places of work, which make coordination more challenging. Yet, gig workers can still find ways to express solidarity and collaborate to improve their working conditions (Tassinari & Maccarrone, 2020). Though gig workers may lack access to traditional trade unions, the labor movement is flexible and adaptive in its practices: scholarship on “indie unions” in the United Kingdom, such as the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, traces both growth in the size of these unions’ membership and the important legal victories they have achieved for independent workers (Però & Downey, 2024; Smith, 2022). Further, while the structure of gig work may act as an obstacle to collective action, there may also be some unique organizing advantages embedded in gig work's distributed nature (e.g., organizing outside a specific workplace).

A final prescription is to try something truly revolutionary: reversing the template of the organization benefiting from all the hidden and unpaid work of carers, and the siloed contributions of gig workers, by sharing power in a way that gives these individuals a voice in organizational decision making (Battilana et al., 2022). While there are already examples of corporations sharing power with workers in countries such as Germany (e.g., work councils), and we have examples of member-run cooperatives that often help workers get necessary protections, what is notable is that advocacy often halts at empowering the worker. Perhaps what is needed are more voices at the table of those impacted by the splintering of work into gigs, including representatives of families and communities, who can also advocate for better work, and thus better care for all.

The ideal worker puts in long hours at the office, regularly works from home, is constantly available to work, and prioritizes work over other commitments (Beckman & Mazmanian, 2020). Ideal worker imagery suffuses popular discourse and informs the everyday experience of people working in professional jobs (Dumas & Sanchez-Burks, 2015; Kelly et al., 2010; Reid, 2015; Williams, 1989). However, rarely do we ask how those who enact ideal worker norms manage the day-to-day challenge of dedicating immense amounts of attention to the workplace while attempting to live full lives (for an exception, see Marçal, 2016).

In practice, working parents rely on a wide array of caregivers to uphold the myth of the ideal worker. There is simply no way to be a full-time worker (no less an ideal worker) and parent without a great deal of help on the home front. When we reflect on the structures of support that parents develop to manage their lives (what we call scaffolding), we find that caregivers often extend far beyond the nuclear family (Beckman & Mazmanian, 2020). Thus, understanding the complexity of caregiving is critical for truing the costs of the ideal worker myth for families, organizations, and nations.

The reliance of working parents on caregivers creates what we call a “temporal cascade” in which one person's time directly affects others’ time. The ideal worker narrative requires staying late or working during “off hours” when needed. So, imagine someone texting their caregiver under the conference table to say they will be home late. What does this mean for those around them? Does a spouse have to drop what they are doing and pick a child up from sports practice? Does a paid caregiver have to stay on, turning around to text their own caregiver that they will be staying late at work? To uphold the demands of the workplace, a temporal cascade of caregiving responsibilities is created. Others are relied on to smooth over and accommodate for the ideal worker's absence, delay, or distraction.

As sociologists Clawson and Gerstel (2014) elegantly explain, people exist in a “web of time” that stretches the workplace into personal lives. When one person is called upon to commit unexpected time to work, this temporal cascade stretches beyond the workplace, to the familial, informal, and formal supports that people rely on to scaffold their daily lives. By detailing how organizations benefit from time cascades, we are able to shed light on the true cost of the time, labor, and energy of those subjugated to support the workplace.

Who are these caregivers and how do their efforts impact their own lives and careers? In our ethnographic fieldwork with busy professionals in the United States we see a variety of supports and time cascades. Olivia Shah hired an immigrant woman to help maintain her household. This is a remarkably common story, as professional mothers regularly outsource caregiving to immigrant women of lower SES (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Stack, 2019). These caregivers often leave their own children to be cared for by others; in some cases, leaving their children behind in their country of origin to support the households of higher-earning families (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2002). For Olivia's helper, this means adjusting her schedule to be available for more or less time in a given week or on a given day, often without much notice.

In contrast, Lisa Phillips relied on her own mother to help with caregiving. Lisa's mother had the resources to retire early to offer this assistance, and she navigated her own relationships with her husband and others to prioritize her grandchildren. Lisa's mother willingly made these decisions, but in order to do so Lisa's mother and her partner contributed substantial temporal, financial, and emotional resources to Lisa's family. Reliance on grandparents is not unique to Lisa (Goodfellow & Laverty, 2003; Posadas & Vidal-Fernandez, 2013). Community mothering has a long history (Dow, 2016; Schulte, 2015) with underappreciated implications for public policy around retirement age and compensation for familial and informal care work, not to mention broader policies around universal childcare and child tax credits.

Nancy Mayer, on the other hand, relied on a rotating posse of female college students, having to take into account their complicated class schedules and timing of exams when navigating her time cascades. Finally, we saw caregivers within the home, like Rebecca Stewart. Rebecca had sidelined (and perhaps given up) her own career to care for her children while her husband worked a time-intensive job. This arrangement carries financial implications for the family, as Rebecca's husband earns a disproportionately large income as a result of his overwork. Such a “fatherhood wage premium” (Weeden et al., 2016) also has implications for Rebecca's identity and the satisfaction of female caregivers writ large (Stone, 2007; Stone & Lovejoy, 2019).

These are just a few examples of how families and caregivers are tied in a web of time. By tracing the temporal cascades from worker to caregiver, we can ask not just who these caregivers are, but what are the power dynamics that shape the lives of families, childcare providers, and domestic workers (Sharma, 2014). Each temporal cascade (whether it be parent to parent, parent to relative, or parent to paid childcare provider) requires a negotiation of power and expectations that expands from families to organizations, and even nation states. How much warning is given when help is needed? Does the caregiver have the ability to delay or push back? Refuse? Which justifications for pushing back are respected and which are not? Do employees with strong structures of support have higher earning power and stronger mobility than their colleagues who are cobbling together childcare? And do countries (like the United States) that rely upon the underpaid labor of immigrants in support of ideal worker dedication contribute to inequality across nations? Examining these questions acknowledges the long shadow of work's influence and the power dynamics within and across families, organizations, and nations.

Even more important is the question of who bears the burden of these challenges and who benefits? We argue that the organization is an unqualified beneficiary of time cascades, as are the countries that benefit from immigrant caregivers. Furthermore, we call attention to how professional parents primarily responsible for navigating work and family (generally mothers) and their suite of caregivers (also almost entirely women) are burdened in numerous invisible ways. In sum, the assumed temporal dedication that underpins the ideal worker myth relies on an array of other people's time, energy, and dedication. Broad swaths of time are put to service in supporting this myth and those that enact it (Blair-Loy, 2009). Without better understanding of these temporal cascades, and how ideal workers do not exist in a vacuum, we cannot fully appreciate the costs of the ideal worker myth on individuals, families, and society.

Organizational scholarship has traditionally drawn on multiple disciplines to make sense of important phenomena, and the study of work-related impacts of nonwork caregiving responsibilities is no exception. Management research has extensively investigated the obstacles faced by caregivers—especially women—who contend with multiple caregiving demands at home that make it more challenging to ‘balance’ work and home life and to excel at work (e.g., Gatrell et al., 2013; Kelliher et al., 2019). Many organizations expect full devotion to work (Padavic et al., 2020); deviation from ideal worker norms due to nonwork caregiving responsibilities can translate to negative work consequences. Yet, despite the richness of this conversation, we notice surprisingly few references to caregivers’ physical bodies as these relate to work, or what a growing stream of management research that examines the physical body and work would call “embodiment” (e.g., Michel, 2011).

There are two ways we envision bodies to be important here. First, people strain their bodies in performing care work for dependents outside of work. Caregivers often provide physical care using their bodies to deliver it: helping dependents get in and out of beds and chairs, get dressed, get to and from the toilet, bathe or shower, eat, and remain clean (i.e., in the case of incontinence). Such caregiving demands, particularly when they are injurious or depleting, can undermine work performance. Thus, the embodiment perspective shows the body to be a conduit of negative physical spillover (not just emotional or cognitive, as spillover is typically conceived) between work and home life and vice versa (Creary & Locke, 2022). People may feel the need to minimize or conceal any injuries arising from caregiving outside of work because injuries signal diminished vigor and vitality to channel into work roles (Clair, Beatty & Maclean, 2005). In an intimate portrait of working families, Beckman and Mazmanian (2020) illustrate the triple threat many workers face: they are called upon to be ideal workers and perfect parents (the most visible category of caregiving), while maintaining ultimate bodies. Unwavering work devotion and consistent productivity hinge on assumptions that the physical capabilities underwriting these performances can expand in proportion to inflating work demands, and that self-care will come secondary to caring for others. While the physical impacts of overwork on worker's bodies have been well documented (Creary & Locke, 2022; Michel, 2011), the distinct physical toll of caregiving accrued outside of work and brought into the workplace by caregivers remains undertheorized.

Changing social demographics account for more workers caring simultaneously for young and aging dependents; tasked with others’ care, caregivers may have little time or energy for their own mental and physical health. Indeed, AARP reports that 21% of caregivers rate their own health as fair to poor, and 23% indicate that their health has worsened due to caregiving (National Alliance for Caregiving & AARP, 2020). Back strain is common among caregivers who must lift children or dependent adults at home. In a study of chronic pain, we (Njoke and colleagues) have observed that expressions of pain are often delegitimized at work, obliging workers to exert more effort to maintain desired productivity levels and keep this extra effort hidden; people who experience physical impairment because of nonwork caregiving roles may exert more effort at work than may be apparent from their output. One can easily imagine recursive negative spillover. For example, when work demands injure caregivers’ bodies, this can undermine their ability to provide care outside of work; if caregivers are injured in nonwork care roles, those injuries may negatively affect their work. Should they choose to “power through” work-inflicted impairment to meet their caregiving obligations (and vice versa), they may further exacerbate the harm. When caregivers are workers trapped in vicious overwork-recuperation cycles (Creary & Locke, 2022), there may be little room for recuperation.

Second, it is important to recognize that, for women in particular, the body itself becomes associated with caregiving. In our own research (e.g., Jones et al., 2020; Ladge et al., 2012), as well as others’ work (e.g., Gatrell, 2011, 2013; Gatrell et al., 2017), it is evident that women's bodies signal ultimate fertility and fulfillment of a parenting ideal. The maternal body “embraces all aspects of women's embodied potential for reproduction” (Gatrell et al., 2017, p. 240). Yet the strong signal of fertility and maternity via one's female body also is associated with negative career consequences. Women are well aware of the physical realities of their bodies over the course of pregnancy and often feel great pressure to show that they can function as they did prior to getting pregnant, even if these bodies are not performing as in the past (Ladge et al., 2012). Moreover, despite many women feeling capable of effective work performance, others may see and treat them as physically vulnerable, and as in need of help and protection. Experiencing unwelcome help that interferes with work, in turn, is associated with greater turnover intentions post maternity leave (Jones et al., 2020).

Postchildbirth, women's bodies also transgress normally appropriate physical presence at work; for example, nursing mothers may experience breast engorgement and leakage, and must pause to pump milk periodically during the day (Gabriel et al., 2020). Such bodily functions are often treated as taboo and evoke negative reactions from coworkers, which can be a source of marginalization (Gatrell et al., 2017). While some prior work attends to these issues, we see many opportunities to explore how women's postpartum bodies are treated at work, and the career and well-being consequences. We see opportunities to explore the way that women manage their physical body at work to overcome marginalization, taboo, and potential negative career impacts. We imagine interesting parallels to Reid's (2015) findings that workers manage pressures to perform as an ideal worker by embracing, passing, or revealing to disclose or mask their deviance from the ideal worker norm.

As we take stock of these two pathways for exploring dynamics and impacts on caregiver bodies, performing care work and being associated with caregiving, we note that caregivers are often cast as hapless victims of their circumstances. While we do not wish to underplay the structural constraints that caregivers face (as Stone and Lovejoy lay out), we must also recognize that workers are finding ways to transcend. Channeling Swidler (1986), we challenge the implication of caregivers as mere cultural automatons. We view them as resourceful actors engaging in bricolage, selectively drawing upon elements from their cultural toolkits to construct more empowering outcomes for themselves. These acts of creative adaptation, whether through job crafting, resource sharing, or challenging organizational norms, reveal the capacity of caregivers to actively shape their realities. Instead of solely viewing the caregiver body as a site of burden, it should be recognized as a powerful locus of agency where workers negotiate, resist, and sometimes even redefine oppressive demands placed upon them. Future research should focus on shedding light on how caregivers can and do reshape their lived experiences. By doing so, we can construct a more nuanced understanding of how caregivers navigate the workplace—one that acknowledges both the physical toll on and the profound resilience of the body.

All of us will be a carer—a person who performs the work described by Wittman and Bailyn in their introduction above—or will be cared for ourselves one day. Given this, it is vital to understand caring from the lens of sustainable careers: “sequences of career experiences reflected through a variety of patterns of continuity over time, thereby crossing several social spaces, characterized by individual agency, herewith providing meaning to the individual” (Van der Heijden & De Vos, 2015, p. 7). Using this lens, we advocate for a nonnormative, nonstandard approach (Van der Heijden, 2005) to caregiving aimed at fostering health, happiness, and productivity (i.e., the three indicators of sustainable careers; Van der Heijden, 2005) across people's career- and life-spans. With this longer-term perspective, career sustainability requires choice in crafting a dynamic person–career fit (De Vos et al., 2020). Dynamic person–career fit requires managing caregiving tasks that can be anticipated (e.g., a consequence of becoming a (grand)parent or having parents getting older) or are unexpected (e.g., those following from, for example, serious illness of a loved one). Whilst the former can be understood by taking a life stage/life course perspective on careers (Demerouti et al., 2012; Zacher & Froidevaux, 2021), the latter can be regarded as dealing with career shocks: relatively infrequent and extraordinary disruptive events (Akkermans et al., 2018).

Anticipated events and evolutions in the person and in their context bring opportunities and needs, constraints, challenges, and dilemmas (see also Nagy et al., 2018). Career sustainability is affected by how a person and other stakeholders involved deal with those changes. Taking a whole-life perspective (Van der Heijden et al., 2020) on careers, a person's career sustainability cannot be considered without taking into account their broader life context. In this broader context, caregiving tasks often predictably coincide with a person's life stage: varying from caring for young children during an earlier career stage to taking care of one's own parents or grandchildren at a later career stage. Such caregiving tasks can take many forms, with some people interrupting their professional career to fully devote their time to caregiving, others opting for reduced workload or a flexible job to combine work and care, and still others paying for professional care. These choices, of course, can be affected by government policies to support certain forms of caregiving (e.g., via legislation around and financial support for parental leave, as in many European countries). From a traditional career success perspective, paying for care might be the most obvious choice, as it prizes work productivity. Career sustainability would require that the choice match the person's needs to stay not only productive but also happy and (mentally) healthy over time. Protecting the balance of the three indicators of sustainable careers over time cannot be realized without considering how life-span overlaps with different anticipated caretaking roles.

Caregiving tasks can also come unexpectedly, such as when having to cope with a loved one's serious illness, which can be understood as a career shock as it may trigger individuals to reconsider their priorities at work versus those at home (Akkermans et al., 2018). How individuals cope with caregiving in such cases is highly idiosyncratic; there is also generally less legislation around or supportive policy measures for people who deal with such unexpected caregiving tasks. Some individuals cannot lean on social security benefits under these circumstances, yet cannot carry the burden of care provision while having a paid job as well. Others, even when being entitled to make use of social security benefits and/or being in a financial situation to be able to afford private healthcare, cannot live with the idea to not take up caring for their loved one as a full-time responsibility. For the latter individuals, career sustainability is in fact at stake if they choose to not provide care, as this would seriously impact their health and happiness.

From personal experience, we know that it can—counterintuitively—be caregiving efforts and choices that protect one's career sustainability over time. Consider the process of mourning after bereavement. When a person loses their loved one, they might look back on a related caregiving period as one of the most meaningful phases in their life. Or, this period might be experienced as very stressful and undesired: feeling guilt towards your loved ones (e.g., when the situation deteriorates or when you cannot cope anymore), negative emotions towards other people (e.g., when you are jealous that they have more free-time), sadness at ignoring other loved ones, or negativity towards oneself (e.g., about the lack of self-care and standing up for oneself). Other authors have mentioned the phenomenon of “complicated grief,” or prolonged grief disorder, and have pointed to a possible relationship between challenging caregiving situations and difficult grieving processes (Boerner & Schulz, 2009). Our main message is that the choices regarding caregiving and its impact on an individual's career sustainability are highly idiosyncratic; choices must be made in line with personal needs. What is clear is that caregiving affects a person's experiences and brings opportunities as well as challenges; caregiving is an important characteristic of “fairer well-being-driven societies” (title of a 2023 World Health Organization webinar). Thus far, policies supporting caregivers (“caregiver policies”) are limited, and target recipient rather than caregivers’ needs; pointing to an acute need to reassess current policy and practice related to caregiver support (Beach et al., 2022).

Similarly in the organizational realm, much more scholarly work is necessary on how Human Resource Management policies and practices tailor-made to individuals’ needs and preferences might empower caregivers to choose different care arrangements while protecting their career sustainability. Addressing this topic requires including caregivers not only from conventional family structures, but also those in less conventional ones (e.g., single-parent families, homosexual couples, cohabiting couples with children, or singles or widowers living alone; Demerouti et al., 2012). So, too, research must include unconventional couplings of life and career stages (e.g., men having young children at older ages, which implies [new] caregiving tasks, possibly while at the same time taking care of ill parents). Finally, considering caregiving tasks within a sustainable careers framework must take into account other stakeholders involved: those being cared for—their own capabilities and empowered preferences for the care they receive, and those who play a role in buffering or disrupting the individual's efforts to craft a dynamic person–career fit (the latter includes extended family members, coworkers, managers, etc., as noted by Beckman and Mazmanian). We argue that a sustainable career perspective will illuminate dynamics for (and interactions between) health, happiness, and productivity indicators that might differentiate or generalize across the experiences of caregivers with diverse life and family experiences—and better reflect today's caregiving and career realities.

The literature on caretaking and careers has advanced our thinking on the consequences of having both caregiving and paid work roles. The difficulties and costs of carrying both roles have been well-documented, especially for child-rearing women (e.g., Bear & Glick, 2017; Beckman & Mazmanian, 2020; Cha, 2013). The lack of structural support, the psychological burdens imposed by trying to conform to ideal worker norms, and the increasing demands of the “greedy” workplace have made fulfillment in both roles challenging, and research has emphasized the tradeoffs that people make in addressing the challenge (see Goldin's, Kelly's, and Beckman and Mazmanian's essays in this collection). Yet research on work–life balance shows that multiple roles across spheres can be enriching, as well as depleting, supplying resources as well as demanding tradeoffs (Greenhaus & Powell, 2006; Hall et al., 2012; Rothbard, 2001). One way of managing work–life tradeoffs is through setting boundaries and segmenting work and life roles (Ashforth et al., 2000; Rothbard et al., 2005). However, an integration strategy where one blurs boundaries, while risking depletion, offers opportunities for enrichment and synergy (Rothbard & Ramarajan, 2009). Moreover, the balance between roles can change over the course of a career, as jobs change in responsibility, caregiving shifts from children to parents, and individual aspirations shift from achievement to a good retirement.

Across two books and research spanning over a decade, we explore the long-term consequences for high-achieving professional women of the decision to “opt out” (i.e., take a career break) for family. Opting out is a specific race- and class-identified strategy used by white heteronormative, married, upper-middle-class women to manage the conflict between caregiving and the all-or-nothing demands of elite careers. The first book, Opting Out? (Stone, 2007), highlighted interviews with 54 highly educated women who had opted out of mostly male-dominated or mixed gender professions. Our findings challenged the prevailing media stereotypes about opting out at the time that depicted these women as acting on a traditional gender preference for home and family, eschewing the stress of a high-powered career. We found that, for the vast majority of women, the decision to leave careers and head home was highly conflicted and constrained. It was a function less of choice or adherence to old-fashioned gender norms than of an extreme long-hour work culture in their professional jobs, and husbands—also working in these types of professions—who were largely absent at home. This same work culture stigmatized flexible work options penalizing women who pursued them and giving greater impetus to their quitting. The book exposed the rhetoric and reality of opting out, and the fundamental mismatch between workplaces and the needs of working women, even among this privileged group.

The second book, Opting Back In (Stone & Lovejoy, 2019), explored what became of these women 10–12 years after the initial interviews. Although women quit their jobs under duress, once home, they began to notice all the ways their family benefitted from this arrangement. They now had time to become much more involved in their children's schooling, and to help husbands work longer and harder in their own elite, extreme-hour jobs. In other words, women (and their families) became invested in their ability, as highly educated full-time mothers, to enhance their family's class status and success—what we call “status keeping.” This kind of intensive parenting may be a response to growing status anxiety among the affluent in an era of widespread economic insecurity.

We found that eventually women did successfully return to work, but they did not resume their former careers. Instead, their reentry required considerable reinvention, over a protracted period of questing and career (re)development. Feeling pushed out or shut out from their former careers, few considered returning to jobs they knew would be as family inflexible as before. Older now and having been immersed for years in a world of intensive family and community engagement, women's values and interests had changed. These changes led them to start over in new careers that were often an extension of the unpaid caring work they had done for a decade or more. Notably, these occupations were in lower paying traditionally female fields like teaching and nonprofit work or jobs with “flexibility” such as freelancing or consulting in the gig economy.

Our long-term vantage point on the outcomes of high-achieving women's career-family strategies enabled insight into a broader dynamic we called, “the paradox of privilege.” This is a phenomenon whereby the very women best positioned to achieve leadership and close gender gaps use career strategies—opting out of and not resuming their former elite careers—that inadvertently reinforce gender inequality. The affluence and education that position these women to break gender barriers in the workplace, also pull them back into the home as family status-keepers whose care is seen to imbue not only love but social capital. The extreme hours characteristic of their elite jobs undermine their ability to combine career and family, as does their husbands’ financial success, which undermines their economic rationale to work. In other words, the dynamics of women's class privilege undercut their aspirations for professional accomplishment and economic independence, especially once they become mothers.

We studied these women not in spite of but because of their privilege which positions them more than any other group of women to achieve top leadership positions in elite professions, like law and business. What we find hopefully sheds light on why it's still so hard for women (even those with the most advantages) to achieve pay and leadership equity with men. The problem is that these highly lucrative elite jobs are structured still around the (male) norm of the “ideal worker” who is always available and unencumbered by caregiving responsibilities. In a process we call “occupational resegregation over the life course,” we find that women who started their careers breaking glass ceilings in the male-dominated professions cannot sustain them upon motherhood. They ultimately redirect to either female-dominated care-oriented professions—which are flexible but relatively poorly compensated—or the insecure netherworld of the gig economy, where they are sidelined from meaningful pathways to leadership.

Methodologically, our decision to study these women's work and family outcomes longitudinally was critical for understanding the interwovenness of career and care work over time and the consequential nature of women's early negative experiences as mothers in elite professions for their later choices and outcomes, and more broadly, for the status of women in the professions. Further research, both longitudinal and cross-sectional, is needed on effective work redesigns in elite professions that can subvert ‘opting out’ and explore the long-term reverberations for women and organizations, of more effectively retaining and building their talent and leadership through the prime caregiving years.

In the end, the women we studied pursued career-family strategies that worked for them individually, but which ultimately increased gender inequality overall. This is the Catch-22 of opting out and opting back in. While we do not yet have data that further tracks our informants’ careers nor other data from other populations, it is possible that a younger generation with more opportunities for different kinds of work patterns (like gig work, discussed by Reid and Ramarajan above) may not show the same dynamics as we uncovered in our work. However, what is clear is that women of any age, going it alone, can’t break this cycle. Therefore, we advocate addressing what often feels like a private problem with a set of very public policies focused in a few areas. These include regulating and restricting working time in the professions (a primary trigger for opting out), creating a better public infrastructure of care to support caregivers, comparable worth laws that equalize the valuation and compensation of gendered work, and family leave policies that encourage men to coparent. We recognize that the problem of work–family conflict is one that is universally experienced by mothers in American society, but it manifests differently for women depending on their economic and racial position. Ultimately, solutions must come from women of all backgrounds recognizing a common interest in creating more humane and family-friendly workplaces, from men joining them, and from managerial and national policies that acknowledge the importance of caregiving and challenge the current status quo.