Why “flexibility” may be the least helpful thing companies can offer working parents right now

Brigid Schulte was quoted in Fast Company about the need to change the way we work:

“Most businesses, particularly in the past 40 or 50 years, have been completely brainwashed by this neoliberal notion that families are private, that government is bad, and that the free market can solve everything,” says Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at the New America think tank and author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. “It’s almost as if public policy solutions are this third rail.”

Nowhere is this prevailing assumption more apparent than on the topic of working parents and childcare. Like society writ large, corporate leaders seem to view the challenges that working parents face as individual problems, rather than collective ones. And so, amid the pandemic, they have marshaled every resource imaginable in order to fashion individual solutions. TutorMe, a startup that offers virtual tutoring for school-age children as an employee benefit, saw 30 times the interest from corporate customers in Q3 of this year as it did in Q1. Meanwhile, policy proposals such as universal pre-kindergarten and paid family leave, which have been shown to increase women’s participation in the workforce, have been languishing at the state and federal levels for years, with little corporate support.