Companies from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to Monsanto Co. have gotten serious about making work more flexible. Thanks to apps and gadgets, you can easily tap away from a living room couch, the bleachers at your son's soccer game or huddled over a coconut on your Christmas vacation. There's a hidden cost to all this for women, though — and it isn't just the prospect of being available around the clock.
A recent working paper from the International Monetary Fund measured how much salary Japanese employees would be willing to forgo to enjoy a healthier work-life balance. It found that earners making ¥3 million a year would give up nearly half of their income to avoid putting in 45 hours or more of overtime per month. That outcome was roughly consistent with higher-wage workers, too.
The most obvious takeaway would be that companies should do everything they can to keep hours reasonable. It doesn't take an MBA to see that lower salaries would improve the bottom line, with the added upside of happier and possibly more productive workers. There's an important caveat, however: Women are much more eager than men to give up money for time. That mostly comes down to deeper feelings of guilt, according to the paper, not just for child-rearing but also general household responsibilities such as cooking and caring for aging parents.
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