According to the traditional way of thinking, losing time as you earn more money isn’t seen as a cost at all. But looking through a Womenomics lens, additional time is increasingly more valuable than more money. Indeed, time is the currency of Women — omics.
It’s remarkable how much money most professional women would be prepared to give up to earn themselves a few more free hours every week. It’s a bit like high-stakes financial trading, where we sell short on one commodity to hold another that’s even more valuable.
But it is worth reminding ourselves that we are the lucky ones. We are in the very fortunate position of being able to choose to give up some income in order to earn some time. If you are poor in New York or New Delhi, you don’t have that option. This choice is a luxury, and we as professional women should appreciate how incredibly fortunate we are.
How much time you need and how much money you will forfeit to get that time are questions only you can answer. Everyone’s definition of what it means to have enough time is different.
Similarly, everyone’s definition of what it means to have enough money is different. You’ll need to look honestly at that side of the equation too. If you are miserable without a regular splurge at your favorite clothing store, if life without foreign travel seems unbearable, or if you need every penny for your son’s violin lessons, you may have to compromise on your time or simply work on the efficiency side of the equation. (We’ll tell you later in the book how to save time without making major career changes.)
When Jennifer Dickey chose to trade money for time, it was worth it, but it wasn’t easy. The thirty-one-year-old is a mechanical engineer at the architectural firm Kahn Associates in Detroit. On Jennifer’s floor of a hundred employees there are only seven women in total. She is a woman in a man’s world who has struggled with the financial costs of dialing back her work hours.
Jennifer has two young daughters. After her second child was born, she realized she didn’t want to work a forty-hour week anymore. Her firm was known for allowing employees to work flexibly, so there was no problem getting the agreement. The problem came in financing it. Jennifer could take the pay cut in her hourly salary without too much hardship. Her husband works in sales, so they had a second income.
What she hadn’t factored in was that all her company benefits would be cut proportionately as well. For every hour she wanted to take off from her traditional forty-hour week, Jennifer would pay a benefits price. Her company’s Social Security contributions would go down. She would get less paid vacation. Meanwhile she would have to pay out more for her share of the company’s health insurance program.
“You know I can handle losing a few hours a week of salary, but it’s all of the costs that go along with it that are also prorated, and that adds up,” she says.
At the same time that Jennifer was working out this time/ money equation, her eldest daughter turned three, and they enrolled her in preschool. That cost was $100 per week, and because they had family living nearby who’d looked after the girls until then, it was the first time Jennifer had paid for child care. The preschool payouts and salary cut came as a double whammy.
“My second daughter was born in December, I came back to work in March, and I don’t think I made the decision to cut hours until it was the end of the summer because I was very nervous about it,” says Jennifer. “I was nervous about making the move because it was a big financial difference for us.”
For Jennifer those “hidden” costs meant she could only cut her hours from forty to thirty-six. It seems small, but even those extra four hours have helped. If she and her husband can make it work financially she would like to cut back to a thirty-hour week. Her ideal would be to work three ten-hour days.
For Jennifer, this was a fairly straightforward value trade. But it takes practice to see this, to get to the point where a financial sacrifice is “worth it.”
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