tions. There are people, especially women and
also lots of men of color, who cobble together
three or four part-time jobs, they have no benefits at all. They don’t get paid when they
don’t work. Basically, we have this bifurcation
of the labor force, some of us having very good
jobs and others churning in and out of low-and median-wage peripheral jobs. There is a
significant difference in quality of life, even if
pay is identical.
Why is no one studying this? People don’t
really care. Many of the people who implement
diversity programs are women and white
women, and it’s only when people of color and
women of color are very active and agitating
about diversity do we get included. How do you
get the research funded? And it’s not clear for
those who are funding research that the diversity in population is a sufficient priority. Often,
what you really have to do is over-sample.
Galinsky: One of the advantages to having
a large national representative study is we can
look at this issue, but it’s important again to
separate out the issues of income ver-
sus ethnicity. I was just looking at our
data, and if you take the lower-wage
work force, 57 percent of those people
are white, and if you take the higher-
wage income, 83 percent are white.
Gadsden-Williams: Is the reason why there hasn’t been substantive
research on the topic of race and
work/life the perception that work/life
balance is everyone’s issue versus our
issue versus their issue?
Malveaux: That’s a very legitimate
question. The fact is it’s everyone’s
issue. When we start talking about
work/life–balance issues, if things are
available at a corporation, there is
nothing to say that a person of color is
less likely to use it than the other person, but we might want to study it.
You might want to know if people of
color in a corporation, is there different usage of things like flex time, the
gym?
HOW DO YOU GET MEN TO TAKE
ADVANTAGE OF WORK/LIFE?
Shi: One good microcosm of that
issue is my son’s baseball league. Most
of the coaches are dads, but those are
the dads that are able to leave their
jobs early to show up at a baseball
game at 5 in the afternoon, which is
tough in some industries. More men
are realizing that they have to make
their choice of what is important to
