on hiring a “house manager”

I am late in commenting but I have read Penelope Trunk’s April 10 column “Marry a Stay-at-Home Spouse or Buy the Equivalent” with some interest.

Disclaimer here: I like Penelope Trunk’s column. I rarely agree with her advice, but I think she offers an interesting perspective on working dilemmas, and I for one don’t mind her openness about her personal life. I want to know more, in fact. She has her detractors, but you know, she’s not writing for The New York Times, so I cut her a lot of slack. And I edit my own posts so many hundreds of times, I simply can’t fault her for not getting hers right the first time. If people don’t like getting the edited versions vis RSS, they don’t have to subscribe. I share her zero tolerance for nitpickers. I believe there are things more important than spelling, or grammar, and I’ll admit to making up my own punctuation. I don’t mind having my Portuguese, or my German, corrected – I like it in fact – but where English is concerned, leave me to my own devices.

Back to the column: here she goes out on a bit of a limb and defends her choice to hire a “house manager” at a salary of $50,000, in addition to her full time nanny, cleaning service, and assistant at work. I have no problem with her decision to outsource the managing of her household; if I had known about the job, I might have applied for it. That said, I am baffled she can afford it. I like her column, but I don’t find it particularly “substantive.” She doesn’t take on macroeconomic issues, for one, and she doesn’t appear widely read. I think the personal stuff would work better by way of illustration of concepts she could introduce in a discussion of such and such a book, or theory, or growing problem. I don’t deny the column is fun to read, but I don’t see much reading or research going on, so I’m curious how it generates so much income for her.

Let’s assume she’s paying for the “house manager” with savings while she builds her career. Or that there’s a bunch of venture capital money behind the “Brazen Careerist” project, so she can really afford it. Whether she deserves her salary is a mute point, she does not need to apologize for her outsourcing decisions. This isn’t a moral issue, any more than the decision to put one’s kids in school. As her Google colleague revealed, “every high-level woman he’s ever worked with—at Microsoft, Starbucks, and Google—has had to pay for tons of help at home or had a stay-at-home husband or has been literally falling apart at work.”

I don’t know why Penelope limits the discussion to “high-level” women, even if she’s one of them. I think whenever we don’t have sufficient resources to be fully present at work, our work suffers. I know mine does, even if it’s not apparent to the external observer (because I am an absolute master of the 80/20 rule).

I have learned to put my personal bottom line first, to take time off in order to study, rest, or hang out with my son when I can’t afford childcare because of some unanticipated expense that week. But the truth is, I am administrator, not an executive, so I don’t have that much flexibility, and I have very little in the way of resources to outsource, etc. Yet, if I were to triple my salary tomorrow, I would not think of hiring a nanny, or a “house manager.” My life is too simple for such things.

I guess I don’t believe as we move up the career ladder, our home lives must, necessarily, become so much more complicated.

That said, I believe there is a minimum level of compensation below which we can’t afford the resources we need to manage our lives outside of work; without those resources, our work suffers.

This is the point Penelope should have addressed: we all have lives outside of work, and without the resources to manage them, we can’t be expected to perform on the job.

This was a case where the personal example did not work, because most of her readers are not in the market for a “house manager.” She could have written about the value of a “wife” in economic terms in our society, and the un-level playing field facing female executives, especially after they have children. She could have raised the question whether “success” as we think of it is even possible for an unmarried female executive with children and if so, under what conditions? Does one really have to buy the equivalent of a stay-at-home spouse?

I think Penelope is right that we have to manage our own careers, our own success, but this does not take the onus off of the society, or the corporation. Single working mothers face conditions that are inherently unfair, and it would be nice to see Penelope’s gaze widen a bit now that she is joining their ranks.