The Household is Flat: The Rise of the Core Competency Mom
“A job is, in essence, a bundle of tasks that have been clumped together and assigned to an individual. There is no reason to assume, however, that tasks must continue to be bundled together in the future in the same pattern they have been bundled in the past.”—Troy Smith and Jan Rivkin, Harvard Business Review
Maureen Beddis of Alexandria, Virginia, has a lot on her plate. She works 45 to 50 hours a week in a senior-level management job at The Vision Group, a nonprofit that promotes better vision care. She has a one–year-old daughter, Abby, who loves walks in the stroller along the Potomac River. She’s also caring for a six-year-old husky-lab mix named Cyrus, but what really makes her superwoman is that she’s doing all this on her own. Her husband Charles is in the middle of a 400-day deployment to Iraq.
Consequently, “time is limited for pretty much any general life maintenance,” she says. “It’s a pretty tough juggling act.” So she outsources or ignores everything beyond work and Abby/Cyrus that she can.
She does not iron—ever. Instead, a local dry cleaner picks up and drops off her work clothes. She rarely goes grocery shopping. She gets regular loads of baby, mom, and dog food delivered. She does not take care of her lawn—a local lawn-service business keeps it reasonably green. A dog walker takes care of Cyrus on weekdays, and a mobile pet grooming service gives him a good comb-out when necessary. She does not bake. “I have found someone in the neighborhood who runs a dessert business; she has a little menu and you call and order it and she delivers everything to your house,” she says. This is great for parties—“I’m always the first to say ‘I’ll bring dessert!’” She’s still on the hunt for a good way to outsource meal prep. She tried the smattering of meal assembly franchises like Let’s Dish popping up in the area, “but I find that they’re best suited when you’re cooking for a family, not for one person.” Sometimes she fantasizes about paying someone to take out the trash. So far that hasn’t worked, but she has found a pharmacy that delivers all her family’s medications so she never has to haul the baby over there.
In other words, there are a lot of people playing for Team Beddis. But all the outsourcing has a pay-off. “By finding help with these things, it frees me up to spend early Saturday mornings out walking along the Potomac River with Abby and Cyrus when things are really quiet, the water still,” she says. “If I’m home giving the dog a bath or running errands like grocery-shopping, picking up dry cleaning, etc., I would never get to enjoy all the wonderful things that make this area so special…It’s about quality of life.”
It’s also a very modern attitude—“an entirely different way of thinking versus how I was raised,” she admits. “My mother told me how much I could save if I would just do my own ironing versus sending everything to the cleaners. But it’s not how I choose to spend my time.” Instead, she’s pondered selling her iron on eBay.
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A job, Jan Rivkin and Troy Smith of Harvard Business School once noted, is a bundle of tasks assigned to one person—and no job description is more of a hodgepodge than “mom.” It’s become a Mother’s Day tradition for companies to release figures showing what you’d have to pay a mom to compensate for the motley jobs she does. The main job, of course, is childcare. But the number crunchers throw in others—menu planning, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, home organization, lawn work, toy assembly, birthday party planning, wardrobe services, errand running—in addition to the paid work that the majority of mothers now do. Salary.com estimates that the “at-home” component of a working mom’s time should be worth about $68,405 per year.
But a growing number of women like Beddis are questioning the idea that “mom” should involve a bundle of unrelated, if traditional, tasks. They are not alone in this re-thinking. We live in an outsourcing era where, according to the title of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s best-selling book, “the world is flat.”
Once, corporations were behemoths made up of discrete business units. Ideally, all these business units would make money for the mother ship, but not necessarily in the same fields. U.S. Steel, for instance, acquired Marathon Oil in the early 1980’s in part because energy seemed like a growing business. To survive in a globalized economy, though, corporations have had to limber up and slim down, as changing technology has made it more efficient to outsource functions once considered integral to their operations. U.S. Steel spun off its energy business and many of its other non-steel assets a few years ago. Even General Electric—a conglomerate of businesses from finance to lighting —announced this past summer that it was looking to spin off its appliance division. Few corporations run their own cafeterias anymore, or hire their own janitors. They do not film their own commercials or administer their own insurance plans. Instead, they focus on what Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, in a 1990Harvard Business Review article, dubbed “core competencies.” These are things that the corporation can do best, and that other companies cannot do nearly as well. Successful 21st-century enterprises have learned that there is an opportunity cost in talent and resources to doing things that others can do better. Companies thrive when they focus all their attention on the few products or services that deliver the most value.
People can have core competencies too. For a professional mom like Beddis, those core competencies are nurturing family members and—if they’re in the right job, as Beddis is (“This is my other home,” she gushes about The Vision Group)—their paid work. No one else can do these things as well as they can.
Dropping off the dry cleaning, on the other hand, does not fall into this category. Neither does pushing a shopping cart down the pet food aisle. These things can be done less often or outsourced to people who’ve made careers of specializing in these tasks—usually small businesses like Beddis’s lawn service, Let’s Dish, and full-service dry cleaners that charge prices more accessible to the middle class than the maids, cooks, and laundresses of yore.
By outsourcing or ignoring non core-competency tasks, a mom like Beddis frees up time to focus on what she does best. And here’s the miracle of home economics: There’s evidence that as women have entered the workforce—and hence have attained the means and social permission to outsource or ignore traditional chores—they’ve actually started investing more time in their kids than in the past. It seems counterintuitive, but the rise of what I call the “Core Competency Mom” has benefits that traditionalists bent on berating working mothers are missing entirely.
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To understand the change in mindset among American women with jobs and young kids, it’s important to look at the history of American homemaking. Before the age of automation, keeping house was a back-achingly laborious process. Women with large broods could spend whole days scrubbing clothes on washboards. Cooking food from scratch made every meal a production. Perhaps one reason Andy Warhol chose Campbell’s Soup cans for his iconic 1962 artwork of the same name is that canned soup really was a sensation in the mid-century household; in the past, housewives had to boil bones to make stock.
By 1965, though, Good Housekeeping magazine was packed with advertisements for KitchenAid dishwashers, Admiral Duplex refrigerators, and Norge washing machines. The packaged food market, while not appetizing, did exist (the June 1965 issue features a SPAM ad suggesting housewives whip up a quick “crusty SPAMbake” from cornflakes, pineapple slices, and the infamous pink pork product). Yet, according to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), in 1965, non-employed moms still spent 37.4 hours a week on housework (employed moms spent 23.6 hours).
Labor statisticians define 35 hours as a full-time job, and reading through 1965 women’s magazines, it’s soon clear that product manufacturers and editors did consider caring properly for one’s house to be a full-time occupation. Multiple ads for baby shoe polish suggest that women actually polished their babies’ shoes. Ladies Home Journal had a “patterns” editor, meaning some readers were sewing the smart suits showcased in the fashion section. Good Housekeeping’s December 1965 edition features an article on protective oven coating products, with instructions to spread newspapers around generously before spraying, “about six feet in all directions.” “It must be understood that these are not oven cleaners,” the article chides, “and that an oven must be absolutely clean before they’re sprayed on—the coatings don’t ‘take’ when applied over soiled areas.” Do it right the first time, however, the reader learns, “and with regular reapplications you can count on quicker cleanup even after heavy roasting or baking sessions.” An ad for an iron touts that it uses “plain old tap water” so “now you can forget about lugging home those bottles of distilled water” which were necessary ironing inputs before. An article on “75 Ways To Save Time During the Holidays” hilariously suggests that women “cut raisins…with kitchen shears.”
Yes, in 1965, houses sparkled, and raisins were cut, but there was a downside to this obsession: According to the ATUS, women in 1965 spent just over 15 hours per week interacting with their children as a primary or secondary activity (a primary activity would be bathing the child; secondary would be answering homework questions while making dinner). In other words, in the 1960s, house-care, not childcare, took the lion’s share of a homemaker’s time. Indeed, moms who spent their days volunteering, playing cards with friends, lugging around distilled water for ironing, and cutting raisins often paid little attention to their kids. One of Good Housekeeping’s timesaving tips is to “Provide interesting toys or books for small children to keep them out of the kitchen”— Christmas cookie-making apparently being too serious an enterprise to share with your offspring.
The era of the professional homemaker is over. Almost no one spends 37.4 hours per week on housekeeping now. In 2006, according to the ATUS, moms spent 14.4 to 25 hours per week on household activities, depending on their employment status.
Time spent at paid work, on the other hand, has moved in the opposite direction. In 1965, 38.5 percent of women aged 25 to 34 were in the labor force, as were 46.1 percent of women aged 35 to 44. By 2005, participation rates for these age groups rose to 74.9 percent and 75.8 percent. About 70 percent of married mothers of kids under age six work in some capacity. There is some evidence that women work differently than men (in more flexible jobs, for instance, and for fewer hours). But, unlike 40 years ago, the majority of mothers work outside the home in addition to inside it.
Traditionalists have decried this trend—at least until many discovered a kindred spirit in Alaska governor and mom Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s running mate. In a story on daycare in the May 28, 2001 National Review, Richard Lowry wrote that “the fact is that working moms are at the very center of a variety of cultural ills. Maybe a little stigma is exactly what they deserve.” (Lowry’s more recent writings have mused about how great it will be to have Palin’s baby Trig grow up in the Naval Observatory). Dr. Laura Schlessinger has long beaten the drum for this message and—to her credit, perhaps –has not allowed her political affinity for Palin to blur the point. “Couldn’t the Republican Party find one competent female with adult children to run for Vice President with McCain?” she lamented recently. “What kind of role model is a woman whose fifth child was recently born with a serious issue, Down Syndrome, and then goes back to the job of governor within days of the birth?” While Palin’s nursing-during-conference-calls strategies are now the stuff of cultural legend, Schlessinger sniffed that “Any full-time working wife and mother knows that the family takes the short end of the stick. Marriages and the welfare of children suffer when a stressed-out mother doesn’t have time to be a woman, a wife, and a hands-on Mommy.”
But it’s not clear that the three are mutually exclusive. The most fascinating piece of this time puzzle is the historical trend in time spent with kids. As noted before, in 1965, the average mother with children under age 18 spent 2.2 hours per day with children as a primary or secondary activity. By 1998, this figure had risen to 2.8 hours per day, a rise of more than 4 hours per week. Averaged over all mothers in America, over the past 40 years, time spent at work, and time spent interacting with children, have risen in tandem.
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In other words, when women entered the workforce, they did not, on average, take time and attention away from their children. Instead, they largely took time away from the non-core competency task of housework. Women in 2008 simply don’t do many of the things housewives did 40 years ago. We don’t cut raisins—with kitchen shears or otherwise. We don’t polish our children’s footwear because they wear sneakers from Target, not saddle shoes that require upkeep. Our standards of cleanliness have changed, notes Glenna Matthews, historian and author of Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity. “When I was a young housewife—I’m now 69 years old—in my 20’s, somebody who didn’t like me came over one time and then a week later said ‘You think you’re so hot but I’ve seen the dust under your bed,’” she says. “It is inconceivable to me now that anybody would be talking about dust under your bed as a mark of shame.”
Taking a cue from large corporations, we are also outsourcing a growing proportion of the housework we can’t ignore. In the premiere issue of Ms. in the early 1970s, Judy Syfers’s famous “I Want a Wife” essay made a splash by listing all the things wives did to make their husbands’ lives easier. The surprising thing about reading the essay now, in 2008, is realizing how many small businesses are clamoring to take over each of Syfers’s chores.
Syfers wrote that “I want a wife who will plan the menus, do the necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly….”
Wendy Kagan, a writer in Woodstock, New York, wanted that too. So she hired a vegan meal delivery service shortly after her daughter Amelie was born. For $90 a week, the Kagan diet was suddenly transformed from take-out to hearty split pea soup and Indian spiced ginger tofu squares with date cake for dessert. As a result, she and her husband had “more time to be with our daughter and more time to do the work we needed to do,” she says.
Delivery services are far from the only way families outsource food chores. Some families make bi-weekly visits to meal preparation franchises such as Let’s Dish or My Girlfriend’s Kitchen, where they assemble enough entrees from pre-chopped ingredients to last for two workweeks. According to the Easy Meal Prep Association, there were four such businesses in existence in 2002. These days, there are over 1,100.
Lyn Franklin Hoyt, a Nashville business owner, calculates that she saves two hours weekly by having her groceries delivered. She also sometimes hires a woman she calls “The Crock Pot Lady” to cook dinner. This chef’s business model entails visiting clients’ homes in the morning, tossing ingredients in their slow cookers, and setting them on simmer until evening. “I don’t have to think about it, shop for it, or remember to set it up,” Hoyt says. When Hoyt cooks, it’s a choice, as it is for a growing number of Americans. We now spend 49 percent of our food dollars on restaurant meals, up from a third a few decades ago. Even food consumed at home is more likely to be prepared or packaged than in the past. By some counts, deli sales in supermarkets doubled during the 1990s.
Syfers wanted a wife “who will see to it that my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it.” These days, she could call any of the 4,000 members of the National Association of Professional Organizers to make sure her house is set up that way.
She wanted a wife “who will keep my house clean.” Jenni Levy, a Pennsylvania-based primary care physician, solved this problem by hiring a cleaning service to strip and make the beds, vacuum, and scrub the kitchen every week. “We just don’t do the housecleaning if we don’t have someone come in, and that makes me crazy,” she says. “The cleaners keep things at a tolerable level and we don’t fuss at each other about it.” A growing number of Americans are discovering this secret to two-income domestic bliss; Ann Arbor, Michigan-headquartered Molly Maids, for instance, added 40 new franchises to its 450 existing U.S. ones in 2007.
Syfers wrote, “I want a wife who will wash the children’s clothes and keep them mended.” Sarah Wagner is a Philadelphia-based stay-at-home mom, but even though she isn’t working outside the home, she recently hired a laundry service called We Wash It Laundry to pick up her bags of dirty clothes and deliver them clean and folded. “Folding the laundry requires uninterrupted time that I don’t have—or don’t want to devote to laundry,” she says. “If I stop mid-load, the kids and dog will inevitably trample my work.” This service costs her $25 to $35 weekly, and “we have all been happier ever since.”
Syfers wanted a wife who would prepare a special meal when company came over. Many women (and men) enamored with the Food Network still take on this challenge, but a growing number of Americans even outsource party hostess duties. The Personal Chef Association, chartered in 1996, now has 4,500 active members who will cook a special meal, and the home catering industry will make sure that guests are, per Syfers’s fantasy, “passed the hors d’oeuvres, that they are offered a second helping of the food, that their wine glasses are replenished when necessary, that their coffee is served to them as they like it.”
Virtual assistants in India can “keep track of the children’s doctor and dentist appointments.” Concierge services such as Red Butler will, for $36.95 a month, “take care of the details of my social life.” Chris Sterling, a spokesman for Red Butler, notes that they’ll do this even if the details of your social life are weird; they once arranged delivery of gallons of milk and Strawberry Quik powder for a client who requested a strawberry milk bath at a hotel.
All of this comes down to economics. As women have entered the workforce, the monetary value of their time has risen. Since their time is valuable, they are less willing to allocate this valuable resource to activities that other people can do just as well. Like corporations allocating top talent and resources to their core competencies, modern mothers allocate time to its highest impact purposes—raising their kids and building their careers. It’s fascinating to note that the industry of children’s museums (38 total in 1975, rising to more than 300 now), Gymborees (founded in 1976), and other activities parents and children do together rose as women entered the workforce.
Interestingly, Core Competency Moms are changing the world of work, too. Many moms work for themselves in order to allocate their precious time to activities with the most bottom line impact, rather than office politics. They seek out flexible hours and telecommuting perks. None of the (non vice-presidential) women mentioned so far in this article has an inflexible nine-to-five cubicle existence. Beddis can work from home whenever she wants. Kagan and Hoyt work for themselves. Levy worked part-time when her daughter was younger; only about 35 percent of married women with children under age six work full-time. There is nothing about a 40, 50, or 60-hour week in an office park that implies maximum efficiency. At 7 p.m. on one recent night, I visited the office of a company known for its brutal hours. Most of the men employed there have stay-at-home wives so they can be free to work around the clock if necessary. But it’s hard to describe what these men were doing as “working.” They drifted in and out of offices chatting with each other, seeing what everyone else was up to, tracking down who was going to a dinner, participating in unnecessarily long conference calls so everyone could have “input,” responding to emails the second they came in. As a general rule, moms want to spend time with their kids. So they have little patience for this mistaking of quantity hours for quality. Consequently, children of working moms often spend fewer hours in substitute care than people imagine. While the majority of mothers of young kids work, 59 percent of their children spend less than 35 hours per week in non-parental care. Kagan and her husband, for instance, use meal delivery services, a cleaning service, and yard help, but they stagger their working hours so the only childcare they use for Amelie is preschool.
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This philosophy of outsourcing or ignoring anything other than carefully chosen work and childcare is not universal, of course. Some fans of Martha Stewart enjoy housework. Some women don’t trust anyone else to do “their” household tasks. Esther de Ruijter, a sociologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, tells me that people who work from home are more likely to outsource household tasks in part because they can supervise the process. It also costs money to outsource and—as long as there are women willing to do these tasks for free, even if they are contributing monetarily to the household as well—outsourcing will be seen as an optional expenditure. Consequently, spending on outsourcing rises and falls with the economy. IBISWorld, a market research company, estimates that spending on cleaning services and lawn care services will decline slightly in 2008 before rising with the expected 2009 recovery.
In general, though, outsourcing costs less than people think it does. A laundry service costs a bit over $1/lb. Grocery delivery is $10 more than going to the store, and that’s if you tip well. The average American tax refund—about $2,500, usually frittered away on impulse purchases—could pay for a cleaning service for a year. A company called The Perfect Wife, run by Ed Daly out in the Bay Area, charges $35/hour to do anything from assembling a bike to finding a plumber.
These days, 52 percent of Americans eat out at least once a week. Almost none of us sew our own clothes. The vast majority of us already outsource some household tasks. Citing cost is likely just the reflexive reason for resistance to more outsourcing. The deeper issue is that our culture assumes that all the unrelated tasks of laundry, food prep, and the like are a vital part of how a mom cares for a family, even though they are clearly not as important as, say, helping a kid develop strategies for making friends at a new school. Making the household flat, along with the rest of the world, means challenging beliefs learned at our own mothers’ knees. Though everything we do is economic, it is difficult to raise economic questions in the domestic sphere, as any mom berated by her sister for sending her kid to school with $2 for a hot lunch rather than a lovingly hand-packed (but soggy) PB&J sandwich knows.
In addition, the infrastructure necessary to outsourced household work is less built up in some areas than others. Rural areas don’t have grocery delivery and laundry services, though this is changing. Then there is the whole question of who we outsource to—though this is also less controversial than people think. Over the years, American women have outsourced the bulk of their chores to machines: dishwashers, washer/dryers, microwaves, even robotic vacuums. Better products make the remaining chores less burdensome; today’s disposable diapers and non-stick pans work far better than their ancestors. Prices have come down so far that it makes more sense to buy children’s clothes than mend them. The chef-designed four-minute microwave meals (e.g., lamb chops with goat cheese and orzo pasta) that I have delivered from my local FreshDirect grocery service taste better than anything I could whip up.
But eventually with services such as cleaning, gardening and, most of all, childcare, a human being must be involved, and that’s where the controversy starts. Is “outsourcing” just a nice way of saying that high-wage women (and men) are paying low-wage women (and men)—whose immigration status might be questionable—to take on their unwanted tasks? Immigration critics on the Right have long touted household self-sufficiency as the moral alternative to low-wage imported labor; during the recent immigration debate, John Derbyshire, for instance, titled a National Review blog post “Mow Your Own Lawn.” Even people who celebrate legal immigration worry that illegal immigrants lack the protections of unemployment insurance, Social Security, and the like. If Core Competency Moms can only exist on the backs of a low-wage, easily exploited labor force, this isn’t progress.
But almost none of the dozens of women I have spoken to about household outsourcing, on and off the record over a year of investigating this topic, has considered illegal immigration to be a relevant issue. And none of my interview subjects who’ve worked in the household services industry has felt in any way exploited. That’s because these days, middle-class Americans outsource to small businesses rather than individuals who function anything like household employees. People who work in household services are, for the most part, small business entrepreneurs. There are two reasons for this.
First, outsourcing to a business is often simpler than hiring a specific individual part- or full-time. One call to a dry cleaner can secure a laundry service for a year, without all the transaction costs involved in hiring someone personally to come to your house to match your socks. Cleaning services like Merry Maids and meal preparation franchises like Let’s Dish deal with their own payroll taxes, and face penalties for employing people who aren’t legally allowed to work in the U.S. That’s not to say it can’t happen, or that they don’t sometimes pay sub-par wages, but these are real entry-level jobs. And sometimes they’re not so entry-level. The dry cleaning business, for instance, has long given lower-skilled immigrants an opportunity to pursue the American dream of working for themselves.
Second, outsourcing to businesses is often cheaper than hiring individuals because of economies of scale. Few American families are wealthy enough to employ full-time maids or nannies on or off the books. There are some 20-million American children aged zero to four. The majority of their mothers work, but no attempt to count full-time nannies comes up with a higher number than 600,000 (and most counts are lower). Most families use commercial or home daycare centers, or make arrangements with family or friends. A daycare center employing three women to watch twelve children can produce better economies of scale than one family employing one woman to watch two children, just as Molly Maids and Merry Maids make money by being more efficient at house-cleaning than the average mom could ever hope to be. A laundry service that picks up dozens of people’s dirty clothes and has ten industrial dryers can charge less than any one family would have to pay a woman to come hang out in their house for five hours while she used their one washer/dryer combo to run four loads.
These efficiencies allow such businesses to charge prices that middle-class families can afford. The crazy thing about economics in our household-is-flat era is that this is true even if the “business” consists of only one self-employed person.
Lyn Franklin Hoyt’s Crock Pot Lady, for instance, charges $35 per meal. This is about $20 more than it would cost Hoyt to buy the ingredients for a six-portion dinner herself. If the Crock Pot Lady were simply the Hoyts’ personal chef, she would have to charge far more than $35 per day to make a living. But, of course, she doesn’t just work for the Hoyts. Ten families might hire her per day. Since she buys in bulk, she’ll clear more than $20 per family, meaning she’ll earn more than $50,000 a year. That’s quite respectable for part-time work, and it is part-time work, since assembling one meal for ten families takes a lot less time than assembling ten meals for one family. Meanwhile, Hoyt, who is better at running her business than the Crock Pot Lady would be, but not as good at designing slow cooker meals as the Crock Pot Lady, can work an hour longer on Crock Pot Lady days, or spend an extra hour with her kids. She values her time at $80/hour—the price she charges her graphic design clients. The Crock Pot Lady gives her an additional hour to work, or an additional hour with her kids, for $20. So, even after taxes, they both come out ahead.
When companies focus on what they do best, the economy grows. When moms like Hoyt, Beddis, and the rest focus on what they do best, they have time for it all—both building their careers and enjoying family life more than when women were expected to cut raisins and lug distilled water to their ironing boards.
Deborah Dalton of Petaluma, California has certainly discovered this. This elementary school site coordinator for a youth mentoring program hires exterminators to come every three months to deal with her bugs. “Could we get a broom and a can of Raid?” she asks. “Sure, but we prefer to let the experts take care of it.” A dry cleaning service picks up all their dry cleaning and ironing from the front porch. She asks her babysitters if they’d like to stay an extra hour or two after she gets home to help with filing, organizing closets and cupboards, or figuring out how to make labels for Christmas cards. Net result? “On the weekends we ride bikes, play games, go to the beach, go for hikes, or take mini-road trips,” she says. “We don’t worry about the things that would normally fall under the ‘weekend chores’ list like heavy gardening, big cleaning, and household maintenance.” When her six- and eight-year-old children get home from school, they can do their homework or play with mom, rather than shuffling into the car to head for the dry cleaners again. “My marriage is not eaten away by arguments about who does what, about who has less time for themselves,” she says. “Yes, we are spoiled, we are tremendously lucky.” But in the era of the Core Competency Mom, they are far from alone.
-Laura Vanderkam is a writer living in New York City. She keeps a blog called Core Competency Moms.