Working women: Is stress a status symbol?

A new book, Rushing Woman’s Syndrome, argues that working women are suffering from overload. Is is fact or fiction?

The busy lives led by many women may not be as stressful as many imagine. iStock image

At 7.45am the other day I found myself driving naked, save for a dressing gown and my daughter’s Crocs. It wasn’t even a sexy dressing gown look, more of an “endgame alcoholism” look. Sitting in traffic, between answering children’s questions in a sensitive way (“yes, your clothes do smell of sick from being left in the washing ­machine, but they appear clean and that matters more”), I had time to evaluate my life choices.

Was I perhaps suffering from “rushing woman’s syndrome"? This is the term used by Australian nutritional biochemist Libby Weaver in her new book to ­describe the modern woman’s ­attempt to please boss, husband and child, at a cost to her health. Apparently even a woman’s adrenal glands don’t have time to do their job properly.

Certainly, I was in no position — the dressing gown had lost its cord — to deny the symptoms, or with any dignity. Yet now there is a counter-attack. Rushing woman’s syndrome almost sounds like a spoof because it comes after so many other books, films, TV shows and articles in tabloids on how hard it is to be a working mother. In essence, everything from I Don’t Know How She Does It to Baby Boom says: “Don’t have a job: you’ll end up like this crazy woman right here, naked in a car at 7.45am. Just look! No, actually don’t — God, there isn’t even a cord.”

Could it be everything we are told about women and work stress is wrong? That being busy is only a good sign that they are in ­demand? That their stock is rising? That working mothers enjoy signalling how stressed they are ­because it equates to their right to the high-status life? That they have ­finally earned the luxury of bragging about being busy as much, or more, as the next man? So argues a new breed of expert on contemporary society, and the evidence seems to be on their side.

In Rushing Woman’s Syndrome, Weaver diagnoses the condition like this: “If your instinctive ­answer to ‘how are you?’ is ‘busy’; if you rarely get enough sleep; make poor food choices, rely on coffee to rev you up in the morning and wine to calm you down at night.” As one of my female editors said: “That’s not a syndrome, that’s the human condition.” Or that’s not a syndrome, that’s a status symbol.

Kelly McGonigal is a psychology lecturer at Stanford University whose TED talk on stress has been viewed 14 million times. Her findings? That stress is only damaging if you view it as a negative. When 30,000 Americans were tracked, those ­reporting that they had a lot on had a 43 per cent risk of dying prematurely. However, that finding held true only if they believed stress was harmful. If you think of stress as a positive challenge, your body can handle it.

And our society is increasingly of the view that stress is not just good but a luxury good. Silvia Bellezza, a professor of marketing at Columbia Business School in New York, has tested perceptions of stress in multiple studies. She found that those who said they were ultra-busy at work were seen as richer, more successful and more enviable than those who had a bit of free time on their hands. This was “driven by the perception that a busy person possesses ­desired human capital characteristics (competence, ambition) and is scarce and in demand on the job market”.

An elevated status.

In previous times the leisured classes were the ones to look up to. Or, as Thorstein ­Veblen wrote in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, absenting yourself from the workplace “becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement”.

This relates especially to women. They have an unprecedented presence in the workplace at just the same time as workplace stress is correlated with one’s value. No surprise they want a piece of that.

Some of the most visible and richest mothers in our culture, Victoria Beckham for example, make a point of saying that the demands of working and motherhood are a “constant struggle”. For Beckham, being seen to sweat it out professionally and personally increases status. Laura Vanderkam, a best-selling corporate time management expert, heard the “constant struggle” mantra of working mothers so often she decided to analyse the data. She found no constant struggle.

In her book I Know How She Does It, Vanderkam found that working women had ample leisure time, yet “the larger world delights in telling people that a full life will be harried, leading to one being maxed out, or torn”.

“I read all these horror stories like anyone else. I call them the Recitations of Dark Moments. They are like a Greek chorus, saying, ‘You can’t have it all’,” she told me previously.

Vanderkam has a high-profile career, four children and an active sports and social life, and freely ­admits “life is busy”. Yet, she views that gratefully and positively.

“No doubt some women feel frequently rushed,” she says. “And many women feel rushed from time to time. But it’s not the constant state for the average person. People do have leisure time. Maybe not as much as we want but someone is watching all the shows on TV and someone is looking at everything posted on Facebook and Instagram.”

Half a century ago Betty Friedan stated that if housewives across the Western world would embark on careers instead, they would be happier and healthier, their marriages more satisfying and their children would thrive. The world laughed. Yet repeated studies have shown that working mothers are physically healthier than their stay-at-home counterparts. Work­ing mothers are also far less likely to feel sad or have clinical depression. We also know working mothers spend more time with their children than housewives did in the 1950s, and that household income is a bigger predictor of childhood academic development than time spent with parents.

The benefits are so consistently tested that it is amazing that new mothers are not given one of those public health leaflets when they leave hospital. “Thinking of ditching your job? Know the risks.” Or that our culture is not full of films called I Don’t Know How She Does It in which the plot involves a woman putting a raincover on a buggy in a windswept playground over and over again.

Our culture is not full of those films, Vanderkam says, because it sees the highly visible busy-ness of women only as a negative. “For women in particular, part of the rushing trope stems from our discomfort with mothers working for pay. For women, we see paid work and domestic work as being at odds. We assume they cannot both be done, so if a woman is doing both she must be harried and pulled in multiple directions. We don’t run the numbers and see that someone working 40 hours and sleeping eight hours a night has 72 hours for other things a week — which is quite a bit of time.”

So it could be that the industry telling women they are miserably stressed in their jobs is partly ­responsible for some women being miserably stressed in their jobs. That rushing woman’s syndrome could give you rushing woman’s syndrome. As for me, yes, I have been known to rush. But today I did eventually manage to get dressed and arrive at work. I thank you for giving me the opportunity to brag about this achievement.

The Times