Why women win with a 4-day workweek

What you probably already know: Henry Ford made history 100 years ago on May 1, 1926, by becoming the first major employer to institute a five-day, 40-hour workweek at his factory. He believed that changing the status quo (a six-day work week was the standard at the time) would boost productivity, improve employee morale and give workers more time to do what they enjoyed. Five days on, two days off is now a pillar of modern life, but is this relic of an industrial age overdue for an upgrade? The answer is yes for Joe O'Connor, CEO and co-founder of a global consulting and research firm specializing in alternative work models, and Jared Lindzon, a freelance journalist whose thoughts on the future of work has appeared in publications such as Fast Company and TIME. They present their compelling arguments in their new book, Do More in Four, Why It's Time for a Shorter Workweek.

Why it matters: Standardizing a four-day workweek is “a necessary rebalancer” in response to changes over the last century, O’Connor says. “Back then, an hour of labor was very closely equated with productive output. The longer people were on the clock, the longer people were working in factories, the more productive they were going to be,” he says. “Whereas we know in today’s modern digital knowledge economy, not every hour in the workweek is created equal.” The economy is also no longer driven by single-income households, so even though the five-day workweek remains in play, the average working hours per family have increased dramatically. “This is leading to a lot of the strain on family life that I think many people are experiencing all over the world,” O’Connor adds. And across the board, burnout is an insidious, escalating problem — with women reporting higher levels of work-related emotional exhaustion than men.

What it means: Lindzon says their research shows that working parents particularly benefit from a four-day workweek. For many, this means an extra day spent on getting “a sense of their personhood back. They can do hobbies they had to give up because they didn’t have the time.” A shorter workweek can also help redistribute unpaid labor, like caregiving, more evenly because having an extra day off weakens the default caregiver dynamic that arises in families where one partner (often the higher earner) works longer hours, placing more caregiving duties on the other. A 2022 trial by 4 Day Week Global found that male employees reported a 22% increase in time spent on childcare and a 23% increase in time spent on housework when moving to a four-day workweek. Normalizing a shorter workweek could also reshape career trajectories for caregivers, the majority of whom are women — easing the pressure women face to choose between career and family, while helping close the gender pay gap by keeping working mothers in the workforce. 

What happens next: A four-day, 9-to-5 work schedule won’t work for every industry, company or setting, but for better or worse, we are transitioning to an AI-augmented economy. Our world has been built around the assumption that more hours equals more productivity, but that’s changing. “The types of jobs and industries that we're going to see the need for reinvestment are those more human roles, the roles that people do not want to outsource to AI,” O’Connor says. Burnout within health care professions, for example, results in myriad costs ranging from medical errors to turnover. “There’s a real opportunity to reinvest in job creation and also alleviate work-time pressure within these sectors through a shorter week.” Adopting a four-day workweek is ultimately up to employers. Lindzon says it starts with one person building a coalition of support among colleagues, workshopping ideas and challenges, and presenting the findings.