Happy 2023!

Some Thoughts on Flexible Work and the Gendering of Gyms

Happy New Year! Is it me, or does this year suddenly seem promising? I’ve taken a casual poll among friends and family and most agree: something seems to bode well for 2023. Perhaps it’s simply optimism or, rather, a kind of fatalistic desperation — after an arduous 2022 and, let’s face it, a difficult three years, we could all use a break. Let’s all think positive thoughts, then, and make it a (good) year to remember.

In recent years I’ve been reluctant about anything like a New Year’s resolution. After too many years of breaking resolutions involving exercise, work habits, or diet within the third week of trying something new, I’ve avoided them. If anything, I’ve aimed small, trying to make micro adjustments to the mundane. Buy a plant and see if I can keep it alive for, say, six weeks (did it!). Make a lunch date with a friend once a week. Aim for one new dinner recipe per month and add it to the rotation. My so-called resolutions had less to do with bettering myself and more to do with my own pleasure. That’s okay, though — seeing a little green in my office or chatting more with a friend keeps things fresh and energized.

This year I vowed to do something more ambitious, though, and make significant changes to both my work and exercise habits. My chief concern was breaking the work-from-home doldrums that so many of us have experienced during the pandemic. Work-from-home seemed so ideal to begin with, didn’t it? You no longer had to commute! You could stay in your pajamas or sweats; if you had a lot of Zoom calls, you could at least stay in your pajama bottoms! You didn’t really have to engage in office chit chat, and you could pack in three 20-minute meetings in the space of an hour with none of the requisite and annoying wind up and wind down! Plus, you could do laundry.

But as many of us have discovered, we need the chit chat to remind us that we are social beings. We need the commute to separate work from home life. It turns out that we actually like to get dressed, at least sometimes. Working from home turns out to be a bit like the idea of Christmas every day: it’s great in the beginning, but after a little while, all that pajama-wearing can turn into a special sort of hell.

I’ve been mostly working from home since well before the pandemic began and had wearied of some of its more grueling aspects long before the first lockdowns of 2020. Writing is, notoriously, a lonely vocation, its solitude made more difficult when, like me, you sometimes lack the discipline necessary to structure your days. In some ways, the pandemic was good for my writing life. With kids and spouse doing school and work at home, with yeast and sourdough calling me to knead according to a strict schedule, with the pandemic puppy demanding her walk, and with my own efforts to keep things at home calm and organized in the face of a bewildering new world, my days acquired structure down to the last hour and minute. But over the pandemic’s long reign, that structure began to devolve.

Fast-forward to the 1st of this year when I decided to implement some pandemic lessons for the long term. Structure is key, and my new plan was to break my days in half. I am one of those writers who works best in the morning, and I need to get to my desk as soon as possible, no later than 8:00am. So according to my plan, my ideal day would unfurl as follows: focused research and writing beginning at around 7:30 or 8:00am and lasting until about 2:30 in the afternoon, followed by some head-clearing and health-promoting exercise before turning back to work if needed, then to the rest of the day. Even better, I resolved that the exercise would take the form of some sort of class — spinning, perhaps, or weightlifting, or yoga. Lacking discipline on the exercise front, I need the class to get me moving. And, as I envisioned it, a class would be, if not exactly social, then at least communal, giving this writer some much needed human contact.

Sounds great, right? Except, to my dismay, not one of the gyms or exercise studios within reasonable distance offer a single class between the hours of 12pm and 5pm. I need yoga to help with my flexibility, but my yoga class is proving decidedly inflexible.

What I wish I were doing in the afternoons.

First let me acknowledge that this is a very privileged problem to have, and I will adjust as needed, foregoing work in the morning to fit in the exercise or renouncing a group class and working out on my own. I am fortunate to have flexible work hours and fortunate to be able to consider my exercise options at all. I also understand why the studios might set up their schedules this way. It’s DC. Most people are working in the afternoon, and most gyms and studios see this window as dead time, not worth paying the salary of an instructor for the few who might trickle in. Still, I can’t help but wonder if the refusal to treat the afternoon as a viable time to exercise reflects a kind of old, pre-pandemic view of the workday that doesn’t reflect the new flex-work and work-from-home reality among significant swaths of the workforce.

And I wonder if these schedules, like the work-day expectation itself, aren’t also profoundly gendered.

In the before times, gym-class schedules organized themselves into two groups: those classes meant for people who worked and those slated for people who didn’t. The imagined workday — as it was conceived by those plotting the schedules —lasted from 9am until about 5 or 6pm. So classes for the ‘workers’ were offered 6-8am and during the lunch hour, then again from about 5pm to 8 or so, picking up the after-work crowd. This all began in the 80s when working out became more of a phenomenon amongst a certain population who had enough income to hire someone to help them move their muscles. By the 90s, some gyms even touted being open 24-hours for people who needed to work out “really late” (presumably after working really late).

For those who didn’t work — or didn’t work in traditional roles — there was the 9am or 10am classes or the early evening classes.

But who were these non-workers the gyms wanted to serve, and were they really going to the evening classes? And why were there no afternoon classes for these same non-workers or non-traditional workers?

I cannot help but wonder whether this gap is because the imagined ‘non-worker’ was also imagined to be a woman, likely a mom of a certain socio-economic class. Perhaps the thinking went like this: such a mom would spend her early mornings getting the kids ready for school, would drop them at the bus or at school itself, only hitting the gym somewhere between 9-10, perhaps after grabbing a coffee first with some friends. By the afternoons, she was running errands, picking up kids from school, organizing their activities and arranging dinner so it was ready when her husband got home from work — or home from his post-work workout.

It is a decidedly upper-middle-class and traditional vision of women’s schedules. But as the exercise world conceived it, it was precisely these upper-middle-class moms who were the most interested — and had the most time and money — to work out.

Of course, this schedule didn’t necessarily fit the reality of many women’s lives whether they were working or stay-at-home — increasingly, with work schedules, locations, and expectations shifting post-Covid, as millennials age and gen-Zers enter the work force, it doesn’t match the reality of many people’s lives, no matter their gender. One could argue that the gym-schedules reflect the low-energy generally associated with afternoons, with post-lunch sleepiness and caffeine crashes. But wouldn’t that mean the afternoon is prime time for an energizing workout for so-called “flexible workers,” before they either tuck in a few more hours of work or attend to whatever needs doing during the rest of their day?

If we are going to redefine our relationship to work, then we also need to reevaluate the other cultural structures that mirror and promote a certain view of work — structures that are in ways both explicity and implicitly gendered. Those biases shape everything from after-school childcare to expectations for business trips, to the most popular classes at Soul Cycle.

I, for one, think that shifting my attitude toward work and exercise will result in better work, better parenting, and generally a better me. And maybe, on a broader scale, new social attitudes toward who works at what, and when, and how, will usher in greater equity.

So please, can I just get a 3:00pm class?