Work-life balance is a lie—and coronavirus is exposing it

The current pandemic is forcing us into a moment of reckoning about how we organize work and family in the United States. In recent days, and for the foreseeable future—as schools close, hospitals are overwhelmed, and we engage in social-distancing—many of us are being asked to continue our full-time jobs while simultaneously homeschooling our children, attending to elderly relatives and those with special needs, and caring for the sick. In 1990, sociologist Joan Acker observed that organizations “assume a disembodied and universal worker.”