In 'family friendly' workplaces, singles feel overlooked

"All the employer has to do to handle adults without children," says Joan Williams, a law professor and director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California's Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, "is to set up workplace structures that take into account that adults will have to leave. They will have to leave increasingly for elder-care crises, for child-care issues, and for ill spouses." If the employer "makes believe" that single or childless employees have no obligations outside the office, and relies on them always to pick up the slack, that can end up taxing the entire company, he says.

The question of better managing childless or single workers is one of pure capitalism, says Ms. Williams. When an estranged single worker quits an office, replacing him or her - including the cost of recruiting and training a replacement and the benefit to a competitor who might hire said employee - can cost as much as 75 to 150 percent of the former worker's annual pay.

What's more, single adults make up a whopping 40 percent of the full-time American workforce, according to a recent study by the American Association of Single People.

"Keeping valuable employees is a business imperative," says Williams. And "insisting that they have no priorities outside of work is not a viable model."

Some management plans already account for the needs of single workers. For example, some workplace managers appoint a rotating worker as a "floater" to fill in for workers called away for personal emergencies, rather than have the same workers stay late.

For Miriam Greenwald of Philadelphia, quitting her job as an elementary school art teacher was the best way to cope with a work environment that had all but excluded her.

"I felt invisible at times," says Ms. Greenwald. "Like I didn't count because [other teachers'] topics revolved around marriage and family. It was the natural thing to do."

Situations like Greenwald's, where an uncomfortable work environment is more a product of exclusive staff-room conversations than short-sighted benefits packages, can be difficult to miti- gate. But sometimes the subtle signals left by bosses can leave strong impressions on workplace culture. According to psychologist DePaulo, policies that deal with time off, overtime, and office picnics or other social gatherings can color workplace relations.

For example, DePaulo describes the annual office picnic at a university where she once taught. Each employee - regardless of how many guests he or she planned to bring to the event - was asked to pay a flat fee. Despite the fact that the policy was blatantly unfair to singles like DePaulo who were effectively subsidizing their colleagues' families, confronting the problem without sounding insensitive was a challenge.

"I hear this over and over again, where people say 'I raised this issue, and my colleagues were so angry at me for raising it,' " DePaulo says. "It does come with a cost of being stigmatized for complaining."

But to say that single and childless people are universally outraged or even dissatisfied is an overstatement. Many of the single and childless people interviewed emphasized their "pro-family" stance, stressing a desire for equity - rather than better treatment.

But some singles, like Roger Brokaw, wonder why so many workers without families have so little to say on the issue.

"For some reason, it's just not generating the kind of support that it should or could," says Mr. Brokaw, who was previously married and has a young son. He has spent years writing to his representative in Congress complaining about the lack of equity at his job in aircraft maintenance with the United States Air Force.

"Single people view it as a transient point in their lives," says Brokaw.

"Or maybe," he adds, "they're ashamed of being single."

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