AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Negotiating the speaker of the House job - not something most of us can or maybe want to imagine, but there is one thing that Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan is demanding that many people can relate to. He wants time to see his kids, a more flexible schedule. NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben wrote a piece about this called "Can Paul Ryan Have It All?" And she joins us now. Welcome to the studio, Danielle.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Thank you.
CORNISH: So I want to first play a clip of Paul Ryan speaking earlier this week as people started to put more pressure on him to take the job of speaker of the House.
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PAUL RYAN: I cannot, and I will not give up my family time. I may not be on the road as often as previous speakers, but I pledge to try and make up for it with more time communicating our vision, our message.
CORNISH: Danielle, family time used to be code for, like, I'm getting fired or I don't want to do something.
KURTZLEBEN: Right.
CORNISH: Help us understand this political moment.
KURTZLEBEN: All right. So first of all, Paul Ryan - he sure sounds sincere here. He's not just saying, I'd like to spend more time with my family. He's saying, I cannot and will not give up time with my family. And speaker is a very demanding job. I mean, political families don't live in D.C. these days. His family is back in Wisconsin. He is known for going back and visiting them on the weekends. So this is something that he clearly enjoys doing. He wants to be with his family, who, you know, lots of people - parents do.
And speaker is a really demanding job. He had said, at one point, you know, speaking can demand a hundred days a year on the road. There's fundraising. There's supporting other candidates. There's going on TV. There's all of that. And he's saying, no, I don't want to have to do all of that on the weekends.
And the other thing to keep in mind here is that this is a very public, very high-profile job negotiation. So he has the upper hand here. He sort of seems to be saying, you know, take it or leave it; this is what I want.
CORNISH: What's been the reaction to these comments on the Hill and, you know, outside of Washington?
KURTZLEBEN: Sure. So on the Hill, you have had a little bit of pushback. Representative Tim Huelskamp is on the record saying, listen, speaker is not a 9-to-5 job. It's a demanding job. It's not 40 hours a week. You've got to work on weekends. You've got to put in the time. That's the way it goes.
Now, he's gotten some more support off the Hill, most notably, advocates of work-life balance like Anne-Marie Slaughter and Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg. They both gave him props yesterday. They said, you know, this is great. He is a powerful man making an ask for more work-life balance.
But they got a lot of pushback from social media and also from a lot of writers on the Internet, saying, you know, Paul Ryan is not exactly the advocate for equal pay that a lot of other people are. I mean, he has been against paid family leave. He voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. So I mean, he has some reasons for equal-pay advocates to not exactly love him. So it's not exactly a clear-cut case either way here.
CORNISH: So I know one of the theories here, though, is that if more men, if more powerful men like this - right? - ask for this kind of flexibility, that it actually could prompt changes in the workplace.
KURTZLEBEN: Right. And to be more precise, what it is, is if more employers made their jobs more flexible, made work schedules more flexible. Now, there is research out there - and pretty well-known research - that says that the jobs that have the least flexible hours and where workers are the least interchangeable with each other - those are the jobs that tend to have the biggest pay discrepancies between men and women.
On the flip side, jobs where people are more interchangeable and have more flexibly - those tend to have lower pay discrepancies. The big example that's always used is pharmacists. Pharmacists can sub in for each other all of the time. Now, other jobs, it's not quite the same. You know, you have your lawyer or your accountant. You always go to the same lawyer or accountant. Those jobs tend to be far less equal in pay.
CORNISH: Well, we know this particular job negotiation is still going on for now. NPR's Danielle and pierce Daniel Kurtzleben - she's written her piece for npr.org called "Can Paul Ryan Have It All?" Thanks so much for speaking with us.
KURTZLEBEN: Yes. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
