Last week Forbes touted a new study from Bain & Company indicating that 80% of 1,800 polled businesspeople — men and women — say they are convinced of the benefits of gender parity at all levels. Orit Gadiesh and Julie Coffman editorialized on why, if this is the case, so few women make it to the top of organizations, pointing out that while women make up 50% of the workforce, they are just 3% of chief executives in the US.
Gadiesh and Coffman identify two primary reasons for the discrepancy at the top: off-ramping and opting out by mothers, and poorly planned and sustained gender equity initiatives on the part of companies. While both contribute to the greater problem, it’s not clear to me that are these issues at its epicenter.
Women who choose to off-ramp or opt-out are clearly (and understandably) at a disadvantage in career advancement, but there’s been a reasonable body of research that suggests this phenomenon is neither as widespread nor as significant a part of the pay gap as we might think. The Shriver Report cites economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn’s detailed analysis of the pay gap, pointing out that they estimate just 10.5% is related to work choices such as off-ramping. And the opt-out revolution so widely reported a few years ago has turned out to be less pervasive than originally suggested: 65% of women with young children work outside the home and 64% of that group earn as much or more than their husbands. And the numbers are growing, not decreasing.
Blau and Kahn indicate that a much greater piece of the pay gap correlates to job choice — women simply aren’t in the right industries to make it to the corner office. That suggests that facilitating better on-ramping for women who have left the workforce isn’t the most critical strategy; addressing the problem will need to start much earlier when women are choosing their fields of study and career paths. It’s a nice idea to structure work so that women can take a year or more off to raise children, but the reality is that no one who has left and returned — male or female — will be as desirable a candidate as a counterpart who has worked through their career.
Gadiesh and Coffman take corporate America to task for not making gender parity a priority, and for instituting haphazard, underesourced, ultimately ineffective programs to address the issue. They are right, corporate America hasn’t put significant resources behind gender parity; it has foundered as a touchy-feely part of human resources rather than core business. On the other hand, it’s not clear to me why they should. The business case for such initiatives is weak. If the choice is to put budget behind programs that directly impact short-term revenue or some feel-good women’s empowerment initiative, isn’t the choice clear?
I’m critical of reports that suggest that more women in higher positions is “just good business.” The truth is that having more qualified people in top jobs is good business. We need to adjust the way we think about increasing the numbers of female executives: it’s not about getting more female bodies in the right seats in the short-term, it’s about training, educating and empowering younger women so that a higher proportion of the best candidates for any given job is female. In many ways this is a numbers game: more experienced and credentialed women in the right industries will lead to more female CEOs.
It’s also about telling women early that being a good mother doesn’t require full-time, or even part-time home-making. We don’t need to shoot low to reach a mythical ideal of “work life balance.” Women can be excellent parents and still have high-powered jobs, though like all parenting, it’s not always easy.
I applaud Gadiesh and Coffman for raising some interesting issues in their piece, but if we hold management accountable for gender equity as they suggest, it’s unlikely to be an important part of the agenda anytime soon. Once women are already in middle management, it’s probably too late to turn the ship around. We need to inspire women who are forging their career paths today to think bigger and reach higher with stronger credentials and more powerful career tracks.
Related links:
- Forbes concurrently published this piece on “The Best-Paying Jobs That Women Aren’t In.”
- Interesting stats on the dearth of female CEOs from Herminia Ibarra and Morten T. Hansen at The Harvard Business Review. Very telling: “stock in a company drops after the announcement of a female CEO, but not after that of a male CEO.”
- Susan Wilson Solovic in The Huffington Post on why there are so few women in high-tech business.
- Catalyst is promoting gender equity at the highest levels in the workplace, and doing some great awareness-raising of the issues.
Well written…some thoughts on women:
Men and women should operate as a team, both within a corporate environment and outside one with synergy in mind. Members of either gender should not feel threatened by the presence or performance of the opposite sex. What we need is a positive approach to life and business in an attempt to increase personal, corporate, national, and international welfare.
The social, cultural, and political attitudes of modern society have enabled women to seize some power from men, despite being treated unfairly by unethical leaders, who continue to reinforce the “glass ceiling” and, in some cases, despite having to leave the workforce due to family considerations, and then return a few years later. Women understand that fruitful conversations promote sound business relationships and teamwork, thus contributing to an improvement in the bottom line.
Women are usually well organized: they manage a dual career, as homemakers and professional employees. Women often regard their fellow employees as family and take time to ascertain their personal needs. Hence, they can sometimes be taken undue advantage of. Competition is strange to most women because they were groomed for caring, rather than winning!
Fay Weldon, a writer, stated, “Worry less about what other people think of you, and more about what you think about them.” A former mayor of Ottawa once said, “Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought of as half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult!”
When women start to follow in the footsteps of many men, by being intoxicated by power, they lose their identity and bearings. Women should focus on a diplomatic approach and learn how to exude self-confidence while maintaining self-respect and deal with the competition without being intimidated or taken undue advantage of.
Women who achieve powerful positions in the corporate world may be subjected to personal and professional attacks because of their gender. Independent women are strong, fearless, and in control of their homes, families, emotions, and their working environment. They tackle problems with a heads-on approach, being steadfast in their pursuit of success and happiness.
I have a policy of distributing free abridged versions of my books on leadership, ethics, teamwork, motivation, women, bullying and sexual harassment, trade unions, business law, etc., to anyone who sends a request to crespin79@hotmail.com.
Maxwell Pinto, Business Author
http://www.strategicbookpublishing.com/Management-TidbitsForTheNewMillenium.html