RULE #8
8
BUILD GENDER EQUALITY
The time is long overdue to encourage more women to dream the possible dream.
Despite progress in recent years, gender inequality persists. To achieve gender equality will require a commitment to change at all levels—from institutions to individuals.
In her bestselling book Lean In, Sandberg highlights this through a story about the importance of raising your hand. Sandberg was speaking to a group of 150 Facebook employees shortly after her book was published. At the end of her talk, Sandberg told the audience she had time for only two more questions. After she answered these two questions, hands continued to wave, and so she continued to call on people. Eventually she went back to her office and found a young woman waiting for her. Sandberg asked this woman what she had learned from the talk, to which the young women replied, “I learned to keep my hand up.” Puzzled, Sandberg asked her to elaborate. The young woman explained, “After you took those two final questions, I put my hand down and I noticed all the other women also put their hands down. A bunch of men kept their hands up and you took more questions.” The men ignored the limit on questions, and the women obeyed, “If we as women don’t raise our hands in the workplace, we’re not going to get the same opportunities men do. Because men keep their hands raised.”1
However, the burden of change cannot rest on the shoulders of women alone. The men in the room at Facebook gained extra opportunities in part because they weren’t afraid to ignore boundaries by keeping their hands raised beyond the end of the session. But they also gained those opportunities because—consciously or unconsciously—the person in power rewarded this behavior. As Sandberg says, “Even though I was giving a speech on gender issues, I had been blind to one myself. If we want a world with greater equality, we need to acknowledge that women are less likely to keep their hands up. We need institutions and individuals to notice and correct for this behavior by encouraging, promoting, and championing women. And women have to learn to keep their hands up, because when they lower them, even managers with the best intentions might not notice.”2
Mika Brzezinski, cohost of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, seemed to have it all, as an accomplished journalist, wife, and mother of two teenage girls. However, she admits to failing to raise her hand when it came time to ask for a raise. Mika’s book Know Your Value tells her story of how she finally demanded a raise as an acknowledgment of her efforts in the success of Morning Joe. Says Mika, “It took me 25 years to understand that I played a role in my success. For too many years, I let others do the talking and made the same mistakes time and time again.”3 Mika shares the dichotomy between her daily on-air persona as the charismatic and outspoken cohost of Morning Joe and her passive, apologetic manner when asking for a raise by saying, “I’m sorry, I know you are super busy but . . . ”
Then, after months of working nonstop to help make Morning Joe a success, she found out her cohost, Joe Scarborough, was being paid 14 times her salary. Initially neither Mika nor Joe could convince MSNBC to appropriately compensate Mika for her work contributing to the show’s success. Finally, as Mika shares in her book, she took action, supported by Joe, her coanchor, and confidently had a discussion with her boss, Phil Griffin, telling him that she deserved to be paid more, no apologies needed!
These stories play out again and again in the workplace. Research by Prudential Financial reports that while women are 33 percent more likely to gain a college degree than men, a gender pay gap prevails.
In the United States, women make up almost 60 percent of the university graduates, 60 percent of master’s degree recipients, and 52 percent of those with doctorates. Women are the more educated part of the workforce even though they only earn 78 percent of the salaries of their male counterparts.4
In the digital economy, where one might expect a more even playing field, women who auction products for sale on eBay still receive 80 cents for every dollar that men get on eBay.5
Glassdoor conducted a study entitled “Demystifying the Gender Pay Gap,” analyzing male-female pay differences in five countries: The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and France. Overall, Glassdoor economist Andrew Chamberlin finds an undeniable gender pay gap both in the United States and around the world. Men earn more than women on average in all the five countries. In the United States, men earn on average 24.1 percent higher base pay than women in Glassdoor salaries. Amazingly even when Glassdoor compared workers with the same title, employer, and location, the United States gender pay gap is about 5.4 percent, and in the other four countries examined there was a similar pattern.6
According to Lean In and McKinsey’s survey of 30,000 men and women at 118 North American companies, women held 45 percent of entry-level jobs at the companies surveyed, but their ranks thin out as they rise in the organization. Only 27 percent of vice presidents at those companies are women, followed by 23 percent of senior vice presidents and 17 percent of C-suite executives.7
These figures represent only a slight improvement from 2012. Women are underrepresented at every level of the corporate pipeline, and this disparity is greatest in senior leadership, as shown in Figure 8.1.8
Figure 8.1 Gender representation in the corporate pipeline
Global Gender Workforce Participation
Across countries, despite educational gains, women lag behind men in income, new business ownership, and earnings. The “Global Gender Gap Report” issued by the World Economic Forum ranks gender-based disparities across the globe by examining four categories: economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. In the 2015 ranking of gender equality, the United States is listed as number 28 out of 145 countries.9
Unsurprisingly, the Nordic countries—Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—come out on top as the best countries for working women. These countries have the largest percentage of women in parliament, as well as laws mandating a percentage of female board members. Finland and Norway have legal mandates that require at least 40 percent of state-owned or public limited company board members be female.10
On the other hand, Japan, a G20 country, ranks number 101 in the 2015 Global Gender Gap Index. In Japan, several issues come together to create a large gender gap, from the Japanese workplace culture of long office hours to the lack of affordable daycare centers for working moms. In fact, there is such a severe shortage of daycare centers that there is a specific Japanese word, hokatsu, to mean “actively searching for a childcare center.” These factors, among others, create an environment where it is especially difficult for women to thrive in the workplace.
Global Gender Workforce Participation Statistics
The average woman working full time in the United States will lose more than $460,000 over a 40-year period in wages due only to the gender gap. To catch up, the average working woman would need to work for 12 additional years after the age at which the average working man retired from the workforce.
Source: Catalyst
The prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, set an ambitious goal: by the year 2020, women should hold 30 percent of senior jobs, compared with just over 8 percent currently. In April 2014, the country’s Labor Ministry launched a program offering financial rewards to small and midsized firms for promoting women into supervisory positions. Under the program, companies must offer 30 hours of training to educate their workforce about equal opportunity rights and the potential of hiring and training women. The Japanese government budgeted 120 million yen ($1.4 million) for the program. However, within 17 months of its inception, not a single company had applied for the incentive.11 Clearly, setting quotas does not work without addressing the larger issue of workplace culture, lack of affordable childcare, and lack of female role models.
The lesson: the gender gap is a complex issue, and sustainable solutions require a mix of new policies, a more accepting workplace culture, and a set of support services targeting both women and their families, allowing them to thrive in the workplace.
If Gender Equality Is Good for Business, Why Have We Not Made More Progress?
Research from McKinsey and Lean In estimate closing the gender gap could drive between $12 trillion and $28 trillion in gross domestic product growth by 2025. McKinsey’s latest report, titled “Diversity Matters,” examined proprietary data sets for 366 public companies across a range of industries in Canada, Latin America, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The findings are clear: companies in the top quartile for racial, ethnic, and gender-based diversity are more likely to have financial performance above their respective national industry medians—by 35 percent for racial and ethnic diversity and 15 percent for gender diversity. In the United Kingdom, greater gender diversity on the senior executive team corresponded to the highest performance uplift in the data set: for every 10 percent increase in gender diversity, EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) rose by 3.5 percent. Gender equality is smart economics; the companies that embrace an inclusive workplace statistically outperform their peers.12
What is holding companies back from closing the gender gap? Research by LeanIn.org and McKinsey suggests the issue is primarily one of workplace culture. “Historically, we thought women were less interested in promotions because of their concerns with family responsibilities,” Rachel Thomas, the president and cofounder of Lean In, says. However, “This study points to a new reason. . . . Women say stress and pressure in the workplace is a top obstacle for them—and this includes all women, those with and without children.” The stress, Thomas asserts, comes from the conscious and unconscious biases that lead women to face bigger hurdles at the office.13
Glassdoor research points to an additional issue, what Chamberlin calls the “sorting of men and women into jobs and industries that pay differently throughout the economy.” For example, as of 2014, only 18 percent of computer science bachelor degrees were earned by women, despite the fact that it is known to be a gateway to a number of high-paying jobs. And computer science is where there has been a decrease in the number of women earning bachelor degrees since 2002, even after a recent modest increase.14
One key to change, according to the Anita Borg Institute, a nonprofit with a mission to equalize the number of males and females in technology, is for high schools and universities to proactively drive greater participation among women in computer science courses and clubs. One such strategy employed by Harvey Mudd College is to reconfigure the beginning computer science course into three tracks; Beginning, intermediate, and advanced, so students with no programming experience are not overwhelmed by others who may have been coding since they were 10 years old.
Managing Work and the Rest of Life
With 40 percent of the global workforce female, there is still much work to be done—and yet never before has a generation entered the workforce with such high levels of female participation.15 PwC, as one example, recruits 20,000 millennials annually from around the globe and estimates 50 percent of their PwC workforce is female. How does this surge of female workers square with the parenting expectations of millennials? In many ways the “gender revolution” has had lopsided results: younger men are much more committed to equality at home than previous generations of men. However the division of work at home is still disproportionately falling on the shoulders of women resulting in a slow evolution rather than a revolution.16
Research by Sarah Thébaud, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, finds that men and women ages 18 to 32 tend to have egalitarian attitudes about gender roles, across education and income levels. However, when faced with a lack of family-friendly policies in the workplace, many default to traditional roles rather than follow their preferences.17
In a study by sociologists Thébaud and David Pedulla, entitled “Can We Finish the Revolution? Gender, Work-Family Ideals, and Institutional Constraint,” the authors surveyed a sample of unmarried men and women ages 18 to 34 about their desires for their future work and family arrangements. They were randomly divided into three groups, and each group was given a different scenario, with varying degrees of supportive policies.
When offered supportive policies, a majority of men and women across all educational backgrounds preferred an egalitarian relationship structure. In fact, 95 percent of college-educated women chose an egalitarian relationship and 75 percent of college-educated men did as well.
Yet in the face of constraints such as unfriendly family leave policies and inadequate childcare, their choices more often aligned with traditional gender roles. In scenarios without supportive policies, 64 percent of college-educated women opted for an arrangement where one spouse—typically male—serves as the primary breadwinner and one spouse—typically female—serves as the primary caregiver. For millennial men, the percentage choosing this arrangement increased to 87 percent.18
Why is this? We think the key obstacles to more egalitarian family roles may be a combination of an unsupporting family work culture and extreme schedules of working parents. Gallup reports that Americans work an average of 47 hours per week, with 4 in 10 reporting they work at least 59 hours per week. It is not surprising that in the absence of supporting workplace policies, working parents who struggle with demanding schedules are opting for traditional family structures.19
Millennial women start off wanting egalitarian arrangements at home, but often the reality of the workplace forces pragmatic choices. According to a survey of 25,000 graduates of the Harvard Business School conducted by Robin Ely, Pamela Stone, and Colleen Ammerman, 50 to 60 percent of men across three generations (boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials) were “extremely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their work and professional accomplishments, opportunities for career growth, and compatibility of work and personal life, while only 40 to 50 percent of women were similarly satisfied on the same dimensions. “In the end,” the Harvard study authors write, “we find not just achievement and satisfaction gaps between women and men, but a real gap between what women and working mothers expect as they look ahead to their careers and where they ultimately land.”20
Family Friendly Policies Are Slowly Emerging
As the percentage of two-income families increases, workplace policies designed to support working parents become more important than ever before. But currently, according to the Society of Human Resources, only 21 percent of employers offer some type of paid maternity, while 17 percent offer paid paternity and/or adoption leave.21 Figure 8.2 lists the leading companies that offer paid maternity leave, ranging from a high of 52 weeks to a low of 12.22
Figure 8.2 Top U.S. companies offering paid maternity leave
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Netflix are generous outliers, providing a year of paid maternity leave. But the United States as a whole is still woefully behind other countries. Unlike nearly every other country in the world, the United States mandates no paid leave for mothers or fathers following the birth of a child.23 Our Family and Medical Leave Act requires employers with more than 50 employees to provide new parents with 12 weeks of leave; however, it does not require this leave to be paid. In the United States, this is starting to be dealt with on a state-by-state basis, with some states, including California, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, creating some type of paid family leave policy. In the vast majority of U.S. states, though, there is no required paid parental leave. In contrast, the average paid leave available to mothers across all 34 OECD countries is 54 weeks, with an average of 17 of those week fully paid.24 Interestingly Swedish parents are entitled to a combined 480 days paid parental leave, with 60 of those days reserved for fathers.
When companies are offering paid maternity leave, there are pockets of innovation. Fidelity Investments offers a customized package of maternity benefits allowing women the ability to create their own path forward following the birth of a child. Jennifer Hanson, head of Associate Experience at Fidelity Investments, stresses the importance of choice. “For mothers returning to work following the birth of a child, they have the ability to customize the last six weeks of their 16 week paid leave choice and break this up into three blocks of time, of at least one week in length, creating their own personalized path back to work.”
Increasingly, some companies offer paid paternity leave for fathers. As examples, Facebook offers 16 weeks paid paternity leave, Yahoo offers 8 weeks, and showing this is not just a “Silicon Valley initiative,” Bank of America offers 12 weeks, and Johnson & Johnson provides 8 weeks of paid paternity leave. While paternity leave may seem like an unexpected benefit for new fathers, in the long run, all parents—male and female—as well as the children win. One of the benefits of of paternity leave is that it creates opportunities for men to become more involved at home, not only for the duration of the paternity leave but also for years to come. In Quebec, as reported in an article entitled “The Daddy Track: The Case for Paternity Leave,” there is a “use it or lose it” approach granting each family member a total amount of leave, a certain portion of which can be used only by fathers. The result: women whose husbands took paternity leave were more likely to resume full-time work themselves, with their original employers.25
Some companies that offer paid paternity leave recognize the cultural barriers around new fathers taking time off, and they are creating policies to address this. At State Street Bank, which offers four weeks of paid paternity leave, new fathers have the opportunity to customize their leave. This means they do not have to take the four weeks of paternity leave all at once; they can take one week, return to work, and then customize the remaining three weeks of leave across several months. State Street managers make a point of communicating this policy so new fathers who are too hesitant to ask for their leave are encouraged to have a conversation with their manager.26
Recent announcements to enhance maternity leave programs have added a new benefit, a Work Life Coach, for women and men returning to work after the birth of a child. So far this benefit is cropping up in firms engaged in highly competitive talent markets such as accounting, law, and investment banking by organizations that include EY, KPMG, Grant Thornton and Proskauer Rose, and K.K.R. Life Coaches provide access to parents to ensure a smooth transition to the workforce. While only a small and privileged group of employees have access to this, it is the beginning of a recognition that employers must take more action to assist families in their transition to the workforce following the birth or adoption of a child.27
The Breadwinner Mom and the Emergence of the Chief Household Officer
As more women take on leadership positions, we are seeing the emergence of the breadwinner mom. A Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data finds a record 40 percent of all U.S. households with children under the age of 18 include breadwinner moms, who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family. The share was just 11 percent in 1960.28 These breadwinner moms are made up of two very different groups: 5.1 million are married mothers who have a higher income than their spouses, and 8.6 million are single mothers.29 Despite the different profiles of these two groups, the recent growth of breadwinner moms is connected in part to women’s slowly increasing employment rate and fast rising education levels, which are improving opportunities in the workplace.30 Today, one in five fathers is the primary caregiver of preschool-age children who have mothers who are employed full time. In fact, in the last 25 years, the number of fathers who are primary caregivers married to breadwinner mothers has doubled.31
Kristin Holter, a 44-year-old director of Global HR Capability at Phillip Morris International, has two sons, a 5-year-old and a newborn, and works full time as a breadwinner mom. She is a graduate of Vassar College and currently lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland, with her husband Bruce and their two young sons. Kristin grew up in Europe and traveled widely throughout Japan, Korea, China, Tibet, and Nepal before deciding on a career in human resources. She has worked for a number of large organizations including Bain & Company, Deloitte, Bacardi, and now Phillip Morris International.
Along the way, Kristin met her husband Bruce Weber, a former Accenture consultant and CIO. At the age of 39, they had their first child. Kristin says this about becoming a breadwinner mom: “While on a 14-week maternity leave at Bacardi, I was actually promoted to be the global head of change management. While I took my maternity leave when my first son was born, I ended up creating my own roadmap for a re-entry to the workplace. As a family, we decided I would become a Breadwinner mom since my husband was at the end of his corporate career and transitioning into an entrepreneurial role, so it made more sense for him to assume the role of primary care giver for our children.”
Bruce Weber has an impressive background. He was a pilot and then a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy; an honors graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology with two master’s degrees, one in applied mathematics and a second in physics; a consultant with Accenture; and finally a CIO with a number of privately held companies in Lausanne. Today Bruce manages a number of private investments in restaurants in Switzerland. However, he considers his full-time job as being the primary caregiver for Maxwell and Louis and describes his role as being the “chief household officer,” or CHO, for his family.
Bruce relates his decision to become a primary caregiver in the following way: “Kristin and I always believed that at least one parent should be actively involved at home with our children. And we eventually came to the conclusion that it would be easier for me to be the primary caregiver and to continue to manage my restaurants and do some part time consulting, while Kristin continues her career at Phillip Morris International.”
Bruce said one of the more difficult aspects of transitioning from CIO to CHO was that “I didn’t have any acquaintances in this role so I didn’t have much to gauge the transition against, until I thought of this as effectively assuming a new work role when I was at Accenture. There, one of the first things we did when transitioning to a new position was to create an explicit document of new roles and responsibilities, a sort of Playbook for the role. Well, it took Kristin and me about a year to realize we had to apply the same mindset to this role, just as I would have in assuming any new role I had as an Accenture consultant or CIO. Once Kristin and I thought of the transition in this way, I have been able to make it a success, and I am now coaching other dads to do the same.”
Kristin and Bruce single-handedly put the pieces together to allow Kristin to work full time, manage a remote team across multiple time zones, and transition Bruce from CIO to CHO. But in speaking to both of them, they made it clear that they believe companies can do more to provide resources and support for families that pursue this path.
Kristin and Bruce suggest companies consider breadwinner moms a distinct segment of the employee population and create a similar set of resources for them as are created for other executives transitioning into a new job or new location. Some of the resources might include an employee affinity group that provides access to local on-site and online childcare resources, a program that brings spouses into the mix to meet other spouses who are primary caregivers, access to services that target the special needs of breadwinner moms such as financial consulting, breast milk shipping for traveling moms, and an employee resource group dedicated to not just working moms but their entire family network.
Unconscious Bias: Companies Take Action Against Hidden Prejudices Directed at Women
When YouTube, owned by Google, launched a video app for iOS users, the app’s developers were puzzled by what appeared to be a bug in the code. About 10 percent of the videos uploaded were coming in upside down. Then they realized what happened: the app’s coders were nearly all right-handed. The coders hadn’t accounted for the fact that phones are usually rotated 180 degrees when held in left hands, and they had designed an app that only really worked for right-handed users.32
This was one of the first times that Google realized how unconscious biases can seep unseen into everyday decisions, influencing them without realizing it.
But what exactly is unconscious bias? Catalyst, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting inclusive workplaces for women, defines unconscious bias as an implicit association or attitude about the characteristics of an individual—such as an individual’s race or gender—that operates out of our control, informs our perception about a person or group of people, and can influence our decision making and behavior toward a person or group of people—even without us realizing it is happening.
Companies are recognizing that unconscious bias can seep into hiring and promotion decisions, causing roadblocks in diversity and inclusion programs. In May 2014 Google published a report on the demographics of the company. It turns out that 70 percent of Googlers are men, Latinos make up just 3 percent of the workforce, and African Americans constitute 2 percent. This disclosure set off a wave of similar reports from Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, and others, and plans are under way among these companies to address this issue.33
Google, PwC, and Barclays were among the first companies to call out unconscious bias as contributing to the systemic lack of diversity in the technology industry. Google began training its workforce in unconscious bias with 90-minute lectures starting in 2013. Since then, more than half of Googlers around the globe have taken part in these awareness-building workshops, helping to create a culture that calls out prejudice, both blatant and subtle.34
Google’s former SVP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, explains Google’s point of view: “Our biases are shaped by our experiences and by cultural norms which allow us to filter information and make quick decisions.” He writes, “We’ve evolved to trust our guts. But sometimes these mental shortcuts lead us astray, especially when they cause us to misjudge people. . . . Combating our unconscious biases is hard, because they don’t feel wrong; they feel right. But it’s necessary to fight against bias in order to create a work environment that supports and encourages diverse perspectives and people. Not only is that the right thing to do, but without a diverse workforce, there’s a pretty good chance that our products . . . won’t work for everyone.”35
Moving Unconscious Bias from Awareness to Action
Companies deal with unconscious bias in various ways, from recognizing that it exists and setting goals to change it, to implementing formal training on the topic. But one of the most frequently asked questions is how does an organization move from awareness of unconscious bias to action? Sarah Churchman of PwC explains it this way: “At PwC we have learned everyone finds Unconscious Bias Training fascinating, but the real key is to align this with the talent management process and set targets to hire and promote individuals who are subject to recognizing unconscious bias. For example, if a pool of middle managers is comprised of 50 percent female employees and 50 percent male, then we expect to promote an equal percent of men and women. And if this is not the case, we ask Managing Partners to explain why.”
One company that stands out for its commitment to closing the gender gap is Kimberly-Clark Corporation, which since 2009 has seen a 90 percent increase in the number of women holding director-level-and-above positions and received an award from Catalyst for developing diverse talent and creating metrics for this across the globe. It even ties bonus money to it. “To be an exceptional leader at Kimberly-Clark you have to develop talent that looks, thinks, and behaves like the people who use our products,” says Sue Dodsworth, chief diversity officer for Kimberly-Clark Corporation.
Recently the company put into place something it calls the Rule of Two: for appointments at the VP level and above, leaders must bring three candidates for consideration, and no more than two of them should have a similar demographic profile. This helps avoid the “just like me” bias that is so prevalent in promotion decisions.
Trevor Gandy, chief diversity officer of the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, has a long-term perspective on how to close the gender gap. The Women’s Development Council at Chubb, an employee resource group, is now 35 years old and was one of the first devoted to furthering women’s development. Gandy believes one of the keys to moving from awareness to action in building gender equality is to recruit senior executives into the discussion and planning process for the steps needed to close the gender gap. Ellen Moore, president and CEO of Chubb Insurance Company of Canada, says, “You will not be as successful as you can be if you cling to biases in the workplace.” Gandy believes companies not only need to create a governing board including senior executives on the topic of gender gap, but also need to involve them as sponsors of women, not just advocates for them. As Gandy points out, “Just inviting leaders to be mentors of women is really not enough. While mentors talk with high potential women, sponsors talk about them and advocate on their behalf.”
What Can You Do to Move from Awareness of Unconscious Bias to Action?
Organizations need to move beyond building awareness of unconscious bias to taking action against it. But how? Our interviews uncovered seven strategies organizations can consider:
1. Measure.
• It’s hard to know you’re improving if you’re not measuring. Track gender representation across all standard business activities by job level.
• Who’s included and who’s excluded? Go further and track the discretionary activities such as your gender representation at conferences, recruiting events and of speakers invited to speak at your larger organizational meetings. In 2013, Googlers pointed out that of the dozens of conference rooms named after famous scientists, only a few were female. So Google changed Ferdinand von Zeppelin Conference Room to Florence Nightingale Conference Room—along with others—to create more balanced representation.36
3. If you see something, say something.
• The slogan from the Department of Homeland Security also applies to biases in the workplace. To foster awareness on unconscious bias, encourage a practice of “if you see something, say something.” Google created a workshop called Unconscious Bias @ Work to identify and understand the biases employees bring to work. Bias training introduced the language of bias and now it is part of the daily conversation at Google, with employees owning it and challenging each other all the time.
4. Promote employee resource groups (ERGs) to supplement formal training on unconscious bias.
• Think of ERGs in an expansive way and as a supplement to formal training on unconscious bias. Invite not just female leaders but also their networks of support to participate in these groups.
5. Hold yourself and your team accountable for how you source and promote individuals different from yourself.
• Consider recommending that your team set targets to ensure every hiring and promotion panel includes a diverse group of individuals who are part of the decision-making process. Also to further support diversity, some companies are exploring using mobile job matching apps such as Blendoor and GapJumpers in the recruiting process. These apps hide a candidate’s name and photo to circumvent unconscious bias during hiring.
6. Create a clear process in advance for making decisions.
• Define criteria to evaluate the merits of each option, and use this consistently. Consider using structured interviews in hiring, applying the same selection and evaluation methods for all. Also to further support diversity, some companies are exploring using mobile job matching apps such as Blendoor and GapJumpers, to counteract bias in the recruiting process. These platforms perform functions like hiding a candidate’s name and photo to circumvent unconscious bias during hiring.
7. Pay attention to prevailing gender assumptions.
• When evaluating fit for positions, ask: Would we come to this point of view if the scenario involved someone of a different gender? Sarah Churchman of PwC explains it this way: “At PwC we have learned everyone finds Unconscious Bias Training fascinating but the real key is to align this with the talent management process and set targets to hire and promote individuals that are prone to recognizing unconscious bias. For example, if a pool of middle managers is comprised of 50 percent female employees and 50 percent male, then we expect to promote an equal percent of men and women. And if this is not the case, we ask Managing Partners to explain why.”
Female Boomers on the Grid
True to their competitive and live-to-work reputations, female boomers are deciding to stay in the workplace longer. Gallup research shows that nearly half (49 percent) of boomers who are still working say they don’t expect to retire until they are 66 or older, including one in ten who predict they will never retire at all.37 Although boomers first became eligible for social security in 2008, one-third of the oldest boomers, currently aged 67 and 68, are still working in some capacity.38 While male and female employees both tend to decrease full-time work participation as they age, men stop working full time at a faster rate than women, with larger numbers switching to part-time work.39 This implies that by age 68, the gender gap in full-time work participation between men and women is 8 percentage points, compared with a gender gap as large as 20 percentage points at younger ages.40
While some continue working out of financial necessity, others stay in the workforce because they are highly engaged and enthusiastic about their jobs.41 One example is Candy Haynes, a managing director at PwC, who is a boomer who wants to continue to work and play hard. Candy calls herself “Grandma on the Grid,” and she realizes, looking around her, that she may not be alone! She started her career at Deloitte in 1979 after earning an undergraduate degree in economics from Middlebury College in just three years and then an MBA from Dartmouth. Candy has been a maverick in many ways, from navigating the largely male-dominated accounting world in the 1970s and 1980s to being a breadwinner mom for the past 20 years following the retirement of her husband in 1995 from Deloitte. Now in her fifties, Candy works in an environment where the average age is 27 years old, and she candidly admits to having no intention of retiring. In fact, as Candy says, “I am just getting going, I am motivated at work, love my job, and team members. I also now support my immediate family plus one granddaughter, Riley, who is my best friend and the love of my life.”
Candy sees herself continuing in the workforce well into her sixties and challenges employers to think about how to keep boomers engaged in the workplace. One strategy is to devise a new set of benefits to keep highly talented employees working well into their sixties. Consider the new benefits announced by PwC targeting millennials by offering up to $1,200 per year (for up to five years) in student debt assistance. That’s great for new entrants into the workforce, but employers should also expand and customize offerings for older workers who want to continue in the workplace. As highly engaged female boomers like Candy elect to stay in the workplace into their sixties, forward-looking companies should understand how to leverage these employees’ unique skill sets for mentoring others as well as for inspiration to create customized benefits.
Building Gender Equality Is a Twenty-First Century Challenge
While we have documented the benefits to businesses of closing the gender gap, ranging from improving financial and business performance, to adding diversity of thought in developing new products and services, a gender-based pay gap continues to exist. We believe it is up to countries, companies, and individual women and men to create the change they want to see in the workplace.
We can and need to do more. First we should involve men in the discussion to build gender equality. This can start with creating conversations and workshops that build awareness and actions for dealing with unconscious bias in the workplace. Next, we need to encourage the men we work with to move beyond mentoring women to becoming sponsors and advocates for them in the workplace. Third, we must examine the current policy of maternity and paternity leave in our organizations and ask ourselves what more can be done to assist working moms and their families in creating their own personalized path back to work. Finally, we must examine what can be done by our government. Currently, in the United States, maternity and paternity is being handled on a state by state basis with the United States being the only industrialized country that does not mandate paid maternity leave. While we have documented a number of corporations that offer generous paid maternity and paternity leave, and Life Coach services to employees returning to work, this is not the norm. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, only 13 percent of people in the United States have access to paid family leave.42
As women in the workplace continue to increase in number and take on leadership roles, it is up to each of us to create a healthy work life integration. We no longer have to choose between the two. Rather, we can change how we think, act, work, develop, and lead, particularly in a workplace where women are projected to account for the majority of the increase in the total labor force growth.
MY ACTION PLAN
Myself
• What is my current situation? Am I a breadwinner mom (or married to one)? A member of a dual career family? A single working parent?
• Am I aware of the vocabulary I use in the workplace? Do we use terms such as stay-at-home mother and stay-at-home father? Interestingly, men who identify as chief household officers have expressed the greatest resistance to the stay-at-home parent term as they believe this does not capture the important job of childcare.
• Am I aware of the correlation between diversity and profitability for my organization and how this aligns with what is happening at our competitors?
My Team
• Is our team aware of resources for working moms?
• Are my team members aware of our organization’s workplace flexibility, maternity and paternity leave policies?
• How could our team start conversations about unconscious bias in the workplace and how do we keep this dialogue going?
My Organization
• How could we create job descriptions that encourage women to apply for traditionally male positions?
• Do we believe our culture is one that is family friendly and offers workplace flexibility?
• How could we organize employee affinity groups and online resources for emerging segments of employees such as breadwinner moms and boomers who want to remain working?