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| 474.1 | I of V | ULTRA::ZURKO | Words like winter snowflakes | Wed Mar 01 1989 10:37 | 126 |
| Moved.
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REGENT::BROOMHEAD "Don't panic -- yet." 118 lines 28-FEB-1989 12:12
-< Management Women (Part I) >-
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I have finally finished typing in the article mentioned in [382].16.
I've tried to keep the format, except that I couldn't put the
large-size marginal "thema" where they belonged, so I did what I
could. I will now chop it into pieces. (By the way, in reading
this, I found it important to keep in mind that the author's
intended audience is Caucasian males in late middle age and at
the top of the management ladder.)
Ann B.
Executives and Organizations
----------------------------
Management Women
and the
New Facts of Life
by Felice N. Schwartz
The cost of employing women in management is greater than the cost of
employing men. This is a jarring statement, partly because it is true,
but mostly because it is something people are reluctant to talk about.
A new study by one multinational corporation shows that the rate of
turnover in management positions is 2� times higher among top-performing
women than it is among men. A large producer of consumer goods reports
that one half of the women who take maternity leave return to their jobs
late or not at all. And we know that women also have a greater tendency
to plateau or to interrupt their careers in ways that limit their growth
and development. But we have become so sensitive to charges of sexism and
so afraid of confrontation, even litigation, that we rarely say what we
know to be true. Unfortunately, our bottled-up awareness leaks out in
misleading metaphors ("glass ceiling" is one notable example), veiled
hostility, lowered expectations, distrust, and reluctant adherence to Equal
Employment Opportunity requirements.
Two facts matter to
business: only women
have babies and only
men make rules.
Career interruptions, plateauing, and turnover are expensive. The money
corporations invest in recruitment, training, and development is less
likely to produce top executives among women than among men, and the
invaluable company experience that developing executives acquire at every
level as they move up through management ranks is more often lost.
The studies just mentioned are only the first of many, I'm quite sure.
Demographic realities are going to force corporations all across the
country to analyze the cost of employing women in managerial positions,
and what they will discover is that women cost more.
But here is another startling truth: The greater cost of employing women
is not a function of inescapable gender differences. Women *are* different
from men, but what increases their cost to the corporation is principally
the clash of their perceptions, attitudes, and behavior with those of men,
which is to say, with the policies and practices of male-led corporations.
It is terribly important that employers draw the right conclusions from
the studies now being done. The studies will be useless -- or worse,
harmful -- if all they teach us is that women are expensive to employ.
What we need to learn is how to reduce that expense, how to stop throwing
away the investments we make in talented women, how to become more
responsive to the needs of the women that corporations *must* employ if
they are to have the best and the brightest of all those now entering the
work force.
The gender differences relevant to business fall into two categories:
those related to maternity and those related to the differing traditions
and expectations of the sexes. Maternity is biological rather than
cultural. We can't alter it, but we can dramatically reduce its impact
on the workplace and in many cases eliminate its negative effect on
employee development. We can accomplish this by addressing the second
set of differences, those between male and female socialization. Today,
these differences exaggerate the real costs of maternity and can turn a
relatively slight disruption in work schedule into a serious business
problem and a career derailment for individual women. If we are to
overcome the cost differential between male and female employees, we need
to address the issues that arise when female socialization meets the male
corporate culture and masculine rules of career development -- issues of
behavior and style, of expectation, of stereotypes and preconceptions, of
sexual tension and harassment, of female mentoring, lateral mobility,
relocation, compensation, and early identification of top performers.
The one immutable, enduring difference between men and women is maternity.
Maternity is not simply childbirth but a continuum that begins with an
awareness of the ticking of the biological clock, proceeds to the
anticipation of motherhood, includes pregnancy, childbirth, physical
recuperation, psychological adjustment, and continues on to nursing,
bonding and child rearing. Not all women choose to become mothers, of
course, and among those who do, the process varies from case to case
depending on the health of the mother and baby, the values of the parents,
and the availability, cost, and quality of child care.
In past centuries, the biological fact of maternity shaped the traditional
role of the sexes. Women performed the home-centered functions that
related to the bearing and nurturing of children. Men did the work that
required great physical strength. Over time, however, family size
contracted, the community assumed greater responsibility for the care and
education of children, packaged foods and household technology reduced the
workload in the home, and technology eliminated much of the need for
muscle power at the workplace. Today, in the developed world, the only
role still uniquely gender related is childbearing. Yet men and women are
still socialized to perform their traditional roles.
Women who compete
like men are considered
unfeminine.
Women who emphasize
family are considered
uncommitted.
Men and women may or may not have some innate psychological disposition
toward these traditional roles -- men to be aggressive, competitive,
self-reliant, risk-taking; women to be supportive, nurturing, intuitive,
sensitive, communicative -- but certainly both men and women are capable
of the full range of behavior. Indeed, the male and female roles have
already begun to expand and merge. In the decades ahead, as the
socialization of boys and girls and the experience and expectations of
young men and women grow steadily more androgynous, the differences in
workplace behavior will continue to fade. At the moment, however, we are
still plagued by disparities in perception and behavior that make the
integration of men and women in the workplace unnecessarily difficult and
expensive.
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| 474.2 | II of V | ULTRA::ZURKO | Words like winter snowflakes | Wed Mar 01 1989 10:51 | 142 |
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-< Management Women (Part II) >-
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Let me illustrate with a few broad generalizations. Of course, these are
only stereotypes, but I think they help to exemplify the kinds of
preconceptions that can muddy the corporate waters.
Men continue to perceive women as the rearers of their children, so they
find it understandable, indeed appropriate, that women should renounce
their careers to raise families. Edmund Pratt, CEO of Pfizer, once asked
me in all sincerity, "Why would any woman choose to be a chief financial
officer rather than a full-time mother?" By condoning and taking pleasure
in women's traditional behavior, men reinforce it. Not only do they see
parenting as a fundamentally female, they see a career as fundamentally
male -- either an unbroken series of promotions and advancements towards
CEOdom or stagnation and disappointment. This attitude serves to legitimize
a woman's choice to extend maternity leave and even, for those who can
afford it, to leave employment altogether for several years. By the same
token, men who might want to take a leave after the birth of a child know
that management will see such behavior as a lack of career commitment,
even when company policy permits parental leave for men.
Women also bring counterproductive expectations and perceptions to the
workplace. Ironically, although the feminist movement was an expression
of women's quest for freedom from their home-based lives, most women were
remarkably free already. They had many responsibilities, but they were
autonomous and could be entrepreneurial in how and when they carried them
out. And once their children grew up and left home, they were essentially
free to do what they wanted with their lives. Women's traditional role
also included freedom from responsibility for the financial support of
their families. Many of us were socialized from girlhood to expect our
husbands to take care of us, while our brothers were socialized from an
equally early age to complete their educations, pursue careers, climb the
ladder of success, and provide dependable financial support for their
families. To the extent that this tradition of freedom lingers
subliminally, women tend to bring to their employment a sense that they
can choose to change jobs or careers at will, take time off, or reduce
their hours.
Finally, women's traditional role encouraged particular attention to
the quality and substance of what they did, specifically to the physical,
psychological, and intellectual development of their children. This
traditional focus may explain women's continuing tendency to search for
more than monetary reward -- intrinsic significance, social importance,
meaning -- in what they do. This too makes them more likely than men to
leave the corporation in search of other values.
The misleading metaphor of the glass ceiling suggests an invisible barrier
constructed by corporate leaders to impede the upward mobility of women
beyond the middle levels. A more appropriate metaphor, I believe, is
the kind of cross-sectional diagram used in geology. The barriers to
women's leadership occur when potentially counterproductive layers of
influence on women -- maternity, tradition, socialization -- meet
management strata pervaded by the largely unconscious preconceptions,
stereotypes, and expectations of men. Such interfaces do not exist for
men and tend to be impermeable for women.
One result of these gender differences has been to convince some
executives that women are simply not suited to top management. Other
executives feel helpless. If they see even a few of their valued female
employees fail to return from maternity leave on schedule or see one of
their most promising women plateau in her career after the birth of a
child, they begin to fear there is nothing they can do to infuse women
with new energy and enthusiasm and persuade them to stay. At the same
time, they know there is nothing they can do to stem the tide of women
into management ranks.
With too few men
to go around,
women have moved
from a buyer's
to a seller's market.
Another result is to place every woman on a continuum that runs from
total dedication to career at one end to a balance between career and
family at the other. What women discover is that the male corporate
culture sees both extremes as unacceptable. Women who want the flexibility
to balance their families and their careers are not adequately committed
to the organization. Women who perform as aggressively and competitively
as men are abrasive and unfeminine. But the fact is, business needs all
the talented women it can get. Moreover, as I will explain, the women
I call career-primary and those I call career-and-family each have
particular value to the corporation.
Women in the corporation are about to move from a buyer's to a seller's
market. The sudden, startling recognition that 80% of new entrants in
the work force over the next decade will be women, minorities, and
immigrants has stimulated a mushrooming incentive to "value diversity."
Women are no longer simply an enticing pool of occasional creative talent,
a thorn in the side of the EEO officer, or a source of frustration to
corporate leaders truly puzzled by the slowness of their upward trickle
into executive positions. A real demographic change is taking place.
The era of sudden population growth of the 1950s and 1960s is over. The
birth rate has dropped about 40%, from a high of 25.3 live births per
1,000 population in 1957, at the peak of the baby boom, to a stable low
of a little more than 15 per 1,000 over the last 16 years, and there is
no indication of a return to a higher rate. The tidal wave of baby
boomers that swelled the recruitment pool to overflowing seems to have
been a one-time phenomenon. For 20 years, employers had the pick of a
very large crop and were able to choose males almost exclusively for the
executive track. But if future population remains fairly stable while
the economy continues to expand, and if the new information society
simultaneously creates a greater need for creative, educated managers,
then the gap between supply and demand will grow dramatically and, with
it, the competition for managerial talent.
The decrease in the numbers has even greater implications if we look at
the traditional source of corporate recruitment for leadership positions
-- white males from the top 10% of the country's best universities. Over
the past decade, the increase in the number of women graduating from
leading universities has been much greater than the increase in the total
number of graduates, and these women are well represented in the top
10% of their classes.
It is absurd to put
a woman down for
having the very
qualities that
would send a man
to the top.
The trend extends into business and professional programs as well. I
remember addressing a meeting at the Harvard Business School as recently
as the mid-1970s and looking out at a sea of exclusively male faces.
Today, about 25% of that audience would be women. The pool of male MBAs
from which corporations have traditionally drawn their leaders has shrunk
significantly.
Of course, this reduction does not have to mean a shortage of talent.
The top 10% is at least as smart as it always was -- smarter, probably,
since it's now drawn from a broader segment of the population. But it
now consists increasingly of women. Companies that are determined to
recruit the same number of men as before will have to dig much deeper
into the male pool, while their competitors will have the opportunity
to pick the best people from both the male and female graduates.
Under these circumstances, there is no question that the management ranks
of business will include increasing numbers of women. There remains,
however, the question of how these women will succeed -- how long they
will stay, how high they will climb, how completely their will fulfill
their promise and potential, and what kind of return the corporation
will realize on its investment in their training and development.
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| 474.3 | III | ULTRA::ZURKO | Words like winter snowflakes | Wed Mar 01 1989 11:10 | 147 |
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-< Management Women (Part III) >-
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There is ample business reason for finding ways to make sure that as
many of these women as possible will succeed. The first step in the
process is to recognize that women are not all alike. Like men, they
are individuals with differing talents, priorities, and motivations.
For the sake of simplicity, let me focus on the two women I referred to
earlier, on what I call the career-primary woman and the career-and-
family woman.
Like many men, some women put their careers first. They are ready to make
the same trade-offs traditionally made by the men who seek leadership
positions. They make a career decision to put in extra hours, to make
sacrifices in their personal lives, to make the most of every opportunity
for professional development. For women, of course, this decision also
requires that they remain single or at least childless or, if they do
have children, that they be satisfied to have others raise them. Some
90% of executive men but only 35% of executive women have children by
the age of 40. The *automatic* association of all women with babies is
clearly unjustified.
The secret to dealing with such women is to recognize them early, accept
them, and clear artificial barriers from their path to the top. After
all, the best of these women are among the best managerial talent you
will ever see. And career-primary women have another value to the
company that men and other women lack. They can act as role models and
mentors to younger women who put their careers first. Since upwardly
mobile career-primary women still have few role models to motivate and
inspire them, a company with women in its top echelon has a significant
advantage in the competition for executive talent.
Men at the top of the organization -- most of them over 55, with wives
who tend to be traditional -- often find career women "masculine" and
difficult to accept as colleagues. Such men miss the point, which is not
that these women are just like men but that they are just like the *best*
men in the organization. And there is such a shortage of the best people
that gender cannot be allowed to matter. It is clearly counterproductive
to disparage in a woman with executive talent the very qualities that are
most critical to the business and that might carry a man to the CEO's
office.
Clearing a path to the top for career-primary women has four requirements:
1. Identify them early.
2. Give them the same opportunity you give to talented men to grow and
develop and contribute to company profitability. Give them client and
customer responsibility. Expect them to travel and relocate, to make the
same commitment to the company as men aspiring to leadership positions.
3. Accept them as valued members of your management team. Include them
in every kind of communication. Listen to them.
4. Recognize that the business environment is more difficult and stressful
for them than for their male peers. They are always a minority, often the
only woman. The male perception of talented, ambitious women is at best
ambivalent, a mixture of admiration, resentment, confusion, competitiveness,
attraction, skepticism, anxiety, pride and animosity. Women can never
feel secure about how they should dress and act, whether they should speak
out or grin and bear it when they encounter discrimination, stereotyping,
sexual harassment, and paternalism. Social interaction and travel with
male colleagues and with male clients can be charged. As they move up,
the normal increase in pressure and responsibility is compounded for
women because they are women.
Stereotypical language and sexist day-to-day behavior do take their toll
on women's career development. Few male executives realize how common it
is to call women by their first names while men in the same group are
greeted with surnames, how frequently female executives are assumed by
men to be secretaries, how often women are excluded from all-male social
events where business is being transacted. With notable exceptions, men
are still generally more comfortable with other men, and as a result
women miss many of the career and business opportunities that arise over
lunch, on the golf course, or in the locker room.
The majority of women, however, are what I call career-and-family women,
women who want to pursue serious careers while participating actively in
the rearing of children. These women are a precious resource that has yet
to be mined. Many of them are talented and creative. Most of them are
willing to trade some career growth and compensation for freedom from the
constant pressure to work long hours and weekends.
Most companies today are ambivalent at best about the career-and-family
women in their management ranks. They would prefer that all employees
were willing to give their all to the company. They believe it is in their
best interest for all managers to compete for the top positions so the
company will have the largest possible pool from which to draw its leaders.
"If you have both talent and motivation," many employers seem to say, "we
want you to move up. If you haven't got that motivation, if you want less
pressure and greater flexibility, then you can leave and make room for a
new generation." These companies lose on two counts. First, they fail to
amortize the investment they made in the early training and experience of
management women who find themselves committed to family as well as to
career. Second, they fail to recognize what these women could do for their
middle management.
A policy that forces
women to choose
between family and
career cuts hugely
into profits and
competitive advantage.
The ranks of middle managers are filled with people on their way up and
people who have stalled. Many of them have simply reached their limits,
achieved career growth commensurate with or exceeding their capabilities,
and they cause problems because their performance is mediocre but they
still want to move ahead. The career-and-family woman is willing to trade
off the pressures and demands that go with promotion for the freedom to
spend more time with her children. She's very smart, she's talented, she's
committed to her career, and she's satisfied to stay at the middle level,
at least during the early child-rearing years. Compare her with some of
the people you have there now.
Consider a typical example, a woman who decides in college on a business
career and enters management at age 22. For nine years, the company
invests in her career as she gains experience and skills and steadily
improves her performance. But at 31, just as the investment begins to
pay off in earnest, she decides to have a baby. Can the company afford
to let her go home, take another job, or go into business for herself?
The common perception now is yes, the corporation can afford to lose her
unless, after six or eight weeks or even three months of disability and
maternity leave, she returns to work on a full-time schedule with the
same vigor, commitment, and ambition that she showed before.
But what if she doesn't? What if she wants or needs to go on leave for
six months or a year or, heaven forbid, five years? In this worst-case
scenario, she works full-time from age 22 to 31 and from 36 to 65 -- a
total of 38 years as opposed to the typical male's 43 years. That's not
a huge difference. Moreover, my typical example is willing to work part-
time while her children are young, if only her employer will give her the
opportunity. There are two rewards for companies responsive to this
need: higher retention of their best people and greatly improved performance
and satisfaction in their middle management.
The high-performing career-and-family woman can be a major player in your
company. She can give you a significant business advantage as the
competition for able people escalates. Sometimes too, if you can hold
onto her, she will switch gears in mid-life and re�nter the competition
for the top. The price you must pay to retain these women is threefold:
you must plan for and manage maternity, you must provide the flexibility
that will allow them to be maximally productive, and you must take an
active role in helping to make family supports and high-quality, affordable
child care available to all women.
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| 474.4 | IV | ULTRA::ZURKO | Words like winter snowflakes | Wed Mar 01 1989 11:49 | 125 |
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-< Management Women (Part IV) >-
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The key to managing maternity is to recognize the value of high-performing
women and the urgent need to retain them and keep them productive. The
first step must be a genuine partnership between the woman and her boss.
I know this partnership can seem difficult to forge. One of my own
senior executives came to me recently to discuss plans for her maternity
leave and subsequent return to work. She knew she wanted to come back.
I wanted to make certain that she would. Still, we had a somewhat
awkward conversation, because I knew that no woman can predict with
certainty when she will be able to return to work or under what conditions.
Physical problems can lengthen her leave. So can a demanding infant, a
difficult family or personal adjustment, or problems with child care.
I still don't know when this valuable executive will be back on the job
full-time, and her absence creates some genuine problems for our
organization. But I do know that I can't simply replace her years of
experience with a new recruit. Since our conversation, I also know that
she wants to come back, and that she *will* come back -- part-time at
first -- unless I make it impossible for her by, for example, setting an
arbitrary date for her full-time return or resignation. In turn, she
knows that the organization wants and needs her and, more to the point,
that it will be responsive to her needs in terms of working hours and
child-care arrangements.
In having this kind of conversation it's important to ask concrete
questions that will help to move the discussion from uncertainty and
anxiety to some level of predictability. Questions can touch on everything
from family income and energy level to child care arrangements and
career commitment. Of course you want your star manager to return
permanently and productively. Her downtime on the job is a drain on her
energies and a waste of your money.
For all the women who want to combine career and family -- the women who
want to participate actively in the rearing of their children and who also
want to pursue their careers seriously -- the key to retention is to
provide the flexibility and family support they need in order to function
effectively.
Time spent in the office increases productivity if it is time well spent,
but the fact that most women continue to take the primary responsibility
for child care is a cause of distraction, diversion, anxiety, and
absenteeism -- to say nothing of the persistent guilt experienced by all
working mothers. A great many women, perhaps most of all women who have
always performed at the highest levels, are also frustrated by a sense
that while their children are babies they cannot function at their best
either at home or at work.
In its simplest form, flexibility is the freedom to take time off -- a
couple of hours, a day, a week -- or to do some work at home and some at
the office, an arrangement that communication technology makes increasingly
feasible. At the complex end of the spectrum are alternative work
schedules that permit the woman to work less than full-time and her
employer to reap the benefits of her experience and, with careful planning,
the top level of her abilities.
Part-time employment is the single greatest inducement to getting women
back on the job expeditiously and the provision women themselves most
desire. A part-time return to work enables them to maintain responsibility
for critical aspects of their jobs, keeps them in touch with the changes
constantly occurring at the workplace and in the job itself, reduces stress
and fatigue, often eliminates the need for paid maternity leave by
permitting a return to the office as soon as disability leave is over,
and, not least, can greatly enhance company loyalty. The part-time
solution works particularly well when a work load can be reduced for one
individual in a department or when a full-time job can be broken down by
skill levels and apportioned to two individuals at different levels of
skill and pay.
I believe, however, that shared employment is the most promising and
will be the most widespread form of flexible scheduling in the future.
It is feasible at every level of the corporation except at the pinnacle,
for both the short term and the long term. It involves two people taking
responsibility for one job.
Two red lights flash on as soon as most executives hear the words "job
sharing": continuity and client-customer contact. The answer to the
continuity question is to place the responsibility entirely on the two
individuals sharing the job to discuss everything that transpires --
thoroughly, daily, and on their own time. The answer to the problem of
client-customer contact is yes, job sharing requires re�ducation and a
period of adjustment. But as both client and supervisor will quickly
come to appreciate, two contacts means that the customer has continuous
access to the company's representative, without interruption for vacation,
travel, or sick leave. The two people holding the job can simply cover
for each other, and the uninterrupted, full-time coverage they provide
together can be a stipulation of their arrangement.
Flexibility is costly in numerous ways. It requires more supervisory
time to co�rdinate and manage, more office space, and somewhat greater
benefit costs (though these can be contained with flexible benefits plans,
prorated benefits, and, in two-paycheck families, elimination of duplicate
benefits). But the advantages of reduced turnover and the greater
productivity that results from higher energy levels and the greater focus
can outweigh the costs.
A few hints:
� Provide flexibility selectively. I'm not suggesting private arrangements
subject to the suspicion of favoritism but rather a policy that makes
flexible work schedules available only to high performers.
� Make it clear that in most instances (but not all) the rates of
advancement and pay will be appropriately lower for those who take time
off or who work part-time than for those who work full-time. Most
career-and-family women are entirely willing to make that trade-off.
� Discuss costs as well as benefits. Be willing to risk accusations
of bias. Insist, for example, that half time is half of whatever time
it takes to do the job, not merely half of 35 or 40 hours.
The woman who is eager to get home to her child has a powerful incentive
to use her time effectively at the office and to carry with her reading
and other work that can be done at home. The talented professional who
wants to have it all can be a high performer by carefully ordering her
priorities and by focusing on objectives rather than on the legendary
15-hour day. By the time professional women have their first babies --
at the average age of 31 -- they have already had nine years to work long
hours at a desk, to travel, and to relocate. In the case of high
performers, the need for flexibility coincides with what has become the
goal-oriented nature of responsibility.
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| 474.5 | V | ULTRA::ZURKO | Words like winter snowflakes | Wed Mar 01 1989 11:55 | 136 |
| Family supports -- in addition to maternity leave and flexibility --
include the provision of parental leave for men, support for two-career
and single-parent families during relocation, and flexible benefits.
But the primary ingredient is child care. The capacity of working
mothers to function effectively and without interruption depends on the
availability of good, affordable child care. Now that women make up almost
half the work force and the growing percentage of managers, the decision
to become involved in the personal lives of employees is not longer a
philosophical question but a practical one. To make matters worse, the
quality of child care has almost no relation to technology, inventiveness,
or profitability but is more or less a pure function of the quality of
child care personnel and the ratio of adults to children. These costs
are irreducible. Only by joining hands with government and the public
sector can corporations hope to create the vast quantity and variety of
child care that their employees need.
Until quite recently, the response of corporations to women has been
largely symbolic and cosmetic, motivated in large part by the will to
avoid litigation and legal penalties. In some cases, companies were also
motivated by a genuine sense of fairness and a vague discomfort and
frustration at the absence of women above the middle of the corporate
pyramid. The actions they took were mostly quick, easy, and highly
visible -- child care information services, a three-month parental leave
available to men as well as women, a woman appointed to the board of
directors.
When I first began to discuss these issues 26 years ago, I was sometimes
able to get an appointment to the assistant to the assistant in personnel,
but it was only a courtesy. Over the past decade, I have met with the
CEOs of many large corporations, and I've watched them become involved
with ideas they had never previously thought much about. Until recently,
however, the shelf life of that enhanced awareness was always short.
Given pressing, short-term concerns, women were not a front-burner issue.
In the past few months, I have seen yet another change. Some CEOs and
top management groups now take the initiative. They call and ask us to
show them how to shift gears from a responsive to a proactive approach
to recruiting, developing, and retaining women.
I think this change is more probably a response to business needs -- to
concern for the quality of future profits and managerial talent -- than
to uneasiness about legal requirements, sympathy with the demands of women
and minorities, or the desire to do what is right and fair. The nature of
such business motivation varies. Some companies want to move women to
higher positions as role models for those below them and as beacons for
talented young recruits. Some want to achieve a favorable image with
employees, customers, clients, and stockholders. These are all legitimate
motives. But I think that the companies that stand to gain the most are
motivated as well by a desire to capture competitive advantage in an era
when talent and competence will be in increasingly short supply. These
companies are now ready to stop being defensive about their experience
with women and to ask incisive questions without preconceptions.
Wouldn't we all be
better off with men
in the office and
women in the home?
The answer is
emphatically no.
Even so, incredibly, I don't know of more than one or two companies that
have looked into their own records to study the absolutely critical issue
of maternity leave -- how many women took it, when and whether they
returned, and how their behavior correlated with their rank, tenure, age,
and performance. The unique drawback to the employment of women is the
physical reality of maternity and the particular socializing influence
maternity has had. Yet to make women equal to men in the workplace we
have chosen not to discuss this single most significant difference between
them. Unless we do, we cannot evaluate the cost of recruiting, developing,
and moving women up.
Now that interest is replacing indifference, there are four steps every
company can take to examine its own experience with women:
1. Gather quantitative data on the company's experience with management-
level women regarding turnover rates, occurrence of and return from
maternity leave, and organizational level attained in relation to tenure
and performance.
2. Correlate this data, with factors such as age, marital status, and
presence and age of children, and attempt to identify and analyze why
women respond the way they do.
3. Gather qualitative data on the experience of women in your company and
on how women are perceived by both sexes.
4. Conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the return on your investment in
high-performing women. Factor in the cost to the company of women's
negative reactions to negative experience, as well as the probable cost
of corrective measures and policies. If women's value to your company
is greater than the cost to recruit, train, and develop them -- and of
course I believe it will be -- then you will want to do everything you
can to retrain them.
We have come a tremendous distance since the days when the prevailing
male wisdom saw women as lacking the kind of intelligence that would allow
them to succeed in business. For decades, even women themselves have
harbored an unspoken belief that they couldn't make it because they
couldn't be just like men, and nothing else would do. But now that women
have shown themselves the equal of men in every area of organizational
activity, now that they have demonstrated that they can be stars in every
field of endeavor, now we can all venture to examine the fact that women
and men are different.
On balance, employing women is more costly than employing men. Women can
acknowledge this fact today because they know that their value to employers
exceeds the additional cost and because they know that changing attitudes
can reduce the additional cost dramatically. Women in management are no
longer an idiosyncrasy of the arts and education. They have always
matched men in natural ability. Within a very few years, they will equal
men in numbers as well in every area of economic activity.
The demographic motivation to recruit and develop women is compelling.
But an older question remains: Is society better for the change? Women's
exit from the home and entry into the workforce has certainly created
problems -- an urgent need for good, affordable child care; troubling
questions about the kind of parenting children need; the costs and
difficulties of diversity in the workplace; the stress and fatigue of
combining work and family responsibilities. Wouldn't we all be happier if
we could turn back the clock to an age when men were in the workplace and
women in the home, when male and female roles were clearly differentiated
and complementary?
Nostalgia, anxiety, and discouragement will urge many to say yes, but my
answer is emphatically no. Two fundamental benefits that were unattainable
in the past are now within our reach. For the individual, freedom of
choice -- in this case the freedom to choose career, family, or a
combination of the two. For the corporation, access to the most gifted
individuals in the country. These benefits are neither self-indulgent nor
insubstantial. Freedom of choice and self-realization are too deeply
American to be cast aside for some wistful vision of the past. And access
to our most talented human resources is not a luxury in this age of
explosive international competition but rather the barest minimum that
prudence and national self-preservation require.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Felice N. Schwartz is president and founder of Catalyst, a not-for-profit
research and advisory organization that works with corporations to foster
the career and leadership development of women.
|
| 474.6 | Wow! Thanks for entering this! | CADSYS::RICHARDSON | | Wed Mar 01 1989 13:20 | 15 |
| WOW! Thanks for typing in this very long, very interesting, article!
The only real quibble I have with it is that all the way through the
article the assumption is made that child care is strictly a women's
issue/concern, and the cost of business doing anything to promote child
care gets assigned to the women employees of the business, even though
the articel recognizes up front that the only part of the puzzle that
absolutely falls to the women in business is childbirth. Child care,
and for that matter any kind of dependent care (how many of us have
elderly parents?), is a *human* issue, not just a *women's* issue.
Not only women have these responsibilities, so it isn't reasonable to
assign the entire cost to women and then state that employing women is
more expensive - except for maternity itself, which should not be
regarded any differently from any other medical condition as far as the
cost of insuring for it goes.
|
| 474.7 | It's all in the viewpoint. | REGENT::BROOMHEAD | Don't panic -- yet. | Wed Mar 01 1989 15:12 | 4 |
| Yup. That's why I wrote that I had to keep in mind the image of
her audience: prosperous men steeped in traditional values.
Ann B.
|
| 474.8 | more ramblings on this posting | CADSYS::RICHARDSON | | Thu Mar 02 1989 09:37 | 29 |
| Hi, Ann... What I was specifically thinking about when I read that is
that there are also plenty of ambitious, successful, *men* who have to
balance their family and work lives - approximately as many as there
are ambitious and successful men who have families (maybe leaving out a
few with live-in servants!). One of the men I work with (a consulting
engineer, a few years older than I am, a very sensible and intelligent
fellow) often makes this point - usually in reference to how mistakenly
hard-nosed he (claims he) was when he was a manager (before I worked
with him) - about not discounting people's abilities (men or women,
although in hardware engineering, most of his direct reports had to
have been men) if the people made it clear that their families were at
least as important as their projects. This would be a real maverick's
stand in a traditional hardware engineering group, much more so than
here in software engineering, especially ten or fifteen years ago.
Even now there are very few women hardware engineers (I'm in software).
I'm sure a lot of us have found ourselves labelled as "unpromotable" by
one manager or another at some point in our careers, who didn't believe
that an individual was capable of (or interested in) a more challenging
and rewarding job because the individual appeared to have other
interests and responsibilities outside of the office - and there
doesn't seem to be much you can do to convince them otherwise once you
are so labelled; the best thing you can do is to find another boss
(notice that I don't work for the guy who thought this about *me*
anymore...). It's not only women that this happens to, though, which
is the point my male coworker makes, although it is sure a lot more
common for the victim of this attitude to be a woman.
/Charlotte - getting back to work!
|