politics

Does Professional Part-Time Work Exist?

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A coaching client of mine, the mother of a young child, recently asked me, “Where are the professional part-time jobs for experienced workers like me?” I think this is a good question. This client, we’ll call her Sandy, has graduate degrees in software engineering and business development along with more than ten years of work experience. After the birth of her child, she went back to work full-time, returning to a sixty-hour workweek. She worked hard in a job that didn’t play to her strengths, and after about a year she was passed over for a promotion she had been expecting. Sandy was frustrated and unhappy and decided to step out of her corporate job. She and her husband agreed that their young child needed more parenting time, she wanted more time with her child, and she felt there must be work options available where her talents and wisdom would be appreciated and where a more reasonable and flexible work schedule was available. Sandy wanted to work, but she found nothing that allowed her to use her skills and experience on a part-time basis. This is a common story for many, if not most, professional women who want to stay engaged with their professions, contribute to the family income, and be available as parents. I was heartened to read about a new and innovative job placement service that fits this bill, but is still small and in a start-up phase. In an article in the New York Times, Katherine Rosman writes about a job placement service called the Second Shift, started by two women, friends and mothers, who lamented the lack of options for the talented and experienced mothers in their children’s play groups. They formed a membership-based company whose purpose is to “pair mothers who left professional careers with companies looking to hire consultants and freelancers for individual projects.” While their company is focused only on women with experience in finance and marketing, it has placed forty-five women in project-based jobs, with three hundred women signed up as members, and five hundred more in the process of applying for membership. The Second Shift is a great example of what is possible and much needed. Some advantages of this model for organizations and for mothers are as follows:

  1. Companies can tap into an experienced pool of professional workers who are hard to locate.
  2. Companies can bring in experience and wisdom for short-term intensive projects and add diversity to their teams.
  3. Women can keep control of their schedules and make time for their families.
  4. Women can maintain active engagement with their professions so that their skills and resumes stay updated in preparation for a return to full-time work when their children are grown.
  5. Companies can reduce the long-term expense of benefits for permanent workers by hiring temporary professional workers, even though the hourly or project-based fees may seem high.
We need more of these types of matching services in more sectors for mothers, and the growing number of fathers, who choose to be available to their families and also want to be professionally engaged. Are there professional part-time options out there that you know about? We’d love to hear what you know.   Photo courtesy of Matthew Trinneer (CC BY-SA 3.0)]]>

What About Men?

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When I make presentations to audiences of women and men about my research on women in organizations, they often ask me, “What about men? What’s happening for them?”  Recent studies, reported by Richard V. Reeves and Isabel V. Sawhill, reveal some important changes for men in the United States workforce.  Specifically, Reeves and Sawhill note, “the old economy and the old model of masculinity are obsolete.” While women have been pushing, for the most part successfully, into previously traditionally male roles, men have not been pushing into traditionally female roles.  Because the jobs that men used to do are largely disappearing, men either need to adapt and move into the female-dominated HEAL (health, education, administration, and literacy) jobs, or men will have fewer and fewer prospects for participating in the labor market.  The thirty fastest-growing occupations are currently in the HEAL sectors.  The only obstacles to men entering these occupations are culture and attitude—men aren’t training or applying for these “pink collar” jobs. Here are some recent trends that do not bode well for men if they do not adapt and change:

  • Male wages are stagnant and, among the less educated, have fallen. Median earnings for men with only a high school diploma have fallen by 28 percent since 1980.
  • Men are now a minority on college campuses, accounting for 42 percent of graduates.
  • Girls demonstrate more focus, effort, and self-discipline as well as better study habits starting in the early grades, and, consequently, they have higher grades.
The authors note that what is needed is a “cultural recalibration” for men.  Many men are retreating into violent “hypermasculinity” in order to try to hold on to their old competitive edge over women.  Instead, we need campaigns that encourage men to see themselves in HEAL jobs the same way that campaigns currently encourage girls and women to see themselves in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) jobs.  We need to balance participation and opportunity across all the sectors for both women and men. This cultural recalibration also needs to include adaptation by men on the home front.  In households where two parents work outside of the home, men are doing more childcare and housework than in the past, but not as much as they think they are doing.  Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times cites several rigorous studies of the division of labor for opposite-sex, dual-earner couples across the transition to parenthood.  While the division of labor for housework showed no gender gap before children, a significant gap emerged after birth.  While men in two-income families reported that they shared housework and childcare equally after birth, analysis of rigorous time studies showed that women shouldered much more responsibility at home.  This extra work for women, in addition to holding a full-time job, creates pressure and stress that can push them out of the workforce.  Miller cites the work of Paula England and others who note, “the gender revolution has largely been one-sided—women have entered traditionally male jobs but men have been reluctant to take on traditionally female activities.” Reeves and Sawhill sum up the challenges for men as follows:
“The way forward, we believe, is for men to embrace and adapt to the new, more androgynous world.  There is no point in harking back.  The world in which high-paid manufacturing jobs could support a family, and where women were expected to focus on being wives and mothers is gone.  Women have shown they are ready for this transition.  But what about men?”
  Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]]>

Gender Equality and Population Growth: What China and Europe Need to Know

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China’s recent announcement that more families will be allowed to have a second child ended the one-child policy in effect in China since 1980. When the one-child policy was implemented, China’s leaders were desperate to control their population’s growth. With 1.2 billion people, or one-quarter of the world’s population, and a third-world economy, they worried that they could not continue to feed everyone and improve the standard of living for all Chinese people if they didn’t slow the rate of population growth. They succeeded on all counts, and now, thirty-five years later, as the second-largest economy in the world, China is facing a problem that many European countries are also facing—aging populations and not enough babies to replace or support them. But studies show that passing laws to encourage higher birthrates are not particularly effective. Steven Erlanger of the New York Times notes that countries with healthy birthrates have the following social forces engaged:

  • Gender equality
  • Trust within society
  • Immigration by people of childbearing age
Because China has none of these social forces in effect, their fertility rate is not likely to go up very much, and they are likely to face population-aging problems on a scale never before seen. What has gender equality got to do with higher fertility rates? The Nordic countries of Europe, along with France, were able to reverse their birthrates after they hit a low point in the 1960s and 1970s. Erlanger explains that the birthrates went up “because of social policies and attitudes in those countries promoting gender equality,” including paid parental leave and childcare support. In other Western European countries—like Germany, who did not institute these policies—the birthrates are still very low. One example of the impact of social policies on birthrates of is offered by Professor Francesco Billari of Oxford University, cited by Erlanger in his article. Billari uses Italy as an example where the trends have reversed between the richer North and the poorer South because of differences in social policy. The fertility rate is now higher in Northern Italy where women have more gender equality and job opportunities than in the South. Women in the poorer South, where there is high unemployment, more traditional gender-based divisions of labor, and “lack of female participation in the labor force,” are having fewer children than in the past. Russia, Central Europe, and East Asia are other examples of low birthrate countries and regions where there is a lack of gender equality, small numbers of working women, and few social policies to support working families. Professor Billari goes on to note that social policy that promotes gender equality and support for working families “has to be pushed by a society that is ready for it or demands it from politicians.” Especially during this election cycle, let’s demand that our politicians do more to promote gender equality and support working families!   Image provided courtesy of arztsamui at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]]>

Why Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is My Role Model

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We all need role models—people who inspire us and provide us with examples of how to live and be. These can be invisible mentors whom we never meet and only read about. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court Justice, is this kind of role model for me. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) is eighty-two years old and, as Gail Collins of the New York Times reports, she loves her work and, in spite of tremendous public pressure to retire, has no intention of “going anywhere any time soon.” I am not the only one who admires her for a determination to live her life on her own terms rather than succumb to social pressure to conform (and retire). She has developed a huge fan base, particularly among young women, complete with a blog and upcoming book about her entitled The Notorious RBG (a play on the name of the rapper Notorious B.I.G.). Let me count the ways that RBG inspires me:

  1. She is a pioneer and the first woman to do many of the things she did in her life.
  2. She lives her life on her own terms.
  3. She is physically fierce and works out at the gym with a trainer two times a week, along with daily stretches.
  4. She writes ferocious dissents against conservative decisions and is the leader of the Supreme Court’s dissident liberals.
  5. She is a survivor of colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, and heart disease.
  6. She has an overall energy level that is inspiring. For example, she explained to MSNBC’s Irin Carmon in an interview that the reason she dozed off during President Obama’s State of the Union address in January 2015 was that she had been up all night the night before writing an opinion. “My pen was hot,” she said by way of explanation.
I hope I will have the courage to live my life on my own terms when I am eighty-two and the energy to realize my goals at that stage of my life. She inspires me to keep going to the gym and exercising my mind as well as my body so that I can keep living fully. I am so pleased to have RBG as my role model. Who is your role model?   Photo Credit: Steve Petteway, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States]]>

Where Are the GOP Women in Congress?

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If you are like me, you’ve noticed that there are fewer Republican women than Democratic women in Congress and wondered why. In fact, the number of women in Congress has been steadily rising over the past twenty-five years, but close examination of the numbers reveals a difference between Democrats and Republicans. In a study recently published in the New York Times, the author, Derek Willis, found that the share of Democratic women in Congress has risen steadily to the current level of 33 percent, while representation by Republican women has been stagnant at roughly 10 percent. While only seventeen Republican women have ever served in the Senate, fourteen Democratic women are currently serving there. Why does this gap exist, and why is it important? The author suggests that “a root cause of the gap is that Democratic women who are potential congressional candidates tend to fit comfortably with the liberal ideology of their party’s primary voters, while many potential female Republican candidates do not adhere to the conservative ideology of their primary voters.” In other words, as the parties have become more polarized, the voters in the primaries have come to demand more and more ideological purity. In this environment, both moderate Republican men and women have declined to run because they cannot win. There are fewer highly conservative female candidates compared with male candidates. In fact, in state legislatures, a major pipeline for congressional candidates, conservative women are outnumbered five to one by conservative men. Given these numbers, the gap in congressional representation is likely to persist for some time to come. Why is this gap important? Willis notes that many studies show that “the presence of women in legislative bodies makes a difference, particularly on the policies that many female lawmakers prioritize, such as health care and children’s issues.” A recent study by the Center for American Women and Politics also found that many female legislators see themselves as representing women in general. For this reason, we need women in Congress from both parties to represent our views and, from time to time, to reach across the aisle to collaborate as they did in 2013 in the Senate to break the budget stalemate and avert a government shutdown. Let’s make sure we are all represented. The future of our country may depend on it.   Photo credit: U.S. Senate, 111th Congress, Senate Photo Studio  ]]>

Our Discomfort with Powerful Women: What We Can Do

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I recently met a woman from India while we both waited for a train. The first question she asked me was, “Why have you never elected a woman leader in the United States, as we have done in India?” All I could say was, “That’s a good question.” She went on to ask, “Do you think Hillary Clinton will win the election this time? Is the United States ready yet for a woman leader?” I truthfully answered, “I really don’t feel confident that we are ready. The facts are not very encouraging—and I hope I’m wrong.” In a recent article in the New York Times, Bryce Covert cited these discouraging facts:

  • There has not yet been a woman elected to the White House.
  • The US Congress is less than 20 percent female.
  • In 2009, the year after Hillary Clinton conceded the nomination for president to Barack Obama, 13.5 percent of the top jobs in Fortune 500 companies were occupied by women. By 2013, that number rose to only 14.6 percent.
Covert goes on to note two troubling trends:
  • Women and minorities usually make it to corporate leadership in times of crisis.
  • They face backlash and added challenges once they get there that men don’t face.
Covert cited one study of large companies on the London Stock Exchange, which found that those companies who had put women on their boards “had just experienced consistently bad stock performance, while companies were generally stable before they appointed men.” Covert also cited a large study of all the promotions to chief executive at Fortune 500 companies over a fifteen-year period. The study found that “a company’s return on equity was consistently and significantly negative just before a woman or a minority got the job.” Because companies are commonly in crisis when women get the chance to take a senior leadership role, it is harder for women to succeed and more likely that they will be forced out and blamed for the problems. The second trend shows that once hired, women and minorities face challenges and forms of backlash that make success more difficult. Covert cited polling that shows both women and men prefer to have men in senior executive positions. (I have written in a previous article about the preference for male bosses.) In addition, Covert reported research on backlash against women when they act assertively at work. He noted that “female leaders are more likely to be called abrasive, strident, aggressive and even emotional.”  Women of color are also more likely to be called angry and militant when they act assertively. (Read more about this dynamic in another of my previous articles.)

What We Can Do to Help Pave the Way for Women Leaders

Because all change has to start with ourselves, we can take steps to fix these problems:
  1. Support women’s leadership in general. Remember, studies show that both women and men prefer having men as leaders, so we can reverse this trend by starting to be more supportive, in general, of women leaders at all levels and positions.
  2. Notice your own reflex reactions to quickly judge or feel uncomfortable with women leaders. I recently caught myself starting to be critical of a book by a well-known woman. I challenged myself to look for the value in the book, and I found plenty of value. Challenge yourself to ask, “What else could be true?” when you find yourself with an urge to negatively judge a woman.
  3. Whatever your political persuasion, challenge others when they judge a woman candidate as too aggressive, too ambitious, strident, or angry. These were many of the negative adjectives, often expressed by women, that were used to describe Hillary Clinton when she ran in 2008. Challenge people to speak about qualifications, facts, and issues, instead of personal characteristics.
Yes, we have work to do as a country to be ready to elect a female president, but by pushing through our unconscious bias and making conscious choices based on awareness, facts, and issues we can get ready to support women leaders. We can challenge ourselves and others to become aware of unconscious bias that stacks the deck against women leaders. Think about how important it is for girls to have more role models so that they are encouraged to aspire to be all they can be. Your decisions today will impact their future.   Image credit: Photo courtesy of Ralf Roletschek, Wikimedia Commons  ]]>