Month: October 2020

For women facing all-or-nothing tenure or promotion evaluations this year during the pandemic, those with small children for whom school and day care have been closed most of the year are facing disastrous consequences for their careers. Noam Scheiber of the New York Times writes that in several up-or-out fields, “workers face a single high-stakes promotion decision,” such as tenure decisions in academia, partner decisions for lawyers and accountants, and some positions in finance or management. In these fields, the promotion decision can result in a lifetime appointment in the case of tenure or partner decisions, or unemployment—up or out. The Covid-19 pandemic has meant months of lost productivity because of the additional childcare responsibilities, which fall more heavily on women.

Scheiber notes that women in academia find themselves with little leverage. Dr. Susan Pearson, a tenured Northwestern University history professor who has helped rally colleagues, with limited success, to seek more accommodations, explains that academic settings see parenthood “as a personal choice” and not an issue of concern for the university. The one accommodation that Northwestern, like other universities, offered was an extension for one year of the time allowed to publish academic work required to qualify for tenure. Research shows, however, that this extension benefits men more than women. Dr. Jenna Stearns, an economist at the University of California, Davis, notes that “men appear to devote more of the additional year to academic research, while women appear to spend more of it managing parental obligations.”

In addition to more flexible tenure standards that take the pandemic into consideration, women faculty are also asking for

• Paid leave exempt from the tenure clock for parents with pressing childcare needs
• Additional childcare subsidies
• Relief from teaching obligations and other workplace obligations such as student advising

As Dr. Magdalena Osburn, a geobiology professor at Northwestern University, notes, “I need an acknowledgment [from the University] that this year is trash” for those racing the tenure clock. This year is trash for women in a lot of professions, through no fault of their own. Organizations need to start the clock over on career evaluations after the pandemic is over.

Photo by Hatice Yardım on Unsplash

I was very moved when my new neighbors agreed that they would all continue to pay the people who cleaned their apartments, even though the housekeepers could not work in the pandemic. I had just moved to a new city, and the Covid-19 pandemic hit one week after I arrived. Everyone immediately sheltered in place, and people closed their homes to outsiders for protection from the virus—which meant that housekeepers and other service workers were not allowed into our building. I worried about what would happen to all the domestic workers, and I thought their employers continuing to pay them was the right thing to do. How else would these workers pay their bills? In fact, David Segal of the New York Times writes that housekeepers have been among the hardest hit by the pandemic. By April 2020, domestic workers lost most of or all their clients. According to a survey by the National Domestic Workers Alliance,

• 72 percent had lost all clients by the first week in April.
• They were not so much laid off but ghosted. Their employers stopped answering their phones.
• Most are undocumented workers, so they are not eligible for government relief.
• Few have savings or shares of stock, unlike their clients, who continued to prosper during the pandemic.
• A few experienced acts of generosity, but not many.

Segal explains that structural inequality for domestic workers is rooted in racism and existed as far back as the 1800s during the Jim Crow era after slavery. He notes that domestic work was one of the few ways that Black women had to earn money. Until well into the 1950s, most Black women lived in the South and were powerless, exploited, mistreated, and overworked. Segal notes that “in 1935, the federal government all but codified the grim conditions of domestic work with the passage of the Social Security Act” of the New Deal. It provided retirement benefits and a national unemployment compensation program for workers but excluded two categories of employment—domestic work and agricultural labor—that were essential to Black women and men.

Surprisingly, white Southerners weren’t the ones who insisted on this exclusion. White Northerners in Roosevelt’s administration argued that these workers would be too difficult to include. Not until the 1970s was domestic work finally added to the Social Security Act, thanks to the organizing efforts of Black women. But by the 1980s, Black women had moved into other occupations and were largely replaced as domestic workers by undocumented women from Central and South America and the Caribbean who did know their rights or were afraid to assert them.

Senator Kamala Harris has sponsored a federal Domestic Bill of Rights, which would guarantee a minimum wage and other benefits, but it has not yet passed in the Senate. Segal reports that a study by the Economic Policy Institute found that

• 2 million domestic workers—a group that includes housekeepers, childcare workers, and home healthcare aides—earn an average of twelve dollars per hour and are three times as likely to live in poverty as other hourly workers.
• Few have benefits like sick leave, health insurance, formal contracts, or protections against unfair dismissal.

The pandemic has now magnified the power imbalance between employers and domestic workers. As much as at any time in the past, domestic workers are vulnerable to abuse, poor working conditions, and substandard wages. We can all stand up for these workers by voting for local, state, and federal legislators who will right these wrongs. This is a very old problem.

Photo courtesy of Veselina Dzhingarova

In February 2021, Jane Fraser will become the first woman chief executive officer of a major financial institution in the United States, according to reporting by Emily Flitter and Anupreeta Das. Wall Street has stubbornly remained a bastion of white men despite repeated talk of recruiting and promoting more women for decades. The authors note that “not only will Ms. Fraser, 53, not have any female counterparts among the 10 largest U.S. banks when she becomes Citi’s chief, she will also join a small group of female leaders at major American corporations.” The numbers are bleak:

• There are only thirty-one women among chief executives of the five hundred companies of the S&P 500 stock index, according to Catalyst, an advocacy group.
• Women account for 26 percent of all senior US financial service executives in 2019, only a 6 percent increase since 2016.

The representation of white women and people of color in the financial sector below the executive level is also grim. I previously wrote about this low representation and significant gender pay gap in the financial sector in an article entitled “Where Are the Senior Women in the Financial Sector?”

The film industry has also taken a significant step to break through a barrier at MGM. A recent study, reported by Brooks Barnes of the New York Times, found that senior management teams at Hollywood studios are 93 percent white and 80 percent male, unchanged in the past five years. These senior management teams decide what movies will and will not get made and what their budgets will be. For this reason, the recent step by MGM to give a young producer, Alana Mayo, exclusive control over what films its Orion Pictures division will make is significant. Mayo will lead a greenlight committee made entirely of women, who will decide what movies Orion will make. Her boss, Michael De Luca, chairman of MGM’s film group, will not have a vote in selecting films. Mayo, who describes herself as a woman, Black, and queer, plans to focus Orion on making films that focus on people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, and people with disabilities—groups that have been underrepresented in major studio films.

Mayo states, “I want to create something that will hopefully make people like me feel like they are finally a part of the Hollywood system.” It is well known that how people are portrayed on television and in film influences the attitudes of the general population and can create support and inclusion for underrepresented groups. Think about how quickly acceptance of the idea of marriage equality grew once LGBTQ people began appearing in television shows as parents, spouses, friends, and family members. Let’s hope that the promotion of Mayo is a first step to increasingly diverse leadership in the film industry.

Photo by Steven Van on Unsplash

There has always been resentment from childless coworkers toward colleagues who are parents, especially when women, and some men, take maternity and paternity leave or family leave to care for ill family members. Organizations tend to expect the coworkers left behind to pick up the work of their absent colleagues rather than planning for supplemental workers to pick up the extra load. This adds stress and pressure for the workers who are covering the extra workload.

I have seen this resentment from childless employees expressed over the years in all types of organizations, but new reporting by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Sheera Frenkel for the New York Times focuses on resentment from childless employees in the tech industry. Their reporting reveals interesting policy changes by many tech companies in response to the Covid-19 pandemic for both parents and nonparents along with a torrent of resentment from nonparents.

Wakabayashi and Frenkel report that “when the coronavirus closed schools and child care centers and turned American parenthood into a multitasking nightmare,” many tech companies reached into their deep pockets and rushed to help their employees. They implemented many generous policy changes to try to help their employees work from home and help parents care for their children. These policy changes seem to have exacerbated the resentment of childless employees who complain that the new policies “primarily benefit parents.” The tensions released have been most prominently displayed at Facebook, where childless employees are angrily challenging the company about their perception of unfair treatment, and they are disparaging their coworkers who are parents. Here are some of the changes Facebook has made in response to the pandemic that have unleashed resentment:

• Facebook offered up to ten weeks of paid time off for employees if they had to care for a child whose school or day-care facility had closed or for an older relative whose nursing home was not open.
• Facebook announced that it would not be scoring employees on job performance for the first half of 2020 because of all the changes in everyone’s lives.
• Every Facebook employee will receive a bonus usually reserved for very good performance scores, which especially annoyed the childless employees who felt they worked harder and should see more rewards.
• Facebook offers thirty days of emergency leave for all employees if they need to care for a sick family member, and all employees receive an unlimited number of sick days and twenty-one vacation days a year.

Facebook also offered these benefits to all its employees:

• All Facebook employees received a $1,000 stipend to buy equipment for working from home when the pandemic required total remote work.
• All Facebook employees can take up to three days of leave to cope with physical or mental health issues without a doctor’s note.

Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Twitter have each implemented similar parental/family leave policies.

I don’t know about you, but I find the Facebook policies generous for all their employees. I know that tech companies are well known for hiring young people and demanding long hours of work from them. It seems likely that because they are young, these workers have not worked outside the tech industry and do not realize that most organizations do not offer these types of generous benefits for either parents or childless employees. I tend to agree with Laszlo Bock, Google’s former head of people operations, who was quoted in this article as saying that the complaints of the childless tech workers reflect a “lack of patience, a lack of empathy and a sense of entitlement.” I fear that our culture has bred this sense of entitlement and individual focus rather than valuing a sense of community and a sense of responsibility to others.

Something needs to change in our society. What do you think will help?

Photo by Tim van der Kuip on Unsplash