Anne Litwin

Recent events in the United States have raised the awareness in many white people about the terrible costs of structural racism for people of color in our country in terms of safety, education, access to opportunity, and the wealth gap. In a previous post I wrote about research on the increase in Black infant and maternal mortality in the United States due to the stress of racism. New research conducted by Dnika J. Travis and Jennifer Thorpe-Moscon, published by Catalyst, demonstrates what they call the “Emotional Tax” paid by women and men of color in the workplace. They note that the cost of the Emotional Tax for both individuals and organizations is high. They offer strategies for reducing and eliminating these costs.

What is the Emotional Tax at work? To describe the Emotional Tax, the authors ask readers to imagine feeling a need to be constantly on guard at work to protect themselves against large and small acts of bias, exclusion, unfair treatment, and feeling different from peers at work because of gender, race, or ethnicity. This constant need to be vigilant to protect against what others might say or do, whether they intend to exclude or insult, has a cost. The authors explain that “a lifetime of being marginalized can have uniquely potent effects, including on health and well-being.” The Emotional Tax is also harmful to organizations because the tax can prevent employees from being able to thrive at work or can result in a talent drain when employees feel they must leave the organization to protect themselves.

The Catalyst research was based on a survey of 1,569 professionals, 89 percent of whom worked full time, working in corporate and noncorporate organizations in the United States, and was conducted in 2016. Participants were 24 percent Asian, 44 percent Black, 38 percent Latinx, and 6 percent multiracial with an average age thirty-five. They were 51 percent female and 49 percent male with no reporting of nonbinary participants.

Here are some key findings from this study:

• 58 percent of the women and men of color surveyed feel they must be highly on guard to protect against racial and gender bias. This breaks down to Asian women (51 percent), Black women (58 percent), Latinas (56 percent), and multiracial women (52 percent) reporting being highly on guard. Black men (64 percent) and Latinos (60 percent) most frequently report being on guard.
• Employees who feel highly on guard are most likely to want to leave their employers.
• While other aspects of identity were included in the survey, race and gender were cited most often as the reasons for needing to be on guard.
• Women (40 percent) were significantly more likely than men (26 percent) to report being on guard in anticipation of gender bias.
• Latinas were the only group to cite their gender (47 percent) more than their race/ethnicity (42 percent) as the reason to be on guard.
• Women of color (24 percent) are more likely than men of color (11 percent) to be on guard because they expect both gender and racial bias. Multiracial women are most frequently on guard for these reasons.
• Between 13 and 27 percent of respondents report being on guard because they anticipate bias based on other aspects of identity, such as physical appearance, physical ability, age, and religious beliefs. A few women and men of color are on guard because they anticipate bias against sexual orientation or parental status.
• While white men often benefit from behaviors consistent with masculine norms, men of color are more likely to be penalized for the same behaviors and are stereotyped as aggressive and hostile. Latinos, especially Mexicans, are stereotyped as too aggressive and Asian men as too passive. When they behave against expectations, they are penalized.
• Respondents who experience higher levels of being on guard are more likely (38 percent) to frequently consider leaving their jobs than those with lower levels of being on guard (11 percent).

Strategies for reducing the consequences of the Emotional Tax for individuals and organizations, suggested by the authors, are as follows:

Strategy 1: Listen—Listen and affirm how employees experience gender, race, and ethnicity in your organization. Encourage dialogue, promote expressions of difference, and be open to being challenged by other perspectives.

Strategy 2: Learn—Take proactive, careful stock of the day-to-day experiences of exclusion and inclusion. Don’t discount subtle ways people can feel singled out or connected. Specifically, evaluate your organization’s culture, track and monitor outcomes or talent management processes, pay attention to differences, and ensure consistency of policies and practices.

Strategy 3: Link up—Team up with employees and demonstrate partnership. Specifically, hold facilitated conversations, identify common themes, and find ways for employees to “own” inclusion efforts.

Strategy 4: Lead—Ensure leaders and employees are supported and held accountable for inclusive behaviors. Educate and train managers, pay attention to whose voices are being heard, enhance employee skills, and encourage teamwork.

The Catalyst study also found that 90 percent of women and men of color who experience high levels of being on guard report high aspirations to succeed and thrive professionally. The authors suggest, “Any company that doesn’t fully leverage this ambition is vulnerable to a talent drain.” Don’t let this be true for your organization.

Photo courtesy of WOCinTech Chat (CC BY 2.0)

As soon as Kamala Harris was named as Joe Biden’s running mate, “a steady drip of racism and sexism” was unleashed, writes Maggie Astor of the New York Times.

Many of the racist and sexist tropes thrown at her are similar to those aimed at Michelle Obama when she stepped onto the public stage as Barack’s spouse, such as calling her an “angry Black woman” when she spoke of her convictions or showed herself to be a strong woman. At the same time, the intersection of Harris’s particular combination of identities creates some different challenges for Harris. Astor explains that intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a lawyer and civil rights activist, three decades ago to describe “how various identities can overlap to produce discrimination more complex than just, for instance, racism plus sexism.” Harris has the “triple whammy” of at least three primary identities—race, gender, and being the child of immigrants.

The Triple Whammy

Astor notes that Kamala Harris is a Black woman, an Indian American woman, and a woman whose parents were immigrants. Astor quotes Nadia E. Brown, an associate professor of political science and African American studies at Purdue University, as saying, “These are distinctly misogynoir tactics” when describing the combination of racism and sexism that Harris faces as a Black woman. Here are some examples of misogynoir stereotypes and labels that Harris has experienced so far:

• The president twice used dehumanizing language to refer to Harris when he called her “this monster” on the day following the vice presidential debates.
• Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, referred to Harris as “an insufferable lying bitch.”
• Tucker Carlson of Fox News labelled Harris as, in Astor’s words, “a power-hungry usurper” of Biden’s presidency.
• Birtherism accusations have been made about whether she was born in the United States (she was).
• She has, of course, been called an “angry Black woman” along with “mean,” “aggressive,” and “disrespectful.”
• Sexualization is another racist trope leveled at Harris, which includes being promiscuous and hypersexual. Astor notes that Rush Limbaugh suggested, falsely, that Harris was elected as the district attorney for the State of California by “sleeping her way up.”
• Harris has also been called “Aunt Jemima” by a public official and “phony.” Astor explains that when “phony” is used against a woman of color, it takes on a culturally loaded meaning—she doesn’t belong. This meaning is amplified when the woman of color has immigrant parents.
• Harris has also faced challenges from the Indian American community because of anti-Black racism, from the Black community because of misogyny, and from the Black community because of her Indian American ancestry, which caused some to question whether she was really “Black enough” to understand their lived experience.

Double Binds

Much has been written about the double binds that women face, and women of color are often judged even more harshly than white women when facing double binds. Astor notes some examples of double binds that Harris faced after the vice presidential debate:

• Trump described Harris as “totally unlikable.” This is a classic double bind for women, described by Amanda Clayton, a political scientist at Vanderbuilt University, as “women can either be seen as leaders or they can be seen as feminine, and the two don’t go together.”
• “She is applauded for her knowledge,” Luntz wrote on Twitter. “But they just don’t like her ‘condescending reactions.’”
• “Pence absolutely wrecking Harris on Biden’s economic plan here,” Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire founder, wrote on Twitter. “Her smirking isn’t helping.”
• The focus from commentators was on Harris’s tone and looks, and they overlooked the policies she was discussing and her professional experience.

We must all be vigilant and call out these triple whammies and double binds as unfair when we see them leveled against Kamala Harris. This includes staying conscious about our own biases and challenging ourselves when racist or sexist thoughts or judgments arise in us. They are unfair.

Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

It is always important to verify the truth of claims that our leaders make in order to be informed citizens. The purpose of my posts is to report information from current research to keep readers informed of new knowledge about gender issues in the workplace. While the Trump administration has consistently made claims about their commitment to gender equality, new information reveals a mixed record in that regard. Here are some of the claims from the Trump administration about their accomplishments, reported by Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th:

• Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump administration press secretary, said that the president has taken “unprecedented action to support women and girls.” The Trump administration has implemented some helpful policies, but the rhetoric does not match reality in many ways.
• The Trump administration says that it has more women in senior positions than any president in history. We will examine data that disproves this claim.
• McEnany also touts the historic low unemployment rate for women in 2019 as proof of the administration’s commitment to gender equality (and unemployment rates are now at historic highs due to the pandemic).
• In terms of the gender pay gap in the White House, the Trump administration never mentions it. Mark Perry, an economist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who tracks the pay gap, offers the standard justification that “there are more men than women who have advanced degrees and decades of experience,” so of course men are paid more in the Trump White House. To this tired “pipeline” argument, C. Nicole Mason of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research notes that “there is no absence of qualified women.”

Let’s take a look at some of the recently available data.

The Gender Pay Gap in the White House

Carrazana of The 19th writes President Trump did not make closing the gender pay gap a priority. An analysis by the staff of The 19th found that a significant gender pay gap exists in the Trump White House with a $33,300 pay gap in median salaries in 2020. Male staffers had a median income of $106,000 while the median of female staffers is $72,700. This means that in the Trump White House women make 69 cents on the male dollar, which is worse than the national pay gap of 82 cents on the dollar.

Carrazan notes that there do not appear to be any staffers who identify as nonbinary, so all available data is binary. These numbers for the White House are calculated as “raw” gender pay gap data, not adjusted for experience, education, title, or other factors, which is the same way that the national figure is calculated.

In comparison to past administrations, Carrazan reports that in the Barack Obama White House, in 2016, women were paid 89 cents on the dollar, which plummeted to 63 cents the first year that Trump took office, according to an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Women in Senior Positions

As for the claim that the Trump administration has more women in senior positions than any president in history, this claim does not hold up. Carrazan reports that

• An analysis by the Brookings Institution of top advisors across administrations found that the 2017 Trump administration had women in 23 percent of its A-team positions, which is less than the 2009 Obama administration, the 2001 George W. Bush administration, and the 1993 Bill Clinton administration.
• An analysis by The 19th staff of 2020 data on Trump White House commissioned officers—assistants, deputy assistants, and special assistants to the president—found that 40 percent of staffers who had that ranking in the Trump White House were women.
• In the Obama White House in 2016, the gender split in the commissioned officers, or top positions, was 50-50.
• In terms of top earners, in 2016, 53 percent of those who earned $100,000 or more in the Obama White House were women compared to 47 percent who were men. In 2020, the gender split for highest earners in the Trump administration was 37 percent female, 63 percent male.

Actions to Support Women and Girls

In terms of this claim that President Trump took unprecedented actions to support women and girls, Carrazan reports that

• The Trump administration tried to roll back measures designed to increase transparency on pay data collected by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission but was blocked from doing so by the ruling of a federal judge.
• Trump signed an executive order in 2017 that rolled back the Obama administration’s Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order. The Obama order required companies with federal contracts to comply with a number of civil rights and labor rights laws, including paycheck transparency.

We must stay vigilant and ensure that the voices of white women and women and men of color are represented at the table where decisions are made and that we are paid equitably for our work. We bring valuable perspectives and life experience that will make our government and our country stronger.

Photo courtesy of The White House (public domain)

I don’t know about you, but I really hate being interrupted. I don’t like it when either women or men interrupt me, but men interrupt me so much more often, especially in professional settings, than women do. Research shows that it is not just my imagination. In a previous post, I wrote about research showing that women do, in fact, get interrupted more. I was surprised to see, when I located this previous article, written in 2017, that the picture at the opening of the article was of Kamala Harris with reference to the interruptions both she and Elizabeth Warren had experienced in the Senate. Now Kamala Harris is front and center again in a current conversation about men interrupting women, with the added awareness that women of color get interrupted even more often than do white women.

Colleen Flaherty, writing for Inside Higher Education, notes, “Female academics saw their own experiences in the vice presidential debate’s gendered and racialized dynamics” when Mike Pence repeatedly interrupted Harris and refused to stop talking when moderator Susan Page called time. Flaherty notes that Page signaled to Harris to stop talking thirteen times, but she had to signal to Pence forty-five times.

Pence was demonstrating “mansplaining” or “manologues” when he continued talking and talking and talking while talking over a woman, Page, the moderator. He was demonstrating “manterrupting” when he cut Harris off repeatedly. Flaherty reports that this pattern is not unusual:

• 66 percent of all interruptions during oral arguments at the US Supreme Court were directed at the three women on the bench as of 2015.
• Another study of forty participants found that men interrupted 33 percent more often when they were speaking with women, compared to when they were speaking with other men. In that study, men interrupted women 2.1 times per three-minute conversation, compared to 1.8 times per conversation with other men. Women on average interrupted men once.

Another important dynamic on display during the vice presidential debates was a racial dynamic. Flaherty cites Anne Charity-Hudley, North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as saying, “This is the story of Black women” when noting that the moderator, a white woman, admitted she gave Pence more time to talk and did not offer equal time to Harris. It is true that Pence took the extra time while talking over Page. Nonetheless, Charity-Hudley explained, this was a typical example of anti-Blackness when white women are the arbiters of rules that benefit white men and short change Black women—not uncommon in academia and other organizations. Charity-Hudley notes that a white ally would have advocated for Harris to finish speaking when interrupted and would have ensured, as the arbiter of the debate rules, that Harris got equal time to make her points when Pence took more than his share of time. But Page did not do that for Harris. This is how white women, of which I am one, collude in reinforcing the racial hierarchy at work in our society. We can do better than this. We can be better allies.

Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Becoming a medical doctor takes years of training, including grueling hours of clinical practice. It would seem that graduating from medical school and completing all the required internships and residencies would entitle the graduate to the respect of peers and clients—but not if you are a Black woman. It’s not that Black male doctors don’t experience disrespect because of race, but the intersection of race and gender means Black female physicians experience a double dose of it.

A useful term for describing a lot of the disrespect that Black female physicians experience, and the ensuing impact, is microaggressions. Emma Goldberg of the New York Times explains that microaggression is a term coined in the 1970s by Dr. Chester Pierce, a psychiatrist, that refers to “subtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges which are ‘put downs’” of Black people and members of other minority groups. She notes that “micro” refers to the routine nature of these exchanges, not the scale of their impact. In fact, the impact can be quite damaging because the injuries to self-esteem and confidence are often cumulative for individuals. Goldberg cites Dr. Kimberly Manning, an internal medicine doctor at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, as explaining, “It’s like death by a thousand paper cuts” and “It can cause you to shrink.” Dr. Sheryl Heron, a Black professor of emergency medicine at Emory University, explains that “after the twelve-thousandth time, it starts to impede your ability to be successful. You start to go into scenarios [in your head] about your self-worth.”

What do microaggressions look like for Black female physicians? Here are some examples:

• Onyeka Otugo, an emergency medicine doctor, was often mistaken for a janitor or food service worker, even after introducing herself as a doctor. She goes on to say that people would often ask her when the doctor was coming and ask her to take the trash out.
• Phindile Chowa, an assistant professor of emergency medicine, describes one patient who repeatedly forgot her name while quickly learning the name of her white male colleague during the course of her hospital visit.
• Damon Tweedy, in an article he wrote for the New York Times, described a patient telling him to “go back to Africa,” and his white supervisor said and did nothing once he was told about it.

It does not help, of course, that there are very few Black female physicians. Goldberg notes that

• Only 5 percent of the American physician work force is African American, and roughly 2 percent are Black women.
• Only 3 percent of emergency medicine doctors identify as Black.
• Just 7 percent of the student population at American medical schools are Black.

The recent revelations from the Covid-19 pandemic about the dramatic health disparities between white people and African Americans highlight one reason why it is so important for there to be more Black physicians. Goldberg notes that “a 2018 study showed that Black patients had improved outcomes when seen by Black doctors, and were more likely to agree to preventive care measures like diabetes screenings and cholesterol tests.” Black patients have a good reason to distrust the medical establishment. Tweedy notes that as recently as the 1970s, “Black people were experimented upon under the guise of scientific study and sterilized without their consent.” Black female doctors are aware of the importance of their presence to reassure Black patients that they can trust preventive care measures. Black physicians are also attuned to discriminatory practices that create hardship for their patients. For example, Black patients are prescribed less pain medication for injuries comparable with those of their non-Black counterparts and are often left to suffer needlessly without the advocacy of a Black physician.

Both Goldberg and Tweedy suggest steps that the medical establishment needs to take to support the success of Black female doctors and to undo the racism deeply embedded in the medical establishment. Some examples include

• Publish the experiences of microaggressions for Black female physicians, as was recently done by four female physicians of color in a paper in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. The authors Dr. Melanie Molina, Dr. Adaira Landry, Dr. Anita Chary, and Dr. Sherri-Ann Burnett-Bowie hope to reduce the sense of isolation of Black women doctors by shining a light on microaggression. They also hope their work will raise the awareness of their white colleagues who will change their own behavior and become white allies.
• Continue to diversify emergency medicine departments to reduce the isolation of Black doctors and to amplify their voices.
• Conduct training of doctors and physician educators on implicit bias, and evaluate their behavior in tangible and accountable ways.
• Root out the racism still deeply entrenched in the cultures and curriculum of medical schools.

We need to address health disparities in our country, and we cannot make progress until the medical establishment changes.

Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash

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

I have long felt and written about the importance of transparency to close the gender wage gap in the United States. It stands to reason that as long as payroll information is a secret, we cannot hold organizations accountable for paying women and people of color less than they pay white men for the same work. For that reason, I felt hopeful when, in about 2016, the United Kingdom passed a law requiring that all organizations with at least 250 employees had to report their wage data, broken down by sex (but not race). The first report of comparative wage data was published in 2018. I also remember the outrage and scandal when this data revealed massive gender wage gaps in almost every industry and job in the United Kingdom. I subsequently assumed that change was well underway in there with closing the gender wage gap because of this transparency and the outrage it unleashed. When I recently made a presentation on gender issues in the workplace to a group of women in the United Kingdom, I mentioned that their country had taken significant steps to close the wage gap compared to what we have done on a national level in the United States. When I got blank stares back from my UK audience, I realized that my assumptions were apparently wrong, and I decided to find out what has happened after 2018.

Linda Scott, writing for The Guardian, reports that not only has the wage gap not closed for women in the United Kingdom as a result of the publication of the 2018 wage data, but that the current Covid-19 pandemic is making things worse for women in there. She notes that women are “watching their careers evaporate as the pay gap widens.” She suggests that the pandemic could set women’s economic progress back half a century because of the expectation that women will sacrifice their own economic viability to provide care at home. Before the pandemic, women in the United Kingdom were 75 percent of the part-time labor force because childcare is so expensive, and they were hit hard when part-time jobs fell by 70 percent in the first three months of the pandemic. With schools and day care closed, British mothers were 47 percent more likely than fathers to lose their jobs. As in the United States, gender inequality in the home increased during the pandemic as British women did more than twice the work of maintaining the home and family than men did.

Why didn’t the scandal produced by the big reveal of wage data in 2018 result in any change in the British wage gap? Scott explains the following:

• In 2018, most pundits, HR managers, and government servants blamed the women for having children, choosing to work in the wrong jobs, and not trying hard enough even though all industries paid women less in every job.
• The United Kingdom’s Equal Pay Act of 1970, passed fifty years before, contained a provision that said there can be no “positive discrimination” of one sex over another. In other words, it would be “positive discrimination” to raise the wages of women to be equal to men’s. The 1970 law did not recognize patterns of inequality between women and men that already existed, nor past discrimination. Therefore, equal pay had to be considered only during the actual hiring process.
• When an employer underpays a woman in the United Kingdom, her only recourse is to file an expensive and protracted lawsuit that she may not win. The employer’s risk is minimal, so it makes sense for employers to continue paying women less. There are few consequences.

Scott notes that in 2020, two years after the British gender pay gap was exposed, no significant improvements have been made because there simply are no consequences for maintaining discriminatory practices. This is not good news.

Photo courtesy of Erich Ferdinand (CC BY 2.0)