Deloitte’s recent Women @ Work study makes for sobering reading, offering a stark reminder that businesses continue to put women at a disadvantage in the workplace, with 44% of women reporting that they have experienced harassment and/or microaggressions at work over the past year.
The survey also highlighted struggles around flexible working, with 97% of women saying that requesting such an arrangement would adversely affect their chances of promotion, while 37% of women with a partner say they feel they need to prioritize their partner’s career over their own.
When discussing workplace inequality, leaders all too often focus on the problems without offering any solutions. For workplaces to become environments in which women can thrive, organizations must create inclusive cultures that foster collaboration and consideration, rather than environments that disadvantage women.
So, how can businesses reframe the workplace environment positively for women?
In her book “Career and Family: Women’s Century Long Journey to Equity”, Claudia Goldin, the 2023 Nobel prize winning economist coined the phrase “greedy work” to describe work that values and rewards jobs with long and inflexible hours with high salaries. Such jobs involve a degree of presenteeism that can prove incompatible with flexible working, effectively excluding women with caretaking responsibilities.
Moreover, greedy jobs incentivize couples with children to prioritize the career of one partner. The result of this is often that one partner (usually the male in a heterosexual couple) stays in this “greedy work” full time, while the other partner (most often the female) takes flexible work and makes other concessions to accommodate care-giving responsibilities. This, in turn, can lead to fewer prospects for promotion for the female partner. A survey from the British Chamber of Commerce found that two-thirds of mothers felt that they had missed out on career progression as a result of having children, compared with just over one-third of fathers.
Businesses should not expect their female employees to shoulder the burden of fixing this problem. By adopting policies that are pro family – such as paid family leave and support with child-care – businesses can create more equitable conditions for women in the workplace and thereby support couples to balance the trade-offs between work and family. In the words of former US Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.”
This means not only increased flexibility in terms of hours and location for employees but more accommodating, compassionate policies around parental leave in order to encourage partners to share the responsibility of childcare. Leaders in this field include asset manager Abrdn, which offers nine months of fully paid parental leave, or insurer Aviva, which offers six months. These policies make a difference: since introducing its equal parental leave policy, Aviva has found that 80% of fathers in the business have taken at least five months off work for the birth of a new child.
Microaggressions directed at women in the workplace (being talked over, patronized, or left out of meetings), may seem minor in isolation, like the emotional equivalent of a paper cut. However, while people can shrug off the occasional “paper cut”, when women are subject to cut after cut, this can be both painful and damaging, stymying careers and diminishing creativity, energy, and sense of belonging.
However, preventing these microaggressions can be challenging, if businesses try to avoid fueling a “callout culture.” Rather than microaggressions, it is helpful to think of these incidents as “micro-inequities” to remove the association with aggression. This defuses the tensions of a callout culture and encourages those affected by these behaviors to speak up, without the prospect of a defensive response.
Sponsoring a local girls’ sports team is an effective way to equip a new generation of women with essential skills of teamwork, leadership, and resilience.
In order to address micro-inequities proactively, businesses can introduce inclusive language guidelines to equip employees with the language to work together in a respectful way.
Examples of using inclusive language can include asking for and respecting people’s choice of personal pronoun, or changing language in policies or guidelines to be gender neutral, for example by changing “husband” or “wife” to “partner”.
Hybrid working has given employees far greater flexibility, which is especially valuable to those who have caregiving or homemaking responsibilities – tasks that still primarily fall to women. These responsibilities, or the “invisible job,” as Paula Fyans calls it, create an additional mental load on women, on top of their paid jobs. There is increasing evidence that hybrid working helps women to deal with this workload while increasing their participation in the workplace. A recent study found that women are more likely to work full-time in sectors where hybrid working is the norm with the effect magnified for mothers.
Hybrid working also has its downsides as workers can struggle to make an impact while working remotely. According to Deloitte’s study, 37% of women who work in a hybrid situation say that they have felt excluded from meetings, important decisions, or informal interactions, and 30% say they don’t have adequate access to leaders.
Organizations should put in place clear guidelines as to which types of meeting can be held online and which should be face-to-face, in order to ensure equitable treatment of men and women in the workplace. Businesses should be especially conscious of scheduling face-to-face team meetings for times that work for everyone, considering employees’ caregiving responsibilities, for example, by avoiding scheduling meetings during school pick-up times.
Beyond internal policies, it is important that organizations support their employees to make the most of external resources for career development. Associations such as Business Professional Women provide women with peer support and the opportunity to grow their networks and advance their careers through workshops and activities supported by local businesses. Such initiatives constitute a crucial step in fixing the “leaky pipeline” of women to senior leadership.
Another example of how businesses can increase women’s participation in work at an even earlier stage is through sports. According to an EY study, 80% of female Fortune 500 CEOs played sports in their formative years. Organizations have the opportunity to get involved at grassroots level. Sponsoring a local girls’ sports team is an effective way to equip a new generation of women with essential skills of teamwork, leadership, and resilience. For example global chemical company INEOS supports sports teams around the world. The company supports AGNA – a girls netball association in Switzerland. This corporate support has helped grow the grassroots club – founded to encourage girls to stay in sport during their teenage years – from its inception to a thriving club that has developed many girls, some of whom have made it to represent the Swiss National teams.
There is a huge opportunity for employers to shift the emphasis to action on workplace inequality. The Deloitte survey found that women with more flexible workplaces reported higher levels of productivity and loyalty to their employers, as well as being likely to stay longer with their current employers. A positive reframing of the challenge helps involve all employees in creating a healthier culture that supports women in reaching their full potential at work. In the process, they will be improving the workplace for everyone.
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