Episode 162: The Coming Shift: What's Happening to Our Careers (part 2)
/Show transcript:
Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
In the last episode we worried that women might be losing ground during this pandemic. This time, a different perspective…
“Suddenly flexibility – something that women have been fighting for for thirty years is becoming the default position for a growing number of companies, and we’re already yelling victim, victim, victim, rather than wow, this is really cool.”
Coming up on The Broad Experience.
What is happening to women’s careers right now? That’s the question you heard Jessi Hempel and I tackle in the last podcast. And it’s one I’m going to keep asking one way or another in these next few shows.
In that conversation with Jessi we looked at some of what we’re hearing anecdotally…that women with families…some of them are thinking about quitting their jobs – or they already have - because they just don’t see how they can make it all work when their children need so much support right now. It’s an old story but with a new, pandemic twist.
My guest today is more optimistic. And she says organizations can learn a lot of lessons from this pandemic that they can use to make everyone’s life at work easier when we return to some kind of normality.
You last heard from Avivah Wittenberg-Cox a few months ago in a show about how male and female leaders around the world were handling the coronavirus crisis. She is CEO of consultancy 20-First, she works with companies to bring gender balance to their businesses. She uses that expression deliberately.
“Yes because I am very careful about integrating and including the dominant majorities and in a lot of companies that happens to be men. So if you show up and say you’re pushing women, it’s not usually the most receptive message. You can just switch your semantics to we’re promoting balance, which I have found is just much more receivable.”
Avivah is a Canadian now living in the UK.
I started by talking about doom and gloom – the fact that female-dominated sectors like hospitality and retail have been hard hit by this pandemic. Many women have lost their jobs.
And women in other sectors and high wage brackets are struggling too.
AM-T: “There’s been tons of reporting about how women with families…it’s still seems to be the woman who’s taking on the bulk of dealing with the kids and the home schooling and all that, which can really take you away from your job. And it can just feel like this is a time that as a sex we’re going backwards not forwards. Would you disagree?”
Avivah Wittenberg Cox: “I would cautiously hold my fire until I have a bit more proof. I am continually suspect of a strong media preference for positioning and framing women as victims.”
AM-T: “Tell me more.”
“Well it just seems like the overwhelming story we keep getting is dire tales that women are suffering, and I’m on a million panels that are discussing this topic and not one of them will say that actually men are dying more of Covid than we are. I suspect the lack of balance and equity between men and women and between…we’re still on this fighting spirit of ‘fight for women,’ which I have done all my career, and I think we have to be cautious about ‘everything’s being lost.’ I think one of the astonishing realities I’ve heard about a lot in the last 5 months is what I call the Berlin Wall of personal and professional life has fallen down, NOT just for women but for men too. So there’s been more men confronted with the realities of working from home and taking care of children than there ever has been before, I mean this is a big breakthrough, right? Nobody talks about that.”
That’s something that came across in an episode I did in the spring about partnership in the pandemic. It featured three women, all married, two of them had kids. And both those mothers said their husbands were doing more childcare during lockdown. Life was still chaotic, but each felt their husbands had built a stronger bond with their kids during this time.
“We seem to prefer to say women have taken over and…how do they know that already? Who’s doing that research and I want to see the reports and the stats. That’s not what I am hearing. I hear all these companies doing work from home, going on permanent work from home. Suddenly flexibility – something that women have been fighting for for thirty years is becoming the default position for a growing number of companies, and we’re already yelling victim, victim, victim, rather than wow, this is really cool, let’s redesign the workplace with a technology that’s now on tap, and that we can do this kind of thing and everybody is discovering that, and yes, I will add there remains a very interesting issue that has been perhaps less the focus of our work for this last little while, because we’ve been focused on gender balance at work, there remains an issue of gender balance at home. And that is what is being revealed at times like this. So when push comes to shove what happens in the home when there’s two careers, two kids, no day care and nothing else, who has the power, and how is it balanced between two parents?”
Sociologist Daniel Carlson has been looking at this. He also appeared in that episode about couples during Covid. Several weeks after we spoke he and some colleagues published their own research into men, women, and the division of labor during the pandemic. What they found was less dire than some surveys suggest. Men WERE doing more childcare and housework than they had before, although most women still did the bulk of it and they certainly reported they were doing the bulk of homeschooling.
The research concluded that lockdown had made most households more egalitarian…but an egalitarian utopia it was not.
Avivah says what we don’t know is what those conversations are like between partners. Women may insist on equality at work. But to what extent are they asking for or demanding it at home?
“What choices do they make, how much negotiating power do they have, how can they contract with their spouses, do they even try, do they themselves default and assume they’re the better teachers and accompaniers of their children…do they leave space for their spouse…we’ve been through this before but this is now a whole new game when you’ve got two parents in lockdown for five or six months and no school on the horizons – it’s very revelatory of company cultures, of couple cultures, of country cultures…who is doing this well, who is doing this badly, and we will see both, but it’s a legacy of gender issues, how we’ve all been brought up, what we think our roles in the home are, they’re in evolution for men and women, and we’ve hit this crisis when shared parental leave has just been introduced in various countries in the last few years…it’s a whole new era but it’s the beginning of this era for fathers to take their rightful place in fatherhood, something many of them have been fighting for for quite some time.
Now have women suffered from this crisis? You’re absolutely right in saying it’s the sectors that were female-dominated that suffered in this crisis most, just as in the last crisis in 2008 it was the sectors dominated by men that suffered most. But that’s not like a gender bias attack, we’re going backward, it’s the weird circumstances of the world. And if anyone feels they’re going backwards at home, time to fight back, right? Time to renegotiate what you’re willing to do or not.”
She says these can be difficult conversations. They can challenge the ideas men and women are carrying around about what a good mother or a good man SHOULD do. But they need to be had.
AM-T: “You wrote in this Forbes piece in July that this crisis actually presents an opportunity for organizations to change the way they do things and make things more equitable.”
“Yeah, I mean never waste a crisis is typical management speak, right? It depends of course on the state of a company, right, if it’s fighting for its life and very fearful I find usually companies then hunker down on people they trust and the past. They go backwards, of course they do ‘cause they can’t see their way through. Good companies with strong leadership innovate, re-create, leapfrog forward, and yeah, they’re inventing new ways of working, new definitions of flexibility, insisting on the gender balance journeys they’ve already usually been on for a number of years, very cautious not to lose it all in the next two years.”
Avivah has said this before but she really believes if companies are going to thrive in the future they have to be more humane. They have to show what she calls love to their employees.
“Well run companies and countries during Covid have realized that good leadership encapsulates and includes pretty finely attuned emotional support, psychological safety at work, bringing your whole self to work, all these concepts that have been in the progressive leadership ranks have proven survival tactics in a crisis like this one, to keep people engaged and delivering under really stressful situations sometimes. To take care of your people, to show love, not just utilization has been really key. So I tend to – I’m in a default space, the companies I work with tend to be good companies and good employers tend to be self-selecting. I’ve been very impressed by their ability to protect jobs, to do innovative things, to have senior leaders lose some salary so they wouldn’t have to let people go and people would accept salary adjustments across the board...there’s been all kinds of, you know…here in the UK there has been the furlough scheme but when the furlough scheme ends, they have been protecting these things. They’ve gone a long way – that doesn’t mean they haven’t let anybody go but they’ve done it very mindfully, carefully, with strong communication.”
Not every company has handled Covid with grace. Even companies that claim to be family friendly. Like the small firm a listener of mine in New Zealand works for. She left me a voice memo a few weeks ago.
“I can’t really blame them for reacting the way they did when we were told we had to go into lockdown, there was just no procedure for this. At home I have a 4 year old daughter and a husband. It was just us during the lockdown period. I struggled a lot working from home and felt terribly guilty about not being a good worker and for struggling to be a good mum.
Her husband took full charge of their daughter but still…her daughter wanted HER attention as well. She hated this meshing of her work and her home lives. Her employer didn’t seem to grasp how hard it was to get things done in the circumstances.
“I felt as though our mental health took second place to completing the job, the work, was the priority. What would have made a significant difference for me and other staff aside from reducing the expectations from management, would have been to limit client expectations. The communication to our clients was that it was business as usual, and it just wasn’t.”
Now she’s back at the office she says there’s been no outlet to talk about this.
She says most of her bosses are men with wives who work part-time.
Avivah says that could be part of the problem.
“Generally what I find about the business world despite this talk we hear of ‘bring your whole self to work’ and authenticity and all that…a lot of male dominated, male normed corporate company environments are: never show your emotions, totally eliminate any reference to your personal life. As personal as you’ll go is what football game you watched over the weekend. And there’s this complete compartmentalization between personal and professional. Which women have always been incapable of separating right, and this is why this experience has I think been so seminal, is it’s knocked down that wall for men too, which is new, right? So I’m not surprised some of these companies are desperately trying to put it back up as fast as possible because they don’t want it down. But for employees who saw it fall and experienced its fall and know how much better they felt being able to be the same human being at home and work rather than two separate versions of themselves…I think it’s probably wiser management to learn how to integrate it, and a lot of men are uncomfortable, we haven’t raised men…that’s the management culture and I would add the English speaking language culture to be rational, unemotional, that’s why women have always made men uncomfortable because we’re always embracing our emotions, naming them talking about them, but now we know, we’ve got MIT saying gender balanced teams are more effective because they have more EQ, because they have more psychological safety… because women bring up different subjects. It reminds me of a company I interviewed years ago in Canada, an electricity company that had gender-balanced, and the CEO was just so impressed that the number of their safety incidents fell by like 50% in the first year because he said women talk about fears and problems, and men don’t.”
AM-T: “That’s so interesting…”
“And I think in moments of crisis, if you can’t talk about what’s going on you’re gonna fail, you’re gonna burn out, you’re gonna melt down, you’re gonna have cancer in 20 years, it’s just not good for humans to lock down all their emotions especially in this kind of massive, collective trauma thing we’re going through.”
She’s been speaking to clients and consulting with couples all over the world during Covid. And one thing she notes is how many baby boomer men have wives who don’t work. They’re at the top, they’re affluent…
“So lockdown to them means something very different than it does to the young, dual career spouses they employ. And there’s this complete generational and financial divide. They’re at home, they have beautiful homes, often they’re in their country home because they have more than one… and they have an office and the door is closed and to them not only are they comfortable they’re in a very happy place, they don’t have to commute, they have their families, they get to see them every day in a much less stressful way. So for some of those guys it’s been an unexpected pleasure, all of this. The age of their children makes an enormous difference most of them will be older, it’s lovely to have your 20 year-olds come back home, it’s been a gift to a number of senior people I’ve been talking to, they get their kids home for a few months, which is like cherry on the cake of life for some of them, so it’s almost the complete reverse of what their staffs are going through, which they may not fully understand, appreciate or see, right?”
She says many younger men want to be present for their kids during all this. But…
“Men are not going to be sharing, ‘oh my God I’ve gotta take care of the kids,’ to a senior guy who isn’t very open to that kind of conversation. This is the problem we have with parental leave still. I hasten to add that what people don’t integrate is the big generational shift isn’t between you and your mother and me and my mother, it’s between young men and these boomer men, that’s the big shift, is on fatherhood and the roles of men in the world over the last 30 years, right, so what we see is all the men running large organizations today come from one generation that often weren’t dual career or certainly not the ones in the most senior roles, their wives often let work go, so they’re in lead careers, never really had to worry about the kids. And they don’t necessarily understand, appreciate or encourage a younger generation of men to do differently. And they’re very suspicious of young men who want to balance.
They only just barely got used to women being the pain in the neck we are, you know, oh, babies, bla bla bla, and now they have the spectrum, oh my God, men are gonna want this too? Geez, then the game’s over, everyone is gonna want this. And that’s exactly the issue.”
But that attitude on the part of some bosses is contributing to the imbalance of power at home, as men hesitate to ask for much flexibility. Age-old beliefs about gender roles can be incredibly hard to shake.
AM-T: “Sort of back to the beginning…for many people because they are still working from home in some form of lockdown situation, it feels a bit Groundhog-Day-like, and I think treading water is a good way to put it, as one of my correspondents put it…what are you hearing, you’re talking to people all over the world you say. Are people just treading water in their careers, how are they feeling? What’s going to happen to us?”
“We’re in for a tough year, we’ve only really seen so far the health crisis, now it’s the economic crisis and huge numbers of companies…we’re going into some really, really bad numbers. Which governments will cough up, which ones have money to cough up more…anybody who thinks companies aren’t going to be massively laying off don’t have their eyes on the road. It’s terrifying. No, I think, listen, it’s really terrifying. So anyone who’s in a job should stay there, which is what I’m telling my daughter who hates her job and wants to quit. It’s not the moment to quit, I don’t care how much you hate your job, unless you’re ready to go off and do something really different…I think there’s a lot of treading water, there’s always a pendulum swing between who has the power. Is it the employer or is it the employee?”
Since the pandemic struck, it’s the employer.
“This is not a time of ease, of facility, of power on the employee’s side. So if you’re in any kind of a stable place, stay there, and if you’ve lost something my advice is really to start thinking creatively about how to start something on your own. I hope to see a huge uptick in entrepreneurship would be my only silver lining of what’s coming. And even that is tricky, right?”
AM-T: “And in the US, your heath insurance, most people depend on their work to pay for their health insurance and when you work for yourself paying for your health insurance is on you – so that’s another difficulty in the US for people going out on their own.”
“I think the issue is not that they’re going to be going out on their own, it’s that there are going to be people now on their own. It’s how they’re going to end up, and then it’s how do you start over, you have to keep learning and growing and doing. I think there are a lot of opportunities, there’s always new spaces opening up in markets, there will be huge needs…there are a lot of problems, right? When there are problems there’s always a business solution to offer for it that people will be ready to pay for, and I think that people should start thinking. That’s definitely where I would recommend that we all start thinking creatively about how can we in the next decade solve some of the issues?
What I’m also hearing is that a lot of people are having second thoughts about what they’ve been doing for the last decade, what are they doing, how are they spending their life? When you know you can get sick it helps to remind you that life is short and sweet, right? Are you doing something you’re convinced by and committed to? And if in any case we’re all gonna lose our jobs and have to shift, which I think many of us will have to do at all ages right…this is hitting across the age span, although what I see in the statistics is that it’s hitting most in the 60s and in the 20s, which are two difficult ages to be re-creating by the way…”
AM-T: “Why in your twenties?”
“Well because these poor young kids, if they’re just graduating it’s very hard to find work, if they’ve just been hired as interns and stuff they’re let go. Those are the easy ones to lose. They don’t have long term contracts, they’re on short term things. So then yeah, I’d offer a different way of thinking about work which I think many people will come to: How to find a bit more meaning in what you do, and how can you help others, rather than just getting a job and earning your income.”
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. I’ll post some links to Avivah’s recent articles under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com and I’ll also link you to Daniel Carlson’s research on the division of labor at home during Covid.
You can find me in all the usual places – by email, on Twitter or on the Facebook page.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.