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Featured Guest Blogger October 19th, 2009

Brad Harrington is Executive Director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family and a research professor in the Carroll School of Management. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

This week you will likely hear quite a bit in the media about a report being published by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress called A Woman’s Nation. The goal of this undertaking has been to provide an in-depth look at the status of women in America from a number of different perspectives and across a wide range of sectors - healthcare, higher education, law, public service, policy, etc. It replicates a report that was done by Eleanor Roosevelt in the early 1960’s at the request of President Kennedy (Ms. Shriver’s late uncle.) Look for a Time cover story and extensive coverage on this week’s “Meet the Press”, “NBC Nightly News”, and “The Today Show” (for those of you in the United States) regarding the report and its findings. As part of the report, I was pleased to be the lead author, along with Professor Jamie Ladge of Northeastern University, of the chapter on women in business. We titled our piece “Got Talent? It isn’t Hard to Find” for a very simple reason. Present recession aside, we have heard for so long about the war for talent and the tremendous emphasis leading HR departments put on talent management. I often find these discussions ironic in light of the fact that there are so many talented individuals right under our noses (i.e., women) who are either lost to an organization (i.e., they leave their present employer or opt out altogether) or underutilized due to outmoded management thinking. In our chapter, we lay out six key points, none of which will be surprising to you who are so close to these issues:

• The case for women in business is a talent management one, pure and simple. For a knowledge-based economy like ours, the numbers are truly staggering. Fifty-seven percent of all college degrees are awarded to women each year. Yet many organizations are still reluctant to make even minimal adjustments to ensure they are creating jobs that fit the needs of their “most valuable resource.” If women made up 10 or even 20% of new college graduates, one could argue that organizations don’t have to adjust to retain top talent. But modifying HR practices for 57% of new grads isn’t an accommodation, it’s common sense.
• We have made progress on gender equity on many work fronts, but when it comes to home life women with children still contribute twice the number of hours to dependent care and domestic tasks as men do. That’s reality. So while men have increased their commitment to care giving, the “second shift” that we discussed 20 years ago is still alive and well.
• In spite of the progress women have made in business, they are at the helm of only 3% of the Fortune 1000 companies. This means that women must continue to operate in organizational cultures that are designed by and for men. This creates a myriad of challenges for women who need to adapt to male dominated organizations and ground rules and adopt male oriented ways of operating in order to succeed. Much recent research suggests that women’s ways of leading is at least as effective as more male-oriented approaches, but unfortunately the dominant culture can easily discount new and different forms of leadership as being inappropriate simply because it does not fit pre-conceived stereotypes of how leaders should behave.
• The highest impact actions that employers can take to help women thrive in business cost almost nothing. These include letting go of outdated mental models that suggest there is only one way to work, there is only one place to work, that a 40+ hour work week is the only model for contributing, and a standardized, rigid career path for all is a desirable norm. Rather, we should aim for highly flexible career models that can be customized to maximize the contributions of all employees, not a one-size-fits-all approach.
• Those companies that do offer innovative and flexible approaches to work too often limit their offerings to professional and managerial staff. The case for innovation and flexibility are at least as appropriate for hourly workers who often face greater work-life challenges than salaried workers do. And in many industries, retaining this talent base is every bit as important. Hourly workers in a wide variety of businesses (think retailing, banking, restaurants, hotels, etc.) are the critical means for delivering an organization’s value proposition and provide the company’s face to the customer.
• Finally, the United States federal government must take a more active role in developing and encouraging family friendly policies. FMLA, our great legislative triumph in the work family arena over the last 20 years, places the U.S. as one of only four industrialized countries in the world that does not by law offer paid maternity leave. Can we seriously view ourselves as world leaders in gender equality when this is the only mandated support we provide to working people with acute dependent care issues?

Not much is new to your ears here, I’m sure. But now is the time for the business community to stop debating and begin embracing the world as it really is today. The subtitle of A Women’s Nation is “This Changes Everything.” And it’s about time that it did.

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