Very early on, in advance of a pool’s formation, and after the first or second promotion, many capable young women leave the management ranks. They never reach positions from which they have the pool in sight.
Women “opt out” for a variety of reasons, such as their belief that the turbo capitalism and the 24/7 availability that U.S. bosses demand of subordinates are excessive. Further, many young women believe that those features of the workplace are incompatible with the type of family and personal life they envision. Implicit requirements for face time in the office along with demands for willingness and availability to travel on short notice are further elements of a U.S. business environment. Many younger women do not wish to work that hard or under those conditions. Another principal reason for opting out is biological. Younger women opt out to give birth to a child and then, often, a second child, and sometimes a third.
Male bosses—and many female bosses as well—regard childbirth as recreational.1 They seem to place childbirth and maternity leave in the same category as taking time off to train for running in a race or playing in a tennis tournament. Companies, including those in information technology, need to take steps to make opting out less of a watershed, career-determinative, or career-ending event. In other words, those at the head of companies must do more to “ease the off-ramps,” as author Sylvia Ann Hewlett describes them.2
Many of the young women who opt out do not return to the same or similar employers, or do not return to the workforce at all. Companies thus lose the institutional memory and the human capital that are associated with capable employees who leave and do not come back. Of the women who do think about a return, they are forestalled by thoughts of hostility by coworkers who have never left; the self-perceived or actual obsolescence of their knowledge and skills; and the work/life balance, including child care issues and tug-of-war (home versus job) that confront them. Thus, heads of companies must talk about and implement steps to build and then enhance the “on-ramps” too.
The less fearsome the opting-out process is, and the more facile and smooth the subsequent return, the more robust will be the stream flowing into and enlarging the pool from which future female leaders will emerge. Even after stretching a four-month maternity leave into a year, or a multiple of years, absences are statistically of little significance, leading to working lives of thirty-five or thirty-six years rather than thirty-seven, thirty-eight, or thirty-nine years.
Of course, a few outliers insist that, in the first place, opting out does not exist. Recently, Aaron Dhir, professor of law at Osgood Hall in Toronto, made just such an assertion:
I am skeptical that [gender disparities] can be attributed to a shortage of qualified women. Rather than there being an insufficient “pool,” or “supply,” I suggest that . . . a more appropriate explanation lies in the coupling of implicit cognitive biases [sexism] with the fact that the networks of existing directors are limited in scope and restricted entry.3
In support of his statement, Professor Dhir “re-tweets” the Catalyst pronouncement: “Catalyst has characterized the supply problem in Canada and the United States as a ‘myth.’”4
Professor Dhir’s assessment, that a good ole boys’ club is still in control (“networks of existing directors”), and that “implicit cognitive biases” among males hold women down, has far less explanatory power that it did thirty or forty years ago. More importantly, assertions about sexism as the primary cause are going to be a turnoff to dominant males, many of whom have daughters, have acted as mentors to female coworkers, and live in a world that differs markedly from the one Professor Dhir seems to have in his mind’s eye.5 The males may still be dominant, but many harbor the belief that their daughters and their coworkers live in a changed world in which women can do anything that men can do, in sports, in business, in politics, or in academe.
Rather, there are other, more cogent explanations for the leaky pipe syndrome, that is, that many capable qualified younger women enter the pipeline but few emerge at the opposite end, as senior executives. One prevalent one is the opting-out phenomenon.6 Young women who have graduated from university and have possibly garnered an MBA obtain a management position at a company. Then, at age thirty, thirty-one, or thirty-two, they marry. They become pregnant, taking a maternity leave that stretches into a year or two. They have a second child.
Professor Dhir and Catalyst flatly deny that any of this takes place. “There is ample reason to question conclusions that women are ‘opting out,’” Professor Dhir, for example, again asserts.7 True, “little empirical evidence [indicates] that women are leaving in droves when they have children.”8 What the naysayers ignore are the reams of circumstantial evidence, strong circumstantial evidence, that validate the existence and widespread nature of the opting-out phenomenon.
First is the trophy director phenomenon. Why, if the pool of female candidates is sufficient, do corporations and their boards of directors choose the same women over and over again for board positions? No one can do a capable job holding more than two or three board seats, but in corporate America a number of women hold six, seven, or eight board seats. Part of it may be that corporations have a tin ear, or are ham-fisted, or are merely ticking the boxes, choosing only road-tested, safe female candidates for their boards of directors. But another very plausible reason for why corporations choose the same women over and over is that the pool of possible candidates, at least from corporate settings, is small and deemed insufficient. The reason: the pool has not appeared promising, and a principal reason for that has been opting out by well-educated, capable women.
Second, where do directors, especially women directors, come from? Scholars and analysts in the field assume that female directors have come up through the ranks, at the same and at other corporations. My studies show just the opposite. Forty percent or more of the female directors on U.S. Fortune 500 boards “sidestep” onto corporate boards, having spent most of their careers in government, academe, nonprofits, and similar endeavors, not in corporate settings.9 They do not percolate up through the ranks. Why is this so? It may very well be, and probably is, due to the small size of the pool, the pool being potential female board candidates coming up through corporate hierarchies. The sidestepping phenomenon and its prevalence evince, again, the existence of a pool problem, exacerbated by opting out.
Third, if women are not opting out shortly before they reach the cusp of the eligibility range, how do you explain the leaky pipe? No doubt exists that the leaky pipe exists. I personally have heard of no explanation for the phenomenon other than that younger, qualified women are opting out, in great numbers, and not later opting back into corporate management ranks.
Women can take steps themselves that may lessen the slope of the off-ramp and, possibly, decrease the steepness of the on-ramp they may encounter in the future. Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, discussed in chapter 8, suggests just that. With a maternity leave on the horizon, a young woman may view that as the time to cut back and relax on the job. Sandberg’s point is that she should do precisely the opposite. She should “lean in,” if not taking on extra tasks, putting in extra effort in carrying out the responsibilities she does have. In that way, she cements in the minds of bosses and coworkers alike her worth to the enterprise. The regard for her worth will make opting out less a fearsome process and may well carry over, easing any subsequent return.
From her lofty perch, though, Ms. Sandberg develops only one side of the issue. In contrast, a Sandberg critic chimes in from the opposing side: “Plenty of women have leaned in for all they’re worth but still run up against insuperable obstacles created by the combination of unpredictable life circumstances and the rigid inequalities of our workplaces, the lack of a public infrastructure of care, and cultural attitudes that devalue them.”10
As has been seen, one phenomenon that more than any other detracts from building up a pool of capable, experienced female candidates is opting out.11 Young women who enter the employ of companies spend three to five years in entry-level positions and then, after a promotion or two, in sophomore management jobs. Most MBA programs require or prefer to see that kind of real-world experience in applicants. So, after several years in the workforce, the young female manager then takes a leave of absence to pursue an MBA or similar degree. Those programs take two years. She returns to the employer but now at the age of twenty-nine or thirty.
After two or three additional years, she and her spouse decide to have or adopt their first child. Often they earlier had delayed, and then delayed again, the decision to have children. The woman takes a maternity leave but, infused with the joy of such a blessed event, namely, the birth of a child, and preoccupied with the newborn’s needs, delays returning to the workforce. Ultimately, she may decide to postpone any decision on whether to return. Adding to the aura is the special nature of giving birth to and raising a child at a later age. A Princeton graduate with a law degree from Duke who has opted out to tend to two small children states, “This is what I was meant to do. . . . I know it’s very un-p.c., but I like life’s rhythms when I’m nurturing my child.”12
The woman who opts out thus never returns to her former employer or to the workforce at all. Women have received a near-majority of the law degrees and 40 percent or so of the MBA degrees since the late 1970s or early 1980s. But ten and fifteen years later, the number of women still in the workforce and moving into the pool has dwindled. For example, the Harvard Business School survey of women MBAs from the classes of 1981, 1985, and 1991 found that fifteen years after graduation, only 38 percent of the women were still working.13
This has been described as the “leaky pipe phenomenon”: again, a robust flow exists at the intake end of the pipe, but at the pipe’s outflow, or tap, end the flow has ebbed to a mere trickle.14 “One of the misleading impressions [of] the women’s movement is that it swept away women’s traditional lives, like a sandstorm covering artifacts of an ancient civilization. The media constantly remind us of women and how they have become doctors, lawyers,” corporate managers, and company directors.15
One explanation for the dearth of candidates for the pool is that there are many leaks in the pipe. A principal one of these leaks is the decision to opt out.
Companies offer maternity leaves ranging from six to twelve weeks, but the time allowed is patently insufficient, especially for a first child. Some women, if they are able to arrange day-care, may be able to return to work part-time before they have used up the time off allotted them, stretching a ten-week leave to sixteen weeks, for example. But women, and men too, may need extended leaves for a variety of reasons, and not merely childbearing or child-rearing. They “may need to take time off work to care for a seriously ill child, parent, parent-in-law, grandparent, grandchild, sibling’ spouse, [partner], or to bond with a new child entering the family by birth, adoption, or foster child placement.”16
Deloitte, the Big Four accounting firm, surveyed a thousand employees of other firms, and found that 88 percent of the respondents wanted a leave program broader than merely for maternity/paternity and early childcare. A significant number, for example, cited the need to care for an elderly parent. Seventeen percent of Americans over age fourteen, numbering approximately 40 million, are providing unpaid care to another adult, according to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) Public Policy Institute and National Alliance for Care Giving.17 For these reasons, to accommodate more uses, the lexicon and the concept have broadened to family leave rather than merely maternity leave.
Only a few of the family leave programs are mandatory, the product of statutory enactments. Other programs are voluntary policies set in individual corporations. A third category of family leave programs are hybrids that build upon and extend the leave that statutory programs require.
In 2002 California became the first state to enact a mandatory program, effective in 2004, guaranteeing employees six weeks off at partial income. An employee may invoke her right once every twelve months, entitling her to six weeks’ pay (at 55 percent of base pay and capped at $1,129 per week) during her absence from work.18 In addition, under the California Family Rights Act, enacted later, the employee’s position is protected for up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave.
New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Washington have comparable paid leave programs for working parents.19 New York recently adopted a family leave statute.20 The Washington, D.C., leave program would be expansive: requiring sixteen weeks of paid leave for a worker to care for a newborn or a sick family member.21
The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) foreshadowed the California enactment by nine years.22 FMLA gives certain workers the right to twelve weeks unpaid leave, but new workers (less than twelve months’ employment), part-time workers (less than 1,250 hours per year), those deemed executives, workers in smaller enterprises (fewer than fifty employees), and others are exempt, necessitating broader state enactments in some cases.
A cluster of voluntary paid family leave programs exists, in of all places, many companies in the information technology industry. Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook have formal leave programs. At Netflix, employees can have up to a year off for childcare and similar purposes. In 2015 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made headlines and won plaudits after he announced that as CEO, and a new father, he would take a two-month leave to care for his newborn daughter (although the Facebook corporate program is more generous, providing for leaves of up to four months).23
The Facebook program took effect January 1, 2016. Lori Matloff Goler, Facebook’s Global Head of People, resolutely announced that “our approach to benefits at Facebook is to support all employees.”24 IKEA, the Swedish company, adopted a similarly generous four-month paid family leave program, effective January 1, 2017.25 Deloitte Touche’s program is for sixteen weeks of “fully paid leave for a wide range of caregiving, including maternity and paternity leave, eldercare, and aid for other sick family members or partners.”26
Corporations as well as work/life balance specialists see family leave programs as a key tool in hiring and retaining women employees. Along those lines, the financial services firm Credit Suisse Group is using data analytics to carefully track whether its formal family leave policy has had an impact when it comes to hiring and retaining women.
All of the above may mislead. To set the record straight, the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that paid family leave programs cover only 7 percent of private sector workers.27 That statistic would include the 18 million workers covered under the California paid family leave program, thus taking a significant chunk out of the 7 percent statistic as applied outside California. Thus, few U.S. workers have access to paid family leave programs, while governments in many other nations have made paid leave, at least for mothers, mandatory.
By contrast, Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!, delivered a setback to the wave of family leave enactments and adoptions. Ms. Mayer eschewed taking advantage of any corporate leave program, prominently announcing to the world that her maternity leave would be “a few weeks long and I will work right through it.”28 Ms. Mayer reiterated this anti–family leave attitude in anticipation of the birth of her twins, in December 2015: she would take only “a limited time away,” she told the press.29 She further aggravated perceptions of her attitude by causing to be built, proximate to her CEO’s office suite, an in-house day care facility for her first child, in part to facilitate her quick return to the office after childbirth. Unwittingly perhaps, Ms. Mayer’s actions rubbed salt in the wounds of family leave advocates and other women at Yahoo!. They, alone or with their spouses, have to scramble to find off-premises day care for their offspring.
Researching and exploring the opt-out phenomenon, as well as the entire work/life balance that particularly affects women in their careers, is beyond the scope of this work. Analysts offer many solutions, such as increased tolerance for part-time endeavor, flex-time for personnel, de-emphasis on face time and time in the office, less insistence on availability for travel, particularly for employees with younger children, encouragement of job sharing, and more.30 “Designing effective work-family programs [must] assume higher priority. Four out of five women say they need more flexibility at work.”31 “Promising approaches include expanding the number of upper-level positions that are eligible for extended leave.”32
The latter statement highlights an additional problem encountered by women who aspire to higher positions. Corporate employers may deem them ineligible for programs and benefits applicable to lower echelons. If employers do not formally exclude them, “those who take extended leaves or reduced work schedules appear lacking as [potential] leaders. [This] is one of several [more subtle] gender inequalities in career development.”33 Of course, there are those who pooh-pooh all of this and say so. One of the more prominent of those is Jack Welch, longtime and highly successful chief executive officer of General Electric and the acknowledged management guru of the 1990s. To Mr. Welch, “There is no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” Women who take time off “[should see] their chances of reaching the top decline.”34 Fortunately, Mr. Welch’s view is becoming less popular as time goes by.
Three of the more recent overtures, “on-ramps” easing women’s return to the workforce, include alumni programs, welcome back programs, and career customization.
Alumni Programs. Corporations keep track of employees who have taken leaves of absence or have opted out for longer periods. Companies attempt to keep their former junior managers and executives informed about matters at the company, through periodic newsletters and even telephone calls or emails.35 It is a recognition of the value associated with institutional memories and experiences that the hopefully temporarily absentee employee may possess. Further, it is a recognition that a thirty-three- or thirty-four-year working life with a three-year hiatus and perhaps a later one-year leave (say, when the first child is beginning school) is not dissimilar from the thirty-seven-year work span that has been the norm. The former employee, kept somewhat in the fold by an alumni program, will not regard the employer as so distant and the gulf to be navigated in order to return as so vast.
Welcome Back Programs. Enlightened corporations have instituted these programs as well, for much the same reason. Many former employees who wish to return to the workforce, most of them women, fear resentment and opprobrium from those who have remained on the job, pursuing a linear career path, with more or less continuous service. The times have changed, though, at least in some quarters.
For many persons in the workforce, absences taken to rear children are not permanent. “It’s not black and white; it’s gray. You’re working. Then you’re not working. Then maybe you’re working part time or consulting. . . . Childbearing and child rearing are merely chapters; they’re not whole books.”36
Returning to employment is a front-burner issue in the work/life debate: how liberal will employers be in permitting women to return to the workforce, especially without significant losses in seniority, job status, and salary levels? How will supervisors and coworkers regard and treat the returnees? A consortium of tech companies—IBM, Google, Apple, LinkedIn (Microsoft)—have started and funded an eight-week program for women returning to the industry. The “Reboot Career Accelerator for Women” is an eight-week course that teaches, or refreshes, skills such as design thinking, cloud applications, and personal branding.37
Part of the on-ramps answer also lies in the team-production and collaborative nature of work in many companies. Managers and subordinates move from team to team, with higher-ups assembling ad hoc task forces to address the matters at hand. The upward linear progression in employment is a thing of the past. “People are more likely to move from project to project, rewarded for each accomplishment, like professionals.”38 A strategy is to “design work around discrete projects and to allow people to decide how much to take on.”39 This creates a dynamic very different from the hierarchical atmospheres, with unwavering chains of command, that used to dominate in many companies.
Career Customization Initiatives. One advocate argues that “more organizations should follow the lead of those that have established ‘career customization’ which enables individuals to dial back (or dial up) their commitments without penalty.” Career customization is an important subtext to the need for organizations “to rethink expectations of 24/7 availability for everyone on the career track.”40 It is somewhat counterintuitive that accounting, “a profession scarcely indifferent to the bottom line, has led the way in allowing flexible work arrangements, largely to benefit women.” In addition to career customization, “KPMG [for example] offers compressed work weeks, flexible hours, telecommuting, job sharing and reduced workloads.”41
“Deloitte Touche’s Mass Career Customization [program] allows individuals to work less, work from different places, and shoulder less responsibility to accommodate caretaking commitments.”42 In fact, the national accounting firms have implemented many steps and programs to ease the pathway, the off-ramps and the on-ramps for women and for female advancement in their organizations. In doing so, the accounting firms have come from far back in the pack, at a time and place when their treatment of women was dismal, to a position of leadership today. Chapter 19 recounts that leap forward in greater detail.43
Paying close attention to the pool problem thus necessitates sensitivity toward and thoughtful actions and policies aimed at ameliorating or solving work/life balance issues. Alumni and welcome back programs, family leave, and career customization are only several of the many initiatives enlightened corporations could adopt. Attention to off-ramp and on-ramp issues must percolate upward, affecting the entire organization. Board members and senior managers should “insist upon diverse slates of candidates for any opening,” including in the pool of employees who have left and then opted back into the organization.44 Such insistence would aid in enlarging the pool and smoothing out off-ramps and on-ramps.
As Deborah Rhode puts it, “It is not enough for leaders to proclaim their [generalized] commitment to equal opportunity; they also need a corresponding commitment to the policies, programs and reward structures that will encourage it. To that end, organizations should set goals and targets to hold top management accountable in compensation and advancement.”45
By the same token, however, in the end corporations should avoid mindless wheel spinning. Taking inspiration from Nike’s advertisements, they should “Just Do It.”