2012-08-30 11:54:25
rlp
Aug 25th 2012 | from the print edition
IN BORGEN , a Danish television drama, the country s first female prime
minister returns home late each night to domestic bliss. Her stay-at-home
husband stacks the dishes and massages her back. The children cheer her
televised speeches. But before long her son is seeing a shrink, the neglected
hubby is having an affair and our heroine is throwing furniture around her
office.
Rarely has there been so much angst about women reaching the top. In the
Atlantic magazine last month, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first female director
of policy planning at America s State Department, declared that women cannot
successfully combine a super-demanding job with bringing up young children.
(She quit Washington, DC, to return to academia.) This month a British member
of Parliament, Louise Mensch, resigned, saying it was too hard to juggle job
and family. Yet the news is not all grim. In July Yahoo!, a struggling internet
firm, picked a 37-year-old from Google, Marissa Mayer, who is expecting a baby
in October, as its new boss.
America s biggest companies hire women to fill just over half of entry-level
professional jobs. But those women fail to advance proportionally: they occupy
only 28% of senior managerial posts, 14% of seats on executive committees and
just 3% of chief-executive roles, according to McKinsey & Company, a
consultancy. The figures are worse still at big European firms, which is
perhaps why the governments of Belgium, France, Italy and Norway have set
quotas for women on boards. The European Commission is threatening to impose
such rules across the EU. It would be better if women could rise naturally to
senior executive roles rather than being forced on to boards. But how can this
be done when everything tried so far seems to have failed?
Several factors hold women back at work. Too few study science, engineering,
computing or maths. Too few push hard for promotion. Some old-fashioned sexism
persists, even in hip, liberal industries. But the biggest obstacle (at least
in most rich countries) is children. However organised you are, it is hard to
combine family responsibilities with the ultra-long working hours and the
anytime, anywhere culture of senior corporate jobs. A McKinsey study in 2010
found that both women and men agreed: it is tough for women to climb the
corporate ladder with teeth clamped around their ankles. Another McKinsey study
in 2007 revealed that 54% of the senior women executives surveyed were
childless compared with 29% of the men (and a third were single, nearly double
the proportion of partnerless men).
Many talented, highly educated women respond by moving into less demanding
fields where the hours are more flexible, such as human resources or public
relations. Some go part-time or drop out of the workforce entirely. Relatively
few stay in the most hard-driving jobs, such as strategy, finance, sales and
operations, that provide the best path to the top.
Consider this example. Schumpeter sat down with a mergers-and-acquisitions
lawyer who says that, before starting a family, she was prepared to give blood
to meet deadlines. After the anklebiters appeared, she took a job in
corporate strategy at an engineering firm in Paris. She found it infuriating.
Her male colleagues wasted time during the day taking long lunches, gossiping
over caf au lait but stayed late every evening. She packed her work into fewer
hours, but because she did not put in enough face time the firm felt she
lacked commitment. She soon quit. Companies that furrow their brows wondering
how to stop talented women leaving should pay heed.
Could corporate culture change? In their book Future Work , Alison Maitland
and Peter Thomson describe how some firms give staff more flexibility. Not just
women, but men and generation Y recruits, say the authors, are pushing for a
saner working culture. Unilever, a consumer-goods firm, wants 55% of its senior
managers to be women by 2015. To that end, it allows employees to work anywhere
and for as few hours as they like, so long as they get the job done. Despite
being one of the world s most global firms, it discourages travel. McKinsey
lets both female and male consultants work for as little as three days a week
for proportionally less pay and still have a shot at making partner. Sheryl
Sandberg, Facebook s high-profile chief operating officer, says that she has
left the office at 5.30pm ever since she started a family in 2005.
Such examples are rare. For most big jobs, there is no avoiding mad hours and
lots of travel. Customers do not care about your daughter s flute recital.
Putting women in the C-suite is important for firms, but not as important as
making profits; for without profits a company will die. So bosses should try
hard to accommodate their employees family responsibilities, but only in ways
that do not harm the bottom line. Laurence Monnery of Egon Zehnder
International, an executive-search firm, reckons that companies should stop
penalising people who at some point in their careers have gone part-time.
Better be good
All the flexitime in the world is unlikely to yield equal numbers of men and
women in the most demanding jobs. Ms Mayer of Yahoo! is an inspiration to many,
but a hard act to follow. She boasts of putting in 90-hour weeks at Google. She
believes that burn-out is for wimps. She says that she will take two weeks
maternity leave and work throughout it. If she can turn around the internet s
biggest basket case while dandling a newborn on her knee it will be the
greatest triumph for working women since winning the right to wear trousers to
the office (which did not happen until 1994 in California). To adapt Malia
Obama s warning to her father on his inauguration, the first pregnant boss of a
big, well-known American company had better be good.