Will Gender Equity happen because of Millennial Professionals?

There has been much written about Millennials and the impact they are bound to have on the workforce in the next decade.

Many senior women have talked to us at theglasshammer.com about the challenges of understanding and motivating younger team members. Since there have been academic and anecdotal studies noting the differences in approaches to work between the generations, it is easy to see that our readers are not alone in their experience.

Managers and leaders want to meet the needs of this group, and more importantly, to ensure that talented team members are allowed to shine. Firms are also keen to understand how the influx of these work group members will change the organizational culture.

Dennis Finn, Vice Chair and Global Human Capital Leader at PwC, upon release of their study called Next Gen; A global and generational study, said, “The Millennial generation is already transforming long-held management practices within the workplace. Employers who want to recruit Millennial employees, and keep them engaged will need to adapt to meet their needs.”

So, with the rise of Millennials in the workforce, how can you manage them better?

It seems that the resounding factor to consider is to provide these team members with a sense of purpose.

Don’t we all want that?

It is also useful to look at what benefits will be accrued to everyone in the team from the cultural shift their generation is providing.

Benefit One: Gender Equity

It is possible that due to a reduction in women and men playing out traditional gender roles as predicted by Winograd and Hais in their book Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation Is Remaking America that we will see structural and systemic benefits for all women in the workplace.

These authors claim that gender neutrality, or the lack of traditional gender roles, will be one of the Millennials’ greatest impacts on American society. They write, “As men and women enter the workforce on equal footing, this generation’s belief in gender neutrality will force major changes in our laws governing the work place and its family life.” The authors cite a $5 million federal allocation in FY14 for the support of a State Paid Leave Fund as evidence of how millennial values have begun to change America’s workplace. The state program, already in effect in New Jersey and California, expands on the Family and Medical Leave Act to grant pay in addition to time-off for employees faced with extraordinary demands on their personal lives, such as birth, death and long term illness.

Benefit Two: Flexibility

The biggest challenge revealed by PwC in their study was that Millennials lacked interest in the traditional leadership pathway for professional careers, whereby they are expected to put in an “intense work commitment” early on, and be rewarded with partnership later. 71% of PwC Millennials, compared with 63 percent of PwC non-Millennials, say that work interferes with their personal lives. PwC suggests that employers work to incorporate more flexibility into scheduling.

“If they were able to make their current job more flexible, 64% of Millennials would like to occasionally work from home, and 66% of Millennials would like to shift their work hours,” the report says. “Across the board, 15% of male employees and 21% of female employees say they would give up some of their pay and slow the pace of promotion in exchange for working fewer hours.”

This study is looking at professional services which is known for long hours and many weeks per year as a road warrior, but it is possible that other generations and people in other industries to feel the same way. In fact, cultural shifts are happening in other intense jobs with a traditional expectation of extensive overtime. Goldman Sachs is pioneering these changes by reducing weekend work hours for juniors.

The jury is still out as to whether or not Generation Y, the Millennials, are going to make good on their ideals. Recent reports from NPR support the idea that they are gender neutral. Forbes, on the other hand, reports that early polls of the way gender roles are playing out in their lives show little difference from the traditions of the generations that came before them. The work preferences described by PwC’s research—equity of pay, transparency, and flexibility–certainly would bring about a work world that allowed for the ideals of shared domestic responsibility and gender parity throughout all levels of corporate America to take hold, but change happens slowly.

For now, we do know that the Millennials are a rising force in the workplace, and we need to be ready for them.

By Rebecca S. Caum