Tag Archive for: gender equality

The Gender Pay Gap

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This month we celebrate Equal Pay Day. Take a look at these informative Pay Gap articles previously published on theglasshammer.

This week we hit “Equal Pay Day” on Tuesday, a day which symbolizes the extra days women must work to make the same salary as her male peers did last year. According to the Demystifying The Gender Pay Gap survey by Glassdoor, the biggest myth about the gender pay gap is that it doesn’t exist at all, as 7 in 10 employees across seven countries assumed men and women received the same pay for the same work. But even when narrowed down to an apples-to-apples comparison within companies, researchers found a significant gender gap exists.

Closing the investment gap for women as well as the better- documented pay gap needs to happen. What is the investment gap? And why are most women, even highly paid professional women still missing out? Sallie Krawcheck just wrote a post about the cost of not realizing what we are missing financially by not investing properly on LinkedIn.

money money moneyYou don’t need to work in a male dominated occupation to find your pay check weighs light relative to your male colleagues – particularly, if you’re in business.

In March 2015, the US Census Bureau released the latest pay statistics from 2013, including median earnings by detailed occupation, showing that full-time working women earn 78.8% of what full-time working men do. The census data revealed that across 342 occupations, women (barely) out-earn men in only nine.

Narrow the Hidden Executive Pay Gap Starting Now

Woman-on-a-ladder-searchingWomen reaching for the top rungs of the executive ladder will want to watch for the hidden pay gap. As Bloomberg writes, “Even top female workers can’t catch a break when it comes to pay inequality.”

As women move to senior ranks, the gender pay gap widens. Your best career management play? Begin closing it now.

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Do women want to be CEO? Or is their goal thwarted by incongruous perceptions?

business-race-women-and-men-in-officeWhat is stopping women from reaching the highest echelons of management and leadership in the corporate world? Is it about systemic barriers preventing females from advancing?

Yes, in part, as there are visible and less visible organizational mechanisms that can prevent women from excelling based solely on the fact that they are women. An example of this is the performance review research that we explore in this article. There is also a misunderstanding of what power is and how it can encumber a woman’s pursuit of leadership more than it would for a male colleague. Do women simply not understand the rewards? Are we told not to expect them as quickly or ever? Is the unlevel playing field too exhausting? Or do we simply not want it enough?

Systemic Hinderances – Bias in the Humans Means Bias in the System

A study by Kieran Synder produced some interesting findings. It was based on 248 reviews that she gathered from 180 people— 105 men and 75 women. The reviews came from 28 different companies and included large technology corporations, mid-size companies, and smaller environments. Snyder’s objective was to determine the correlation between gender and negative feedback. Corporate evaluations of this type are generally considered a platform for constructive criticism that can help a professional grow and become more productive. But how “constructive” is a biased assessment? Snyder’s study revealed that reviews for women were far more likely to contain acrimonious evaluations and caustic notes about personality flaws. While both men and women were given suggestions that could be considered constructive, it was primarily women who were told to change their ways. The findings were the same whether the reviewing manager was male or female.

Snyder details 83 critical reviews received by men. Only 2 had comments about the professional’s personality. However, the 94 critical reviews of female professionals contained 71 negative personality comments. The upshot of the findings is that while 76% of the females had been assigned traits by their assessor that were perceived as “personality flaws” those same traits were ignored (and possibly seen as a positive) in male counterparts since only 2.4% of males “personality” were even commented on in the reviews.

What Women Want

Melinda Marshall is the co-author of the report, from the Center of Talent Innovation, “Women Want Five Things.” Her extensive research on women in the 35-50 age range revealed a dip in their aspiration for more power despite the key finding that it is power that enables women to achieve what they want.

There is an incongruous perception amongst women who are at the peak of their careers regarding power. Their viewpoint is that the burden of an authoritative position outweighs the benefits. This perspective is shared by 60% of the women surveyed in the U.S., 65 % of women in the U.K., and 49% of women in Germany.

It is not that they lack proper ambition and qualification. Rather, it is that these women do not see executive roles as a viable means of achieving what they are really after: “the ability to flourish, a way of reaching for meaning and purpose, and the desire to excel, empower others, and be empowered.”

Though corporate goals for both genders are similar, the motivation among female professionals is waning. They simply cannot see how the value of having a top position warrants the struggle necessary to reach and maintain it.

Marshall concluded that “Sometimes women do not have clear goals, early mentorship and sponsorship by women leaders who can make a difference.” By making an effort to single out promising women and encouraging early positive dialogue, corporations can aid in developing female executive talent before aspiration begins to dwindle.

In addition to identifying the value proposition of women with leadership potential, Women Want Five Things contrasts the “realities” of holding a powerful position with the “female expectations” of having a powerful position. Instead of regarding power as something that will hold them back from reaching their five point value proposition, women can begin to view leadership as a positive force that can help them achieve their goals. Marshall explains the equivocation many females have about attaining power. They may hear and focus on the guilt a female leader experiences after having made personal sacrifices, and they conclude that reaching for the top is simply not worth the effort. However, when women are able to see that their value proposition will be fulfilled with a position of power, they are compelled to strive for success.

Nicki Gilmour, organizational psychologist and CEO of theglasshammer.com comments “Power and authority dynamics are at the very heart of the diversity question. Women and men often have similar corporate goals, and it is rarely discussed that men should be anything else but successful at work which is a huge disservice to both sexes since some men just like some women just aren’t that ambitious. It is, however, but the constant scrutiny of female executives’ behavior along with the systemic hindrances that are built into the system historically that continues to define what leadership traits look like. The incongruence lies here not with the individual’s desire for power since with every other message women are given throughout their life on how to be is very misaligned with traditional ideas of how an executive should act, therefore being it less appealing.”

By Kathleen Delaney

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Mansplaining: It’s Time to Interrupt

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Business meeting with women and menMansplaining. If you’ve lived and breathed in this world as a woman, you’ve experienced it. If you work in a male-dominated office, it might be served up as a daily side with your coffee.

Recently, Chicago Tribune workplace columnist Rex Huppke declared: “Mansplaining — whether you like the term or not — is real. That’s not up for debate.”

Huppke called it “a slow drip of sexism”. How much is your office environment dripping with it?

What is Mansplaining, exactly?

In The Salon, Benjamin Hart argued that the term “mansplaining” lost its potency, as well as its real utility within gender dynamics discussions, when it became popularly used and broadly defined as a man explaining something to a women in a condescending or patronizing manner.

Hart asserts it’s morphed into an “increasingly vague catchall expression” of “men saying things to, or about, women.”

“Mansplain” is thrown about liberally. Jimmy Kimmel mansplained speech coaching to Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The Financial Times recently referred to the EU referendum in the UK as at risk of becoming a “giant exercise in ‘mansplaining’”, due to media domination by male voices. Women called for Trump to mansplain his Clinton “women card” accusation. Even a collection of mansplaining moments shows a diversity of takes on what it is.

Merriam Webster takes a hard line on its specific definition: “when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he’s talking to does.”

Other than a sinking feeling in your stomach and increasing desire to find a conversational back door, what are the tell-tale signs of mansplaining?

1) It feels like a “manologue”

One sure-fire sign you’re being mansplained to: you’re not speaking or discussing. Instead, you are being spoken at or spoken over, often for a frustrating duration of time.

Mansplaining carries a trademark air of wisdom-wielding, knowledge-imparting, and time-taking. You may also have the feeling of being verbally cut-across.

Mansplaining, in a two-step conversational dominance maneuver, often follows immediately after manterruption – “unnecessary interruption of a woman by a man”.

A 2014 informal experiment by empirical linguist Kieran Snyder in a tech workplace found that in conversations of four or more, men interrupted at twice the rate women did, and were three times more likely to interrupt women than men. (Women interrupt women, too.)

Dr. Arin N. Reeves also conducted an observational study across 41 hours of meetings, calls, and panel discussions. Not only did Reeves observe that men interrupt far more, but also that 89.3% of men’s interruptions of women (and only 42.6% of men’s interruptions of men) were intrusive interruptions – “intentionally or unintentionally usurping the speaker’s turn at talk with the intent of ceasing the speaker’s ability to finish organically.”

Women were most commonly intrusively manterrupted on panel discussions, although men weren’t “aware” of doing it. Less than 1/5th of all women’s interruptions of anyone were intrusive.

2) It wasn’t solicited

Mansplaining is not a direct question followed by a direct explanatory answer. That’s just explaining.

Mansplaining is more of an unsolicited espousing of lengthy information and proffered opinions, which seeks to ensnare you in its immanent glow of intelligence, and which may or may not follow a question.

In the Chicago Tribune article, Elly Shariat, founder and CEO of shariatPR, tells of a former boss who pulled her aside to advise on the health implications of her shoe choices, for example.

3) Major assumptions are at play

The biggest thing about mansplaining is that it’s based on a culturally embedded assumption. At the core, men often assume they know more or better than women, and culture mirrors this.

Although she didn’t coin the word itself, mansplaining’s popular origin is attributed to Rebecca Solnit’s 2008 essay entitled “Men Explain Things to Me”, in which she tells about a cocktail party experience where a man asked her a question about her writing and then interrupted her to tell her at length about a very important book that she should read – which turned out to be her book, and he hadn’t even read it, just the review.

Solnit wrote, “Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field, that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”

What can we do about it?

No matter how narrowly or broadly you define it, mansplaining reinforces a power imbalance. It reinforces the male domination of meeting conversations and rewarding of men for talking more.

Here’s a thought: interrupting mansplaining might be a necessary, career-building skill.

In her experiment, Snyder found that women interrupt less and very rarely interrupt men (only 13% of the time). But which women were entirely responsible for that 13% of interrupting men? The only three senior women in the study – who all interrupted men (as well as women). In fact, these women were three of the four biggest interruptors in the study.

Snyder wrote, “The results suggest that women don’t advance in their careers beyond a certain point without learning to interrupt, at least in this male-dominated tech setting.”

The most empowering thing women can do when faced with mansplaining?

Put acquiescence away. Interrupt this nonsense, and be heard.

By Aimee Hansen

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How Digital Could Deliver Workplace Gender Equality in 25 Years

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By Aimee Hansen

Women-on-computerAn increasingly digital workplace may have brought debatable impacts such as the 24/7 work week and scattered listening, but according to Accenture’s latest findings, it also has the potential to bring global workplace gender equality a lot closer to reality.

Earlier this month, we wrote about how the United Nation’s International Women’s Day 2016 effort emphasized accelerating gender equality. A new report from Accenture entitled “Getting to Equal: How Digital is Helping Close the Gender Gap at Work,” asserts that digital is a key factor in accelerating gender equality in the workplace.

Accenture’s report finds that doubling the pace of “digital fluency” among women could double the speed of gender equality at work.

Rather than waiting until 2065, doubling the pace at which women become frequent users of technology would bring workplace gender equality in developed nations by 2040.

Rather than waiting until 2100, workplace gender equality could be brought forward in developing nations by 2060.

The Relationship Between Digital Fluency and Gender Equality

Accenture’s report comes as global talent shortages are being highlighted by the World Economic Forum as well as Manpower Group, while women remain an underrepresented presence that could become part of an evolving and flexible workforce increasingly enabled via technology.

Combining survey data (nearly 5,000 men and women in 31 countries) with published data on digital usage by country to create an econometric model, Accenture analyzed the effect of digital fluency on gender equality throughout the career cycle for an individual. Researchers also looked at the relationship between gender equality and digital fluency across nations.

In their report, digital fluency was correlated with women’s career achievement. The U.S., Netherlands, UK, and Nordic countries have both the highest digital fluency and rank among the top performers in workplace equality.

Large gender gaps in digital fluency exist in Japan, Singapore, France, and Switzerland, and closing them would increase gender equality in the workplace.

In countries like India and Indonesia, generally low levels of digital fluency, and gender gaps within them, are holding back women’s progress.

Nations like Saudi Arabia and Japan illustrate that digital fluency is not the only factor at work, since deep-seated cultural factors also hold gender gaps wider than expected based on the model.

Though it may be argued that over time digital, and its ability to amplify the voices that are so often disenfranchised, could play into challenging the cultural factors that disempower women.

Digital Fluency as an Accelerant, Especially For Women

Accenture concludes that digital skills are helping to narrow the workplace gender gap and level the playing field and that digital fluency acts as an accelerant in every stage of a woman’s career from education and employment to advancement because technology removes many of the barriers that prevent women from working more flexibly. Digital fluency helps men and women but the
the researchers of the report found that being digitally fluent held even stronger positive effects for women than for men.

Accelerating Education

The report showed that when men and women have the same level of digital fluency, women have achieved a higher rate of education.

Women are not simply becoming better educated than they were before. They’ve become better educated than men in 16 of the 31 countries.

Digital fluency played the greatest role in enabling women to access education in developing nations – with 68% of women saying Internet was important to their education (versus 44% in developed nations).

Accelerating Employment

Digital fluency allows for more flexibility in the workplace, which is helping to close the employment gap between men and women in many countries, as more women are more able to find and participate in work.

The report found that “While men and women alike are liberated by the balance that work flexibility affords, women appear to derive greater value from it.”

In the survey, 72% of women (and 68% of men) said that women’s employment opportunities increase as digital fluency increases, with nearly half of women reporting they used digital to access job opportunities and work from home.

Accelerating Advancement

While digital fluency also proved to help accelerate women’s career advancement, the relationship was less significant. The report found that “while digital fluency is having a positive impact on pay for both men and women, the gap in pay between genders is still not closing.”

What is changing is the expectations that it’s possible to close the gap within a foreseeable future, as nearly 60% of Millennial women aspire to be in leadership positions and feel skilled for it, and nearly 3/4 of respondents agreed “the digital world will empower our daughters.” Mind you, those digitally native daughters with better education than their male peers and expanded access to work of many forms across many countries.

According to Julie Sweet, Accenture’s group chief executive for North America, “This is a powerful message for all women and girls. Continuously developing and growing your ability to use digital technologies, both at home and in the workplace, has a clear and positive effect at every stage of your career.And it provides a distinct advantage, as businesses and governments seek to fill the jobs that support today’s growing economy.”

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Why Talk is Expensive When it Comes to Boardroom Diversity

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Business meetingIf you’re tired of seeing headlines about the financial advantages and growth opportunities that women executives in the boardroom could deliver to businesses, maybe it’s time we flip that conversation on its head.

As much as highlighting the potential that companies could realize if only women were in the decision room, recent findings quantify the tremendous losses that companies are bleeding right now by their absence. The lack of women in boardrooms and executive positions is, plain and simple, being identified as self-sabotage for organizations.

Male-Only Executive Boards Create an Opportunity Cost

Recent research by Grant-Thorton has revealed that the opportunity cost for companies with male-only executive committees in the S&P 500, FTSE 350, and CNX 200 across the US, UK, and India was a whopping US$655 billion in 2014, and US $567 billion in the US alone, or 3% of GDP. The loss results from lower return on assets.

It turns out that talk is not cheap. When it comes to gender diversity at the executive level, talk alone is very expensive. (As is “action” that is PR-strong but falls short of robust follow through on outcomes.)

Only 35 of US S&P 500 companies have at least one woman executive in the boardroom (a far lower ratio than UK or India), but those companies with female executive presence on the board outperformed the all-male executive majority by 1.91%.

Francesca Lagerbeg, global leader for tax services at Grant Thornton said that corporate culture “kick(s) the can down the road” when it comes to board diversity not because they don’t know it’s necessary, but out of short-term fears of what it takes to implement real change.

“These companies are suffering now,” Lagerbeg says. “A lack of action now will make it all the more difficult to respond in the future when both problems are likely to be more acute.”

Executive Women in the Boardroom Equal Better Decisions

What’s noteworthy about this study is it hones in specifically on the presence of at least one female executive within the boardroom, holding female non-executives aside, as plumping up boardroom statistics mostly with female non-execs (UK) still leads to power imbalances on decisions.

“The research clearly shows what we have been talking about for a while: that diversity leads to better decision-making,” said Lagerbeg. “We only looked at listed companies in three markets and the figures are compelling. Now imagine extrapolating the results for all companies globally.”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently asserted that more women on the boards of financial institutions leads to stability. Iterating opportunity cost, the IMF report states, “Women’s financial exclusion limits the growth-promoting potential of finance and it may also prove costly in terms of lower financial stability.” The authors wrote “…on average, stability is significantly higher in banks with a higher fraction of women in the board of directors.”

Research has also demonstrated that companies with a compelling track record of promoting female executives consistently perform better across 18 measures of profitability.

Despite This, Gender Parity Is A Long Way Off

It’s contrary to the nature of businesses not to evolve when compromised operational strategies lead to loss, but that’s happening on a macro level.

It will take 28 years to achieve gender parity in the boardroom at the present rate of change and that’s not even specific to executive seats.

Forbes contributor Sabina Nawaz asserts that real change will take more than current low levels of consistent jogging towards an abstract goal. Nawaz argues it takes real intensity, including: honest assessments of the presence of women in leadership roles, programs to meet quantifiable metrics by a determined date, and transparently published results. But too many companies are still talking and denying instead of committing.

What If You Don’t Want to Wait?

What about women who want a board seat and don’t want to wait until 2042 before it might be fair game? What about women who don’t want to wait for their company to catch up to the business impact of her voice?

Slow progress is not the same as no progress. This year, there are 11 women executives that are new to Fortune’s 2015 list of Most Powerful Women. Women are gaining ground on leadership positions within boards as well as representation on the committees that select new members.

Just because many companies are self-sabotaging their growth does not mean you have to do the same. If you want a board seat, beginning to make your bid is far better than biding your time until it’s easier to do so.

Forge Your Connections

Develop your connections to existing board members and seek sponsors. The recommendation of board members is the strongest factor in new member selection. If you don’t know the board, it’s unlikely they know you. Take the risk of going beyond your comfort zone with connections.

Be Visible

Janice Ellig, chair of the Corporate Board Initiative of the Women’s Forum of New York, recommends to “pat yourself on the back in a very visible and confident way.” Ellig advises women to “value their ambition” and “stand up and make it known” that you want a CEO or board position.

Actively Seek

Jan Babiak suggests that since 70% of board roles are attained through existing board/management networks, it’s important to cast wide. Connect with high-level professionals outside of your immediate field of work because opportunities may be found where you’re not looking.

All in all, it’s a wake up call to companies: Waiting for gender executive diversity to get easier? It’s a strategy that is costing you.

By Aimee Hansen

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Is Temporal Flexibility Key to Closing The Gender Pay Gap?

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money money moneyYou don’t need to work in a male dominated occupation to find your pay check weighs light relative to your male colleagues – particularly, if you’re in business.

In March 2015, the US Census Bureau released the latest pay statistics from 2013, including median earnings by detailed occupation, showing that full-time working women earn 78.8% of what full-time working men do. The census data revealed that across 342 occupations, women (barely) out-earn men in only nine.

Across the nine, the female pay advantage is “nearly inconsequential,” ranging from .2% (counselers, dishwashers) to 6.2% (producers and directors), with a margin for error that could wipe the gap. Yet a very significant pay gap (advantage: male) persists across most professions, even when women are prevalent in them.

Data on relevant occupations illustrates the point:
Occupation % in occupation who are women Women’s earnings as a % of men’s earnings
Securities, commodities, & financial services sales agents  30%  55%
Financial specialists, all other  55%  60%
Personal financial advisors  31%  61%
Financial clerks, all other  61%  62%
Financial analysts  32%  63%
Financial managers  54%  64%
Market research analysts and marketing specialists 56%  75%
Accountants and Auditors  59%  75%
CEOs  23%  76%
Compensation, benefits, & job analysis specialists  74%  78%

Source: Drawn from US Census Bureau, 2013 American Community Survey

While frustrating gaps in occupations that are historically male-gendered (eg CEOS, financial analysts, securities) may come as less of a surprise, the gap within female skewed jobs (financial clerks, marketing, accounting) underlines that closing the gender pay gap takes more than female representation.

Are men just more valued? Nancy F. Clark of Forbes WomensMedia writes that when men move into female dominated occupations such as nursing, the overall pay of that occupation and level of tasks included in the job remit begins to improve. If appears that when men enter an occupation, its value goes up.

But, what’s going on in finance and business?

Gender Penalties Are Bigger in Business Jobs

Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard, found in her research that when it comes to explaining the majority of the residual gender pay gap, “what happens within each occupation is far more important than the occupations in which women wind up.”

Among high-earning occupations, Goldin found those grouped as “business” have the biggest gender pay “penalty” for “being a woman relative to a man of equal education and age, given hours and weeks of work” whereas “science” and “technology” occupations have the smallest ones.

Census Bureau data shows that women make up only 24% of “computer, engineering and science occupations” and earn 83% as much as men. Women make up 54% of “business and financial operations occupations” but earn only 75% as much as men.

Non-Linear Earnings Are Penalizing Women

“Quite simply the (residual) gap exists because hours of work in many occupations are worth more when given at particular moments and when the hours are more continuous,” writes Goldin.

In many occupations, earnings “have a nonlinear relationship with respect to hours” – for example, a 70 hour week is rewarded in well over double the earnings of a 35 hour week and working 9-11 am counts much more than working 9-11 pm.

It’s less a matter of whether women take time off work to have children or seek flexible hours. It’s whether they are disproportionately penalized for the time they are absent from the office or for working their hours outside of the standard work day.

“Some occupations have high penalties for even small amounts of time out of the labor force and have nonlinear earnings with respect to hours worked,” Goldin writes, and then the gender pay gap is bigger. “Other occupations, however, have small penalties for time out and almost linear earnings with respect to hours worked.”

In previous research, Goldin and Katz quantified the occupational difference in pay penalty among Harvard 1990 graduates. They found that a similar 10 percent hiatus in employment 15 years after receiving their BA (18 months break) meant a decrease of earnings of 41% for MBAs, 29% for JDs or PhDs, and 15% for MDs.

Reduction in earnings as a result of time-off “was linear in lost experience” for MDs, but highly nonlinear for MBAs. “Any time off for MBAs is heavily penalized,” reports Goldin.

Remuneration penalties can result in women going to a different occupation, shifting down within the occupation hierarchy, or being out of work. The research found that when part-time work is largely available, women take off less time (eg pharmacists). Because it’s less available in business, women end up taking off more time even with higher penalties.

Goldin writes, “A flexible schedule often comes at a high price, particularly in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds.”

Closing the Gap

Goldin suggests that the last chapter to achieve gender equality involves “changing how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility.”

She found that certain contextual factors close the gender pay gap, such as when colleagues can more easily be substituted for each other and when information can easily and cheaply be relayed between colleagues.

Forbes contributor Clark advises to get the ball rolling on arranging temporal flexibility before you need it – anticipating and addressing the issues that need to be overcome.

How committed is your firm to making temporal flexibility work for women and for the company itself? What evidence do you see? Firms that are serious about gender equality will be proactive in making it work – and add up – for both.

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You Can Be the CEO, It Just Takes Longer as a Woman

group of business women - career-adviceIn the good/bad old days, if someone wanted to climb the ranks of a company, they did so through hard work and loyalty. Take whatever job you can get, work hard and get promoted on your merit. Despite trends since the late 1970’s when the MBA started to become an assumed pre-requisite for entry to upper management and the modern axiom of bouncing between firms, a recent study conducted by the Harvard Business Review shows that women are achieving entry to the upper echelons of senior management by tenured climb inside one firm as opposed to lateral hire.

Read more

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Tech’s Gender Gap Should Surprise No One

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bottom lineRecently, tech-news website The Verge published a report on diversity at at the U.S.’s biggest technology companies. In data scraped from Equal Employment Opportunity reports filed with the government, the article revealed official stats on workforce diversity at Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, and Twitter.

The numbers weren’t assuring. While women made up 47% of the U.S. workforce in 2014, the seven big, publicly traded tech companies that The Verge tracked only averaged 29% female. Amazon had the highest share of women workers at 37%, while Microsoft came in with the lowest share of women workers at 24%.

The share of women in leadership roles was even more stark. On average, at the seven companies studied, only 18% of executives and senior managers were women. The company with the highest percentage of female leaders was Facebook, at 23%, while Microsoft had the lowest percentage at 13%.

These are embarrassing numbers (and just as embarrassing were the statistics on racial and ethnic diversity – on average, only 21% of leaders at these companies weren’t white). But they shouldn’t come as a surprise. Researchers have long identified the problems behind the lack of diversity in the technology industry.

What is surprising, though, is how clearly defined the solutions to these problems are. Women keep leaving the industry; we know why; we know how to fix it. Yet the gap persists. A recent report by Catalyst identified several concrete reasons high potential women in tech leave for greener pastures and what these companies can do about it.

The technology industry purports to create innovative solutions to the world’s toughest problems. Perhaps it’s time for industry leaders to shift their gaze toward their own ranks, and implement the solutions experts have crafted to solve one of tech’s toughest problems: the workforce gender gap.

Leaky Pipeline

Tech companies like to tout their work to develop the “pipeline” of women into the industry, sponsoring programs designed to get girls and young women interested in STEM fields. This work is important and laudable. But an early lack of interest in science and technology isn’t the only reason for the low rate of women leaders working now in the industry.

The diversity benchmarking and solutions organization Catalyst says high potential women actively seek to leave the industry. According to Catalyst, women who took business jobs in the tech industry after earning an MBA were more likely than men to leave for another industry (women, 53%; men, 31%). And women who started in business roles in other industries were less likely than men to migrate to the tech industry (women, 9%; men, 13%).

Male MBAs who left the tech industry were more likely than women to say they changed jobs for greater opportunities (men, 67%; women, 52%), while women MBAs were more likely to say the left for personal reasons (women, 21%; men, 12%).

“Organizations invest tremendous resources to attract high potentials, and if that talent walks out the door—for any reason—it is incredibly costly for the company. Not only has that talent taken their skills and training elsewhere, but new employees have to be recruited and trained,” writes report author Anna Beninger, director of research at Catalyst.

The attrition problems are well documented, and so are the reasons behind them. Catalyst says women regularly start in lower level positions in the tech industry than men after earning MBAs. That means they also start at lower salaries from day one, a pay gap that persists over time.

In the study, high potential women MBAs in tech said they faced unclear requirements for evaluation and advancement, while men said their goals were clear. High potential women MBAs in tech said they had fewer role models than men, and vastly fewer said they felt similar to their coworkers than men did.

“Feeling like an outsider relative to their coworkers affects their access to development opportunities, sponsorship, and ultimately their aspirations to the top,” Beninger writes.

“Given the dearth of women in tech-intensive industries, including those in business roles, it is crucial for senior-level men in tech-intensive industries to champion women, and in time, create more women role models.”

Clarifying evaluation and promotion requirements, paying employees fairly, ensuring workers are able to meet family responsibilities and still get their jobs done, building cultures that value people outside the majority, and having corporate leadership set the tone from the top on diversity — these are all things that can help stop the female and minority attrition from the tech industry.

In practice, these solutions will take hard work to achieve. Implementing new policies is easy — it’s changing people’s mindsets that is difficult. But it is possible and necessary. The tech industry needs the best minds out there to solve problems in an increasingly complex business environment. It won’t be able to attract and retain the top people until business leaders approach this problem earnestly. Their work is cut out for them.

By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

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Father’s Day: New Dads, Paternity Leave and Gender Equality

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Father and son featuredAs Father’s Day approaches, we reflect on a hot topic that is helping to drive gender equality in Europe and beyond: paternity leave and shared parental leave.

The USA is miles away from the starting line on this matter. 182 countries provide paid maternity leave (the USA sits beside Oman and Papua New Guinea as sole exceptions) and 70 countries provide paid paternity leave. The USA is the only industrialized country that does not mandate some kind of paid parental leave to be provided by employers, only three states (California, Rhode Island, and New Jersey) offer paid leave for both parents, and companies offering paid maternity and paternity leave dropped from 17% in 2010 to 12% in 2014.

At the same time, research shows that paid maternity leave and breastfeeding breaks would help women to advance further in their careers by keeping them integrated in the workforce. But what could really change the game for women, men, families, and gender equality – and have positive growth implications for the GDP – is not just paid maternity leave that still regards mothers as the primary caretakers, but paid parental leave that reflects and encourages true co-parenting.

Newborn Shared Parental Leave in the UK

Only half a dozen countries offer men more than two weeks paternity leave, and the UK has just become one of them by introducing shared parental leave. The Telegraph has called it, “the most progressive new parent support policy that Britain has ever had.”

Before mothers had 52 weeks and fathers had two paid weeks. The new UK policy allows that after the initial two weeks of compulsory maternal leave, 50 weeks of shared parental leave and 37 weeks of pay can be divided up between couples (including adopting & same sex) anyway they chose: taking at the same time, in rotation, and/or in three separate blocks of time each.

The policy is not without bumps. One key issue is it doesn’t add actual weeks off work for families on top of what mothers already received. Jeremy Davies, head of communications at The Fatherhood Institute told The Guardian, “Although it’s called shared parental leave it’s really transferable maternity leave. It doesn’t give fathers any independent right or responsibility for taking time off, and it doesn’t fundamentally challenge employers’ attitudes.”

Other issuesinclude low financial viability for many couples due to reduced pay, whether high-earning women will feel more pressure to get back to work sooner, and whether the policy will result in reduced breastfeeding rates. Good questions, important choices. But now at least the choice is increasingly for individual couples to make based on their needs.

It may be an imperfect step in the right direction, but then children don’t walk in one day either.

Established Shared Parental Leave in Sweden

While news to the UK, in Sweden gender-neutral parental leave is 40 years in the making.

In 2014, Sweden ranked fourth in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, following Iceland, Finland and Norway. The higher the rank, the greater gender equality as measured by “the relative gaps between women and men across four key areas: health, education, economy, and politics”, regardless of the absolute level of resources. The UK and the USA rank in the twenties.

According to The Economist, almost 90% of new Swedish fathers take paternity leave, and last year340,000 dads took an average of seven weeks each. It began 40 years ago as six months of paternity leave per child at 90% pay to be shared as couples wished. Dads didn’t even take one percent of it. Today, they take 25% of what has expanded to 16 months of shared paid paternal leave. Although paternal leave is flexible between parents, Sweden is upping the paid use-it-or-lose-it-father-only portion from two to three months in an effort towards increasing gender equality.

Parental Leave – It’s Good for Everyone

Research has shown that it’s taboo to many men to even admit they’d like to modify their work schedule to take time at home. Yet over 99% of men in a survey of over 1,000 fathers felt employers should offer paid paternity leave. Even taking just two weeks parental leave in countries such as the USA, Britain, Australia, and Denmark has shown to make positive differences for the whole family.

More Balanced Family Gender Dynamics

As Liza Mundy writes in the The Atlantic, “The genius of paternity leave is that it shapes domestic and parenting habits as they are forming.” When both partners take paternal leave, it sets up the couple up to establish a more gender-neutral pattern where work, household, and family responsibilities are more evenly shared in a two-income household.

According to Mundy, paternity leave has been shown to “boost male participation in the household, enhance female participation in the labor force, and promote gender equity in both domains.”

Dads who take paternity leave are likely to remain more involved in child-care (feeding, bathing, playing, reading) many months after the leave period, compared to fathers who did not. There’s also evidence that being able to take paternity leave helps increase men’s confidence as parents, and they end up being “more competent and committed fathers whose greater involvement persists as their children grow up.”

Children benefit too. Research by the University of Oslo has shown that children’s learning development benefits when dads can take paternity leave – finding that children’s performance at secondary school improved when fathers had taken more time off early on, especially daughters.

More Balanced Workplace Gender Dynamics

More countries are considering that paternity leave is key for improving women’s career prospects, helping them to be seen more equally within, and stay connected to, the workforce.

Mundy, director of the Breadwinning & Caregiving Program at New America, writes that paternal leave keeps women from being singled out as prospective parents in the office, which can hold back their advancement in insidious ways. “If everybody—male or female—is asking for leave or taking leave that they already qualify for, I think it just levels the playing field for how men or women are looked at in the office.”

Because women’s childbearing years coincide with their peak earning years, encouraging paid paternity leave can help narrow the wage gap too. A Swedish study found that a women’s future earnings increased by 7% for every month her partner took parental leave. According to The Economist, greater uptake of parental leave by fathers in Sweden has been associated with higher levels of self-reported happiness in women and higher incomes.

In a survey of over 250 California firms, 90% of firms said that paid paternal leave had a positive or neutral impact on productivity, performance, and profitability, with minimal impact on operations and finances. Tech companies in the USA who pro-actively employ paid maternity and paternity policies are starting to recognize that the long-term benefits in retention and attracting talent are good for both families and business.

As we celebrate Father’s Day, let’s remember that gender equality is not only about promoting women’s equality in the workplace. It’s also about promoting men’s equality in the home and family.

Parental leave holds the potential to offer a big step forward for both.

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Career Tip of the Week!

Nicki-Gilmour-bioThis Week’s Tip Is…

Look for your own blind spots and address them.

Many women are sexist against other women and sometimes it is on a very unconscious level. Examine how you treat the men and women in your team and what behaviors you expect from both genders. Are you stereotyping jobs and types of tasks based on gender?

Welcome to Career Tip of the Week. In this column we aim to provide you with a useful snippet of advice to carry with you all week as you navigate the day to day path in your career.

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

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