Tag Archive for: IWD

International Women’s Day 2023: Artificial Intelligence, Technology and the Internet

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IWD 2023It feels that Artificial intelligence (AI) has really gone from feeling opaque and slightly in the realms of science fiction to current reality with Chat GPT now partly academically approved and AI of all types – from Bing’s chat GPT ‘wanting to be alive’ Jungesque aspirations this week to Elon Musk’s perhaps legitimate fear of AI to the ‘metaverse’ – being discussed at family gatherings. Surprisingly, or perhaps right on time, the UN Women 67th Annual Commission on the Status of Women International Women’s Day 2023 has a theme of “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality.” With the hashtag #Poweron, the focus is on the opportunities that technology has to create access to work opportunities and services for more parity for women across the world, while reducing the internet’s facilitation and spread of sexual violence.

AI Issues From a Career Perspective for Women

Algorithms and AI can add another layer to bias and stereotyping beyond the human aspects that we all work so hard to defuse. Just under 80% of people who work in AI are men and the systems are entrenched in language – benign at best, purposely coded at worst with “lesser than” logic patterns. AI has been found to have biases against women and from a career perspective this has been understood most in hiring processes with Amazon scrapping their AI for recruiting for some of these reasons. Machine learning has shown to replicate male and white visibility with higher values given to data and images of white men. In The MIT Sloan Review, invisibility and erasure was discussed when it comes to ethnic diversity in facial recognition, with the topic causing a furor last June when President Obama’s face was machine refined as a high pixel image of a white man.

There are huge opportunities in AI though from a career breadth and depth perspective. AI is and will be in our lives more and more with wearables being the predicted game changer for healthcare. Other industries like financial services and even your digital shopping cart are heavily investing in AI and machine learning. It could it be applied to big issues like carbon farming practices and climate disaster and climate migrant preparation related challenges. And job roles and skillsets that represent a cross-section of disciplines are increasingly relevant and necessary, so coming from a STEM background is not a prerequisite for getting involved.

What are the Social Issues?

The issue behind technology is always based in human behaviors from who creates what, how and why, to who uses the product or service and for what end. How much humanity is in avatars and online commenters and how people behave online versus in real life has been a decade plus study. Do people act differently when they have anonymity or are without nonverbal cues? How does life online inform real life and vice versa? Apparently, moral outrage gets reposted 20% more than regular statements. The Pew Center has a body of research stating online harassment to be around 45% for men especially around topics of politics while fewer women report this. But, female politicians face verbal abuse with 39% of tweets about females in politics containing problematic threats, as do female journalists. Women are more likely to be sexually harassed or threatened with sexual violence online with image sharing, revenge porn and sextortion being part of this century so far.

Legislation is slowly catching up in Europe and the US with The White House launching the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse in 2022 to tackle online issues including sexual violence, abuse and sharing of files against women, and also child sexual abuse material (CSAM) sharing. Files containing CSAM have increased exponentially with 89.1 million files being reported in 2021 alone and the Legal 500 recently published a study entitled “Is it time to age gate the internet?” citing demand by internet to view child abuse to be increasing significantly. Harrowing as this is to report the hundreds of percent increase for demand of this terrible societal scourge, it is entirely important to understand how technology can help solve for issues as well as replicate problems. It does require people to think about hard things, have difficult conversations and take actions – such as code and AI for good not evil. For example, Thorn.org works to help via code to tag material to stop the spread of files, and in the UK and EU, there are similar technologies that all companies can access. We all need to work to solve real issues that degrade people as well as for democracy and opportunity for all humans.

Women’s lives is an increasing issue with discussions at major platforms and within governments ongoing on how to truly parse and filter empowering content regarding fitness, breastfeeding and women’s health from adult consensual content from non-consensual violence and assault; first to third world. Society at large from a behavioral perspective is again acceptably and overtly anti- women when it comes to dignity and personal sovereignty it seems. From dating apps and their unsolicited genital pictures and deepfakes to permanent perennial abuse images that never let the victim truly recover and all that is in between, it is hard to avoid pondering the nuances of the internet being a mirror or a vehicle to human darkness?

What Can You Do To Be Part of the Solution?

#1 Support with time and money STEM and coding programs for girls and women such as Girls Who Code or Black Girls Code or anitab.org or NCWIT or TCGi Foundation from Avis Yates Rivers. Encourage any girl or young woman you know to get into STEM. There are many pathways.

#2 Hire women into tech jobs, mentor women where you can, be the sponsor where you can!

#3 Have difficult and unsavory conversations with your kids about what is ok and what is not, and what to do if they see something awful on the internet.

#4 Continue the obviously much needed socio-cultural and psychological work for all humans to instill ethical boundaries in our boys and men (and girls and women) to help stop casual sexual and physical violence in real life as well as virtual world, the mantra ‘boys will be boys’ has to stop now so that girls can be girls, safely.

#5 Fund the solutions. Consider donating to Thorn or a similar organization that provides technical solutions, advocacy, support or education on the topic of CSAM or gender/sexual violence and sex trafficking such as RAINN or New Life, New Friends.

Either way, having awareness that there is a virtual world that replicates some of the real world’s most difficult challenges regarding gender is the conversational entry point into an inevitable new world. With more women being involved in building technology, and more women worldwide having equal access to technology, we hold out hope that we engineer AI for the good of women’s lives and towards the collective good.

By Nicki Gilmour

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Judith Barry: Co-Head of Global Equities, Wells Fargo

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Judith Barry“Women put too much pressure on themselves by thinking they have to walk into a role fully capable and qualified, when the reality is that as long as you have the core of what you need to do for the job, you can build and learn,” says Judith Barry. “As long as you’re willing to be vulnerable enough to admit that you’re going to need help or to learn new skills as you navigate, you can take on those bigger jobs.”

Leveraging Her Unique Trajectory

During her sophomore summer at NYU as a political science major, Barry accepted an operations role with Lehman Brothers, staying on during her junior year while attaining her securities licenses. Graduating a semester early, she switched firms and began her career in trading. Trading suited her perfectly: she thrived on how trading was new every day, both fast and dynamically paced, and that it meant working with very smart individuals. After a few years, Barry moved to the buy-side working for a hedge fund. By 29 years old, she became Head of Trading at a hedge fund, before moving to two other firms also as Head of Trading, eventually returning to the sell-side with Wells Fargo. Now with the bank for five years, Barry is Co-Head of the Equities Division, part of Markets, a role she has held since April 2022, as well as Head of Equity Products Distribution.

“I think my unique trajectory gave me the opportunity to learn and hone a lot of skills and, quite frankly, truly understand what clients need and want,” she notes. “Now I’m in a seat to take that knowledge base and help Wells Fargo address all of our clients’ needs and challenges.”

The WomenGoFar Network: Educate, Elevate and Empower

In addition to her Co-Head and Head roles, Barry is also Chairwoman of the WomenGoFar network within Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) at Wells Fargo. About a third of CIB staff are part of the WomenGoFar network, not only women, but also men who are allies in support of diversity.

The WomenGoFar network seeks to educate, elevate and empower women to navigate their careers internally as well as their personal lives.

“Women choose and have different paths – some are single, some are mothers, some are dealing with elderly parents or siblings. Not everyone wants a senior leadership role, but we’re about empowering women to navigate their own career goals to be effective while also balancing life,” she notes. “It’s important to have the skills to come into an organization and be able to advocate for yourself or to elevate your profile.”

When Barry entered trading in the early 90’s, women were competing for very few trading and sales positions. It was unusual to be a woman trader, let alone a senior trader, and unimaginable to sit at the head of the trading desk.

“It’s still unusual for women to be a co-head of equities at a bank, so I’m very proud of the seat that I sit in and the support I’ve been given at Wells Fargo,” Barry says. “What’s critical is I was able to take my early experience and turn that into sponsorship and mentorship and advocacy for women. Now, rather than all of us running at just one seat, there is the opportunity for women to be successful in any seat.”

WomenGoFar builds collaboration, instead of competition, between women and increases access to senior women leaders, sharing how they navigated to where they are today. In the spirit of ‘if you can see it, you can be it,’ Barry feels it’s her responsibility to be visible in her position and she is intentional about celebrating milestones for women. Sharing her own story – the good, the bad, and the speed bumps – is an important part of how she inspires others. She seeks to excel as a leader, as a mother and as a partner with the people and teams she works with.

Barry is also actively involved in creating inspiring content, understanding the supports women need and elevating awareness around the cumulative experiences of women leaders. One example of programming is a deep dive with McKinsey & Company’s annual Women in the Workplace study. WomenGoFar also hosts internal speaker series on topics like personal wealth and investment management that benefit women, from the early stages of their career. In addition, this past year, CIB hosted their first off-site Women’s Leadership Summit which brought together high-level senior women from the bank and the client side, spotlighting important female clients across the spectrum of Wells Fargo.

Flexibility, Resilience And Communication

“Especially as a trader, or someone in finance, you need to be incredibly resilient to navigate the up and down turbulence of the marketplace,” Barry says. “It takes flexibility to understand how to approach things but also resilience when things don’t go your way. You need to be able to pivot and get back on track so that you can achieve the goals that you set.”

Back on the trading desk, where each decision was being made with heightened urgency, engagement often took the form of yelling. But as she moved to managerial and leadership roles, she worked on elevating her communication skills – whether navigating smaller conversations in managing people or conveying an important message to a larger audience. She’s also realized how important it is to value her own voice.

“When I first was on a trading desk, I was often attempting to embrace or to emulate what my male peers were doing. I thought that in order to be successful, I had to be them,” she reflects. “Then I realized that it was incredibly important to have my own voice and realize that I didn’t need to do what they were doing in order to be successful.”

Being Confident and Finding Your Voice

“I walk into every new thing I do with an understanding of ‘I know what I know’ but ‘I know what I don’t know,’ too,” says Barry. “I’m comfortable about being vulnerable enough to ask people to help me.”

She continues, “Women put too much pressure on themselves by thinking they have to walk into a role fully capable and qualified, when the reality is that long as you have the core of what you need to do the job, you can build and learn. As long as you’re willing to be vulnerable enough to admit that you’re going to need help or to learn new skills as you navigate, you can take on those bigger jobs.”

Citing the famous study that women apply only if 100% qualified (while men apply with 60% of qualifications), Barry notes: “I think it’s important to have self-awareness and be self-reflective but, more importantly, you have to have confidence.”

Barry feels being an extrovert helped her to find her voice and to self-advocate, and everyone needs to learn that. She is conscious of the introverts who are incredibly talented and make significant contributions but often aren’t as adept at being cheerleaders for their accomplishments.

“Find someone who is both a sponsor and a mentor. A lot of my success comes down to finding those people who see your contributions, see the things you do and see the skills that you offer,” she notes. “It’s having that opportunity to go to them for advice, but also make sure that someone is speaking on your behalf in the rooms that you aren’t in. You can learn to advocate for yourself, but it’s important that you also have people advocating for you.”

Get the Feedback You Need to Grow

Barry brings empathy and vulnerability and confidence and candor into any room and is commanding. She feels “a compliment is nice, but feedback is a gift” and is tougher on the women she is closer to. Barry feels managers have shied away in recent times from giving critical feedback, especially to women, but it’s critical to growth. So also relies on a good dose of humor.

“If you’re not getting feedback from your manager, go ask for it. Make it so that they are given permission to give you feedback because you’re only going to get better,” she advises. “Feedback isn’t personal. It’s professional and possibly data-driven feedback.”

“Be Intentional and Be Exceptional”

Barry would advise women to take more moments to sit back, pause and reflect before taking the bigger steps, personally and professionally, and to constantly check in on their capacity and ability to do more: think in terms of one, three and five year plans. Barry also emphasizes women be mindful of the people they are connecting and working with, their experiences and their background.

She advises women, “Be intentional and be exceptional. It’s incredibly important for women to understand that if you want to hit a certain level of success, you are going to have to really lean into things,” she says. “That phraseology has become commonplace for women, but it’s not a woman thing and it’s not a man thing. It means that when you are going to do something in life, you should want to be exceptional at doing it. And you should be intentional about how you get there.”

Barry enjoys a couple of trips a year with her family and teenage children. She loves disconnecting from work and immersing her family on city trips in Europe. She says her family is into learning trips, as culture and history buffs, far more than beach trips. Recently they visited Northern Ireland and Portugal. She also values ‘me time’ in helping her to show up whole for her family and at work.

“It goes back to that word intentional – I’m intentional in what I do and how I work and I have to be intentional about carving out my spare time.”

Fitness is a top priority for her, including long hikes often accompanied by great conversation with a friend. She also ‘confesses’ that she teaches a bootcamp class based on karate to women every Saturday morning, so it’s women’s empowerment over roundhouse kicks, too, for Barry.

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Mariella Greco: Gender and International Development Advisor

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Mariella Greco “In difficult moments in the development world, I draw on what I learned from the intensity of the trading room,” says Mariella Greco, a global leader in gender, development and finance. “The motivators are different, but those same skills make me a better leader in the not-for-profit sector.”

Heeding the Call

Having majored in international relations in university, Greco was magnetized to international development.

But after a short assignment at Canada’s Permanent Mission to the UN in 1990, she put her call to international service on hold and accepted a domestic position with the Royal Bank of Canada back in Windsor, Ontario, her hometown, staying near her mother during her parent’s difficult divorce.

When family matters settled, she left Windsor to pivot back to international affairs, but in banking. She succeeded in a tough dealer training program that she landed as the only woman on the Canada desk. Nicknamed “Stella”—and with the occasional “what-a-guy” pat on the back—she learned to hold her own as one of very few women dealers in the bank’s main trading room.

But Greco still felt the pull to international development and began volunteering for Plan International in Canada.

When she began at the Royal Bank, she promised herself (in writing, along with other life goals she recorded in a book) that she would revisit her path in time: within 5 years, she would either try international development or stay the course in finance.

“My head was like don’t be stupid,” recalls Greco, “but my heart was still feeling this call.”

Giving up a hard-won position in the global headquarters of Canada’s biggest bank for an NGO job with a 50% pay cut was both risky and daunting.

“So for a year I went home everyday and asked myself, ’Is this a day where I feel I want to go, stay or am I neutral?’ I literally logged it,” she explains. “Like the markets, my feelings about taking the leap had highs and lows. I tried to find balance with a daily risk-reward analysis about what I wanted in life. At the end of the year, I added it all up, and bottom line—there were more days where my gut said GO.”

Greco heeded the math and left for a “planned” two year break from banking that became two decades working in international development, while living in five countries, traveling to 50 countries and gaining proficiency in several languages, before returning to Canada with her family in 2018.

Transferable Leadership Lessons

Calm Under Fire

On the trading floor, Greco learned that as important as being a good winner was, so was being a good loser.

The EVP who interviewed her for the dealer job asked her, “Can you speak your mind to your boss, and give your opinion knowing his is different, even if he is yelling because of market volatility? Can you speak up then, too?” She said yes, and she did because it was the expectation.

“They wanted to know if you can stand the heat and carry on, even when stress is overwhelming and you’re losing money,” says Greco. “Loyalty to the team meant sharing differing opinions, and it also meant closing ranks when final decisions were taken.”

This insight and learning to stand the heat helped her to be a strong leader in many challenging situations, and to do so while also caring for her team’s wellbeing (physical, mental and socio-emotional), such as in humanitarian crises.

“The most rewarding experiences are sometimes the hardest ones,” says Greco, such as the Category 5 hurricane response she led in Nicaragua (earning her one of her official Medals of Honor).

Also, ensuring child safeguarding and gender equality were part of each and every Plan staff member’s performance objectives was rewarding too, because it positively impacted both the quality of their work and the personal lives of her team.

Speaking Truth to Power and Holding Midterm Vision

Honed in the trading room, several bosses have told Greco that her strong voice is her “superpower”.

When pregnant with her first daughter, Greco learned that expatriate women in her organization didn’t receive maternity leave, even as she was unexpectedly promoted shortly after giving birth. As her contract was subject to U.S. labor laws, she was limited to six weeks of “disability leave” after birth, because maternity leave might be interpreted as discriminatory against men, creating liability risk for the organization.

“I was shocked that giving birth was deemed a disability in an organization dedicated to children and gender,” shares Greco.

Not only did that seem wrong, but also that it was only 6 weeks of leave, especially when compared to the year that mothers may take off in Canada.

Greco began a five year internal campaign that gave birth to a maternity leave policy that was more coherent with the organization’s mandate. In doing so, she helped remove barriers for younger women aspiring to both leadership and motherhood.

“Some things you can take a short-term view on, but for other things you need to play the long game, even if you can’t see around the corner,” Greco reflects. “Be willing to also sow seeds and nurture change for positive impacts that may only blossom after you are long gone.”

Greco values learning to speak truth to power early in life. Reflecting on a “Me Too” incident she had early in her career, Greco recalls the unconditional support of her male bosses when she reported being harassed by a senior executive, who was also way over their heads.

“I had stood my ground with him and let my bosses know the next day, but I also asked them to refrain from intervening unless he bothered me again,” remembers Greco. “They were so outraged that instead of doing what I asked, they made it known to their leadership that they had my back.”

When the “Me Too” movement gained prominence, she realized how rare their reactions were. So she wrote her ex-bosses and asked them to sit their daughters down and tell them that story “so they know how stand-up their dads were and so they know the standard of support they should expect if it happens to them.”

“That whole experience (good and bad),” reflects Greco, “helped me better support others who faced this.”

Multidirectional Career Moves

Greco made yet another non-traditional career move in 2019, pivoting towards government this time.

“People too often think their path must be up, up, up, like that’s the only direction worth going” she observes. “Had I been hostage to that mentality, I would have missed an amazing journey. I feel the same way about the journey ahead”.

She likens working in government to learning about a whole new world: “It is a bit like being paid to attend a university program, continuing to work and add value, but influencing for change more subtly.”

Empowering Girls to Lead

Greco credits her successes—whether as a trainee or as a Country Director—to both fortune and her willingness to try.

In Plan, Greco was steadfast in her efforts to advance gender equality and promote the leadership potential of girls. Ahead of Plan’s #GirlsTakeover on International Day of the Girl on October 11th, Paraguayan colleagues warned that national leaders would never cede their positions to girls, given entrenched gender attitudes and the political environment.

Greco decided she would try, anyway, at least with one Minister. When she phoned him, he quickly agreed. So she called another, and then another, planning to stop when one Minister said ‘no’. None did.

That year, Paraguay’s Cabinet, Senate, Congress, Supreme Court and even the Central Bank were led by girls. It catalyzed the President to create a Council of Girl Minsters, inspired Paraguayan girls to dream bigger dreams and it helped chip away at arthritic gender stereotypes. The next year, ministers were asking her to be involved.

“Without that risk tolerance built into me, whether inherent or strengthened in the trading room, I probably wouldn’t have asked” says Greco. “Don’t squander your opportunities out of fear of a ‘no’. Try. ”

Which Organizations Will Dare?

Greco discusses gender and COVID-19 impacts with her daughters, even the 140,000 U.S. job losses in December 2020, in which women netted 156,000 losses vs. the 16,000 net jobs gained among men.

Women fill so many jobs deemed “essential”—yet are disproportionately bearing the economic brunt of the pandemic, whether in job losses, being underpaid or exiting the workforce for unpaid family responsibilities. Paying wages commensurate with essential work and implementing measures that close the wage gap could slow the loss of women from the labor force, but Greco feels the solution space of gender impacts needs more innovate thinking for systemic change.

“Incremental change is safe but too slow,” observes Greco. “Taking some risks to accelerate long term gains is long overdue.”

Basics like paid maternity leave and flexible arrangements for family responsibilities (the brunt of which continue to fall to women) are critical, but additional measures that fast-track women back onto their career should help them regain momentum too.

When faced with women exiting the workforce (be it a result of the pandemic, family responsibilities or wage gap disincentives), do employers just lament and accept it, or do they step up and flex what’s possible to keep their talent? Can organizational playbooks and rules historically written by men be modernized through a more balanced lens?

Greco looks to organizations with deep pockets to pilot such changes that matter, lean into some risks and help pave the way for others.

The True Pipeline

After witnessing so many empowered girls inspiringly take to leadership, and the impact on their personal sense of agency, Greco reframes the pipeline when it comes to future change.

“Younger people are more powerful, engaging and influential early on,” she says. “It’s not only about a line of new and energetic ‘replacement’ candidates to fulfill status quo positions, but rather an idea stream with young and unencumbered perspectives that will evolve our vision and how we do things.”

“Avoid the typical training that ‘indoctrinates’ young talent in how things are done, because if we listen better, we just might realize that they have the most forward looking solutions,” she advises. “Consider stewarding and facilitating emerging talent and ideas. That’s what’s going to tip it, for those willing to ask—to listen to differing opinions and to courageously take calculated risks.”

By Aimee Hansen

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IWD 2021 Wake-Up Call: The Pandemic Response Has Worked Against Women.

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During the month of International Women’s Day (IWD 2021), we confront a global reality: no recent year has devastated women’s lives like the one we’ve just lived through. And it’s still happening.

The IWD2021 theme is #ChoosetoChallenge: “A challenged world is an alert world and from challenge comes change.”

Starkly put, the pandemic response has exemplified “a lack of gender perspective” resulting in 47 million more women facing poverty. The International Labour Organization has given warning that the “modest progress” made on global gender equality across the years will disappear due to COVID-19.

The damage of the pandemic response has not only made obvious the real danger in the inevitable blindness of default male leadership.

It has also bolded and underlined that the world has not been a level playing field for women for far too long—a paradigm in which gains in “equality” are molasses slow and hard-won progress can slip away within the blink of a year.

A Wave of Women’s Disempowerment

UN Women points out that 2020 marked the 25th year anniversary of the Beijing Platform for action, which was intended to be “groundbreaking for gender equality”, but instead now represents a rollback.

A recent report by UN Women found that as a direct result of pandemic-related unemployment and lost earnings, women’s poverty rates have increased by 9.1 percent worldwide and the poverty gap between men and women is widening after years of decline.

Women are losing what was already sparse ground in executive leadership and a pithy share of entrepreneurial funding. Women are increasingly unable to stay in work while caregiving and taking pay losses. Dozens of millions of women in developing nations have been dropped into economic, safety and health fragility.

A blatant wave of global women’s disempowerment has taken place due to the COVID-19 pandemic response, drastically impacting quality of life for millions of women. The measures have had distinctly gender-regressive effects, setting women back by decades.

The words “pandemic response” are intentional because these impacts are not from the pandemic itself, but from the response measures that have been implemented—neither inherent nor unavoidable. Treating the pandemic and the response measures as inextricable is blinding to a more empowering narrative of exploration of greater choices or different measures.

Many Spheres of Losses for Women

“The pandemic is deepening pre-existing inequalities, exposing vulnerabilities in social, political and economic systems which are in turn amplifying the impacts of the pandemic,” writes the UN Women policy authors. “Across every sphere, from health to the economy, security to social protection, the impacts of COVID-19 are exacerbated for women and girls simply by virtue of their sex.”

Disproportionate Job and Pay Losses

More likely to be employed and over-represented in the informal sectors—such as retail, hospitality, food, agriculture and tourism—women have born the brunt of pandemic job losses. 70% of unemployment has been in the informal sector, in which security for job losses are rare or non-existent.

While women comprise 39% of the global labor force, research by the McKinsey Global Institute in July found that they accounted for 54% of early pandemic-related job losses. A UN Women report at the end of the second quarter of 2020 showed that women were 1.7 times more likely to be out of the labor market. Since February 2020, 2.4 million women dropped out of the U.S. workforce, 33% more dropouts than men (less than 1.8 million).

And the gendered effect is becoming more marked—80% of September labor drop-outs, as school began again, were women (865,000) and this rate continues: in January 2021, 275,000 women dropped out, at nearly 4x the rate of male job exits (71,000). As of October, women in India were dropping out of the workforce 2.5 times faster than men.

While women in European countries are fairing better at staying employed due to more stimulus spending and protections, analysis across 28 countries revealed women’s wages have dropped more (6.9% vs. 4.7% for men)—with drops in Germany (8.6%) and UK (12.9%) being nearly double those for men.

Escalated Unpaid Work

UNESCO reports 87% of students (1.52 billion) and over 60 million teachers have been homebound, with mothers disproportionately shouldering that change. As women are forced to turn their efforts toward unpaid work, they lose access to paid work, in a rate far higher than men who have children in the household.

Women comprise the majority of single-parent households. There’s a gross imbalance in domestic unpaid work (women do 3x as much as men—4.1 vs 1.7 daily hours), with less social and economic protections. Speaking globally, full lockdowns have a disproportional impact on women’s mobility, especially school closures.

As a result of the pandemic response measures, it was estimated in May that time spent on family responsibilities increased by 30% for women in India. In June, a report found that U.S. women were spending ten to 15 hours more per week on caregiving responsibilities than before—creating the emergence of a “double double shift” in dual-career parent couples, where mothers are 1.5 times more likely than fathers to spend an additional 3+ hours on household work a day than prior to COVID-19.

“The COVID-19 global crisis has made starkly visible the fact that the world’s formal economies and the maintenance of our daily lives are built on the invisible and unpaid labor of women and girls,” states the UN Women policy report.

Basic Vulnerability in Developing Countries

Beyond job loss and escalated unpaid work, women in developing economies are less likely than men to have a bank account, have only 77% as much access to personal finances and have 17% less access to the internet. The financial access gap is exacerbated in this increasingly digitized bank environment.

Food insecurity and hunger are anticipated to double in low and middle income countries. Women also face exponentially increased gender-based violence while often being “locked down” with their domestic abusers, with disrupted or inaccessible support services.

As a direct example, a study from Nairobi showed highly gendered impacts to Kenyan youth—over half of women reporting financial reliance (54%), both young men (45%) and young women (53%) being unable to meet basic needs, and more young women becoming reliant on transactional sex partnerships to do so (36%), with half of young women (49%) reporting an increase in intimate partner violence since COVID-19.

Lost of Ground in Leadership, Academia and Entrepreneurship

In the academic world, higher education, school closure and increased childcare has witnessed women’s “research outputs plummeting during lockdown while men’s have increased”—amplifying longstanding gender inequalities in access to grants and promotions.

While women made up only 5% of chief executives globally before, a new report has shown that companies are defaulting to hiring male CEOS and recruiting fewer women. And while women founder teams received only 2.8% of investments in 2019, that paltry all-time high has dropped to only 2.3% of VC funding in 2020.

Disproportionate Impacts on Black and Latina Women

“It appears that the pandemic is affecting the already built-in racial/ethnic and gendered structural disparities in the labor market in an even more pronounced way, especially for women of color,” said researchers in the Journal of Economics, Race and Policy.

Throughout the pandemic, unemployment has hit women and people of color, meaning the intersectional effect for women of color is the sharpest. In April 2020, national unemployment was 14.7% but 16.9% for black women and 20.2% for Latina women. In August 2020, black women had recovered only 34% of pre-pandemic jobs, relative to 61% for white women.

Unemployment for black women (11.1%) and Latinas (11.0%) was twice as high in September 2020 than prior to the pandemic. As of January, black women were still 8.5% unemployed and Latina women 8.8% unemployed, with the national average at 6.3%.

Impacts that will Outlast the Crisis

E-bola in Liberia demonstrated that while men’s lives bounced back after preventative measures subsided, the detrimental impact on women’s livelihoods endured.

Of the 12.1 million job losses for women in the U.S. between February and April 2020, only slightly more than half had returned as of September. Research has shown that workers who lose employment during a recession experience “highly persistent earning losses” in the fallout.

“The large impact of the current recession on working women has consequences that will long outlast the recession itself,” writes researchers. “Given that women have lost many more jobs than men in this recession, earnings losses will push down the average earnings of women in the economy and raise the gender pay gap.”

Default Male Decision Making in the Covid-19 Response

Early last year, theglasshammer wrote about the default male world. Now, the pandemic response measures have shown how default male world decision-making has created massive detrimental impacts for women in a very short amount of time.

As written in a blog post on LSE’s School of Public Policy, “Not only do we know little about the impact of the pandemic on women, the people making key decisions on how to manage it are overwhelmingly male.”

Only 25% of health leadership positions (less than 5% of these in low and middle income countries) are female, while 70% of the health workforce and 90% of frontline workers are women. LSE writers argue this created a complete disregard in policy for the needs of women, precluding the exploration of more diverse, holistic and inclusive approaches.

Only 3.5% of COVID-19 decision-making teams have gender parity, with 85% of task forces being comprised of mostly men. Fewer than 1 in 5 of social policies and labor measures taken across 200 countries were gender sensitive.

An MP committee in the UK called out that government policies had been “repeatedly skewed towards men.” And the “gender perspective is unfortunately often the first thing to be disregarded” in crisis response situations, said Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde.

Bold new fiscal packages and corporate policies, many of which would have seemed unthinkable before the crisis, have been enacted with remarkable speed,” wrote McKinsey partners and co-authors in Foreign Affairs, “While these initiatives have helped to stabilize the global economy during a once-in-a-lifetime emergency, far too many of them have failed to sufficiently consider the half of the world’s population that is arguably more critical to a full economic recovery: women.”

Will We Choose to Challenge?

In a default male patriarchal world, the pandemic response has evidenced that if leadership is not actively working for women, it is in fact actively working against them.

When will we harness the real power of being the invisible engine of the world, and give our support to a paradigm only if it honors and respects the belonging of all people here?

Deep down, don’t we all know the truth that if the world doesn’t work for everyone, it doesn’t work for anyone?

UN Women notes that “Women will be the hardest hit by this pandemic but they will also be the backbone of recovery in communities. Every policy response that recognizes this will be the more impactful for it.”

The organization recommends 1) ensure women’s equal representation in all COVID-19 response planning and decision-making, 2) drive transformative change for equality by addressing the care economy, paid and unpaid, 3) target women and girls in all efforts to address the socio-economic impact of COVID-19.

“Achieving gender parity in leadership and decision-making positions is the first step towards achieving equitable and sustainable global health security,” argues the LSE co-authors.

Stepping back, if we were talking about the impacts on women’s lives as much as case rates, would the world populace—especially women—be abiding the same measures?

Would we be engaging in a more nuanced discussion about preservation of health, lives and quality of lives? Did we even pause to have that discussion?

Would we choose to challenge the changes of a trigger-fast crisis solution we have so quickly abided, and the real impacts it has created?

In a rush to mass implementation, might the solution to any problem carry even greater problematic consequences?

These are all the questions we aren’t asking enough—and women are paying the price.

By Aimee Hansen

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Why Less Is More: Advice for Female Overachievers Everywhere

Women-Cheering-featured

By Aimee Hansen

With the recent International Women’s Day 2019 mantra being #Balanceforbetter, we have proof that giving less of yourself at work could be the best move for you and your career.

Being overly conscientious and accommodating in your work approach – which women are far more likely to be – may diffuse your energy and impact, without helping you advance in the office.

Overcoming the compulsion to overwork is about more than being mentally strategic and discerning with the work you do, though changing behaviors can change beliefs. The hardest part of choosing not to do too much may be riding through the emotional discomfort of not being as overly conscientious as you’re used to.

As girls and women, we’ve come to believe we have to work very hard not even to get ahead, but just to stay safe.

What did we really learn as girls at school?

“What if those same habits that propel girls to the top of their class — their hyper-conscientiousness about schoolwork — also hold them back in the work force?” writes Dr. Lisa Damour in the New York Times.

At school age, girls have the edge on performance and they also work harder, have greater discipline and perform better. Damour finds that girls are more likely to grind away and to leave as little as possible room for error. Anecdotally, it’s observed that boys are more likely to up their game if something slips, while girls are less likely to allow the possibility of slippage, holding the energy of maximum effort.

Damour writes, “We need to ask: What if school is a confidence factory for our sons, but only a competence factory for our daughters?” She asserts that with girls, we need to stop applauding ‘inefficient overwork’ and start rewarding ‘economy of effort’.

Part of this is encouraging girls to acknowledge how much they already know and then where to focus their mastery building, as opposed to only building up capacity for work. The confidence gap and stress gap between genders is only widened when girls and women put disproportionate stock in their ability to work extra hard, as opposed to their innate abilities to deliver good results.

We think we have to work harder (and we do) at work.

A study designed to monitor the impact of privacy filters on productivity at 3M also verified the suspicion that women employees work harder. “During a ten minute experimental trial, female employees worked longer without (2.5 minutes vs 2.1 minutes) or with (4.9 minutes vs 4.3 minutes) a privacy filter. 52 percent of male workers walked away during a waiting period while only 38 present of women did.

Across three decades of studies, professional women in both Britain and the United States are also significantly more likely than male peers to agree to the statement “My job requires that I work very hard.”

“Between a man and a woman who hold the same job, shoulder the same burdens at home and have the same education and skills, the woman is likely to feel she must work harder,“ said co-researcher and sociologist Elizabeth Gorman.

The researchers speculate that “the association between gender and reported required work effort is best interpreted as reflecting stricter performance standards imposed on women, even when women and men hold the same jobs.”

Being too conscientious adds up to emotional exhaustion.

Women tend to experience more stress in the workplace – and a UK survey found up to 67% higher stress levels for women between 34 and 44 compared to men.

Research on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) explored five types of behavior for impact on individual well-being: “altruism (helping a colleague), conscientiousness (going beyond the minimum), civic virtue (involvement in the organisation), courtesy (avoiding work-related problems with others) and sportsmanship (tolerating inconveniences and impositions of work).”

The research showed that employees who regularly put in hours and effort beyond the call of duty experience more emotional exhaustion and work-family conflict – especially for those who carry out responsibilities at a high level.

The study also found “employees who already performed well in their job and had a high level of conscientiousness also suffered significantly higher emotional exhaustion and work-family conflict. Those who exerted greater effort in their work and family roles, with a general sense of not wanting to let people down, found they had little left in reserve, increasing the challenges of balancing work with a healthy family life.”

Doing well at work, not surprisingly, leads to more work: “Managers are prone to delegate more tasks and responsibilities to conscientious employees who are likely to try to maintain consistently high levels of output.”

If you get hooked to hyper-conscientiousness as your success card, you’ll feel you have to keep it going, even when it grows.

What if we just cared less?

Beyond the external demands, clinical psychologist Dr Jessamy Hibberd, co-author of This Book Will Make You Calm, notes the internal demands that we create for ourselves on top of external demands. “These are the pressures you place on yourself,” Hibberd told The Guardian. “For example, checking and rechecking work, spending too long on each task, taking work home and setting excessively high standards.”

As Lauren Bravo writes in the same piece, “As promising students we were told ‘aim high! Join in! You can do anything!’ – but nobody thought to mention we could also aim lower, opt out or do exactly what our pay cheque required and no more.”

“The happiest people at work seem to be the ones who don’t care as much,” writes Bravo, “they might just be on to something.”

How do to less and more.

University of California, Berkeley professor and author of Great at Work, says our approach to work is “broken.” He said to Forbes, “We pursue a paradigm of ‘more is better’ — but more hours doesn’t lead to better performance. And it leads to worse work/life balance.’”

From a survey on what really drives performance, Hansen found some secrets behind doing less to create more impact:

Do Fewer Things: Top performers are very selective in what they do and don’t scatter their efforts too much across too many tasks or too many meetings. Hansen says, “It’s counterintuitive. It’s not how much you can get done in a day, but how few things you have to do in order to excel.”

Sarah Knight, author of “The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k,” encourages us to declutter our mind and care less. She also suggests ditching corporate formalities like conference calls, when the time can be used more productively.

Push Back: If you’re asked to stretch yourself across too many things, Hansen suggests pushing for prioritization. “Say: ‘You asked me to do two things last week and now you’re asking for a third. Which should I prioritize? I can do all three, but it won’t be high-quality work.’ You’re not saying ‘I don’t want to do it.’ This requires some courage and tact.” Another tip: Say no to additional responsibilities with low visibility that won’t truly advance you.

“Do Less, Then Obsess”: Hansen suggests to do less tasks, but put attention into doing the things you commit to with excellence. Take time putting the attention into the details and making the work you commit to high quality. Do less, and do it better.

Women have been devalued in the workplace. You can stop devaluing yourself by finding ways to trim away the work that’s draining your energy more than its advancing you towards your own career desires.

Author Bio:

Aimee Hansen is a writer here at theglasshammer.com.

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Women’s History Month Offers an Opportunity to Reflect on the Importance of Women Leaders

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Laura MartinBy Laura Keidan Martin, National Chair of Katten Muchin Rosenman’s Women’s Leadership Forum and member of the firm’s Board of Directors and Executive Committee

In honor of Women’s History Month, it’s important we take the time to celebrate our accomplishments and the progress we have made as working women but also to reflect on the work that lies ahead so women in all professions, particularly in the legal field and others that are traditionally male dominated, can achieve gender parity and equity – especially at the leadership and partnership levels.

At Katten, women attorneys are making a mark. Women are represented at every leadership level from practice head and office managing partner to the board of directors and the executive committee, which oversees all governance activities and sets policies for the firm.

This year, not only are Katten’s female attorneys garnering accolades for their hard work and many achievements, but the firm has also been recognized for its efforts to support the career advancement of women and improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Katten secured spots on the 2018 lists of Working Mother’s 100 Best Companies and 60 Best Law Firms for Women, as well as Yale Law Women’s Top Ten Female Friendly Firms. Katten also achieved Gold Standard certification from the Women in Law Empowerment Forum and is among National Association for Female Executives’ Top Companies for Executive Women.

But make no mistake: there are still more gains to be made as the number of women attorneys advancing to higher levels is sluggish among law firms in general. And the rate of female minorities ascending to positions of power has lagged even farther behind in the legal profession.

As National Chair of Katten’s Women’s Leadership Forum and a member of the firm’s Board of Directors and Executive Committee, I have a personal commitment to advancing and retaining women attorneys through mentoring, external networking, internal relationship-building and career development programs. We want to see women rise to the top at Katten. That’s why as leaders we aim to do more and to do better by offering firm programs and policies to help women climb the career ladder and develop the skills they need to advance to leadership roles.

Women leaders are integral to the success of empowering all women at all stages of their careers. And that’s why Katten’s female leaders are so vested in the development and implementation of programs and policies that help women reach their professional goals. We believe that women’s upfront involvement is critical to getting these initiatives right and vital to our success.

Our women leaders also serve on the firm’s National Mentoring Panel, which is made up of 17 successful female partners recognized as leaders in their fields. These women serve as role models and share their professional and personal experiences as a means of helping their colleagues. But the objective is to be more than just a mentor. Fellow board member Nadira Clarke likes to remind us, “Women leaders can impact how women get business, how they are compensated, whether or not their work is recognized, or whether or not they get promoted.”

Katten leaders continue to work hard to identify the next generation of female leaders at the firm and provide the tools they need to succeed, including diversity-focused initiatives, in which female attorneys of color participate. Such programs can assist in building leadership skills, developing client relationships and generating substantial books of business, which can go a long way toward a greater likelihood of career advancement – and it’s simply good business sense for the firm as well.

Katten is also committed to dedicating resources to set women on successful career paths. We want to empower our female attorneys at various stages in their careers so they see an attainable, upward trajectory at Katten.

And most importantly, we know we can’t achieve greater gender-balance alone. That’s why we collaborate with organizations at the forefront of generating innovative ideas and solutions that will assist us with improving the retention and promotion of our female attorneys. By working together we learn from each other’s best practices so that we can continue to create positive change.

That’s why we teamed with Diversity Lab’s Women in Law Hackathon, which brings together law firms across the nation to create solutions to boost the retention and advancement of women in law, and pledged our commitment to the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion initiative, dedicated to advancing diversity and inclusion within the workplace.

That’s why we signed on to the Mansfield Rule initiative (a winning idea from the 2016 Hackathon). It was a major milestone when Katten achieved certification for meeting Mansfield Rule standards by ensuring that women and attorneys of color make up at least 30 percent of the candidate pool for firm leadership and governance roles, equity partner promotions and senior lateral positions. This year we are also participating in the Mansfield Rule 2.0 which expands our agreement to be even more mindful of diversity by tracking roles in client pitch meetings, including LGBTQ+ lawyers as part of the diverse candidate pool, and making sure that appointment and election processes are transparent to all lawyers.

All of these efforts combine to help push male-dominated industries to focus on creating diverse teams and to snuff out bias, whether intentional or unintentional. They help put more women in the room and at the table when key business decisions, promotions, or job offers are being made. They help transform what leadership looks like today and what it should look like tomorrow. They help encourage the next generation of women to pursue careers in these fields because they see more and more women represented in the industry.

This Women’s History Month, let’s celebrate the affirmative impact of women in the legal profession and renew our commitment to diversity, innovation and greater gender-balance in the workplace. We all have a role to play, to lean in, lead the way and be the change agents. Our careers, businesses and society will be stronger for it.

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Celebrating Entrepreneurs and Equality: How Did You Recognize International Women’s Day?

celebrating entrepreneurs and equality
In honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, the actions of women entrepreneurs and leaders are being recognized by governments, businesses and society more broadly throughout March.

First recognized in 1908 by 15,000 women who marched on New York City, calling for improved working conditions and the right to vote, International Women’s Day is now celebrated globally each year on March 8. This year, International Women’s Day is focused on the theme of #BalanceforBetter with the aim of achieving a gender-balanced world.

Some of the fantastic International Women’s Day events that were held by government-related and cultural-affiliated entities in 2019 included:

  • New York: The sixty-third session of the Commission on the Status of Women will take place at the United Nations headquarters from March 11 – 22. The event will convene individuals from UN entities and non-governmental organizations to discuss women’s empowerment initiatives.
  • Washington, DC: The US Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the US Department of State hosted The Equality Opportunity, which on March 6 – 7 brought together stakeholders from business, government and civil society to discuss ways to further gender equality.
  • London: The Museum of London displayed a special “Votes for Women” exhibit, featuring pieces from the museum’s suffragette collection.

Corporations are also recognizing the importance of a gender diverse workforce by hosting events in recognition of both International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month. View the full list of nearly 600 events listed on the official International Women’s Day website.

Businesses have a crucial role in recognizing the importance of a gender diverse workforce. Goldman Sachs is one of them. The firm has long been a leader in research that sheds light on the important role and untapped potential of women in the global economy.

Insights Driven by Data

Consider this: women make up about 40% of all employees at S&P 1500 companies, but just 6% of CEOs. And across the U.S. economy, women are paid about 20% less than men.

In Closing the gender gaps: Advancing women in corporate America, the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute looks at possible explanations behind these gaps. These include frictions between home and work; the double-edged sword of “family-friendly” policies; gender-specific expectations about appropriate behavior, norms of leadership and definitions of success; the allocation of commercial opportunities; and bias, whether conscious or unconscious. The report offers strategies that firms can use to help level the playing field, such as helping women re-enter the workforce or “upshift” their careers, carefully reviewing compensation and promotion practices, and adding women to companies’ boards.

Taking Action

Goldman Sachs has extended its commitment to female economic empowerment through two flagship platforms – 10,000 Women, an ongoing initiative to foster economic growth by providing women entrepreneurs around the world with a business education and access to capital, reaching women from over 50 countries globally; and Launch With GS, Goldman Sachs’ commitment to invest $500 million in women-led companies and investment managers, as well as to build a global network of business leaders to facilitate connections, share ideas, and uncover opportunities. Additionally, the firm has been focused on its internal efforts supporting opportunity at all levels.

Collectively, Goldman Sachs has four key initiatives that are focused on women’s empowerment – academic, philanthropic, commercial and cultural pillars – called When Women Lead. This is driven by the idea that when women lead, everything changes.

The Role of Philanthropy

One of the initiatives that GS recently launched is the “Portraits” campaign – instead of the traditional CEO oil painting in a gilded gold frame, the campaign makes the portrait subjects graduates of the 10,000 Women program, Goldman Sachs’ global initiative that fosters economic growth by providing women entrepreneurs around the world with a business and management education, mentoring and networking, and access to capital. The portraits are accompanied by the name plaque “CEO.”

An accompanying video brought to life one 10,000 Women scholar’s story, Ayo Megbope, as her CEO portrait is unveiled and brings to life her role as an entrepreneur. Filmed in Ayo’s hometown of Lagos, Nigeria, the video juxtaposes her story against the arrival of her CEO portrait to hang on the wall of her business.

Looking Ahead

As we reflect upon this year’s International Women’s Day, the advancement of women in the workplace – and more broadly the state of diversity in the corporate world – is top of mind. While some progress has been made, there is still ample room for further improvement.

To that end, Goldman Sachs is committed to having women represent 50 percent of the firm’s global talent over time, and as an initial step, is working toward ensuring women make up 50 percent of the firm’s incoming analyst class by 2021. We continue to work toward these goals.

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Op-ed: To Achieve #balanceforbetter in the Workplace, Reinvent Family Leave Policies

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Dale MeikleBy Dale Meikle, PwC

Icelandic primary school children born in the 1970s and ‘80s expressed disbelief when told that a man could be President.

Their mental map didn’t include little boys aspiring to the presidency — because all they’d ever known was a female president. It’s a favorite anecdote of mine because it flips common gender stereotypes while cementing their power.

Gender equality leads to better outcomes for everyone, a theme International Women’s Day elevates this year with their #balanceforbetter theme. At PwC, we approach IWD as another opportunity to challenge stereotypes. The most limiting stereotype at work is that women are predestined to be caregivers. Outdated family leave policies lie at the root of gender inequality in the workplace and beyond. Until they’re refreshed to give individuals and families more choices, women will continue to make up a minority of leaders.

PwC’s US CEO, Tim Ryan, recently said, “Together a new employer-employee relationship can expand what the old one did for decades, create shared prosperity and hopefully build better and more meaningful work and lives for millions.” Expanded family leave and a simple but intentional change in nomenclature will anchor this transformed relationship, paving the way for true gender equality in the workplace.

PwC found that the expectation of work-life balance is exactly the same between male and female millennials; research shows that men and women experience similar levels of work-life conflict and that fathers experience more work-life conflict than mothers. I can say anecdotally that the men I know take their caring responsibilities just as seriously as the women; and that my colleagues and friends without kids don’t value their family, friends, or time any less than those with kids. PwC’s cutting-edge research on engagement drives home the point that the most successful leaders of tomorrow must discover how to deliver great performance by helping people individually thrive.

Beyond the essential birth and recovery period that women must continue to take, women and men should have equal access to time off and flexibility in coming back to work after the birth or adoption of a child. Furthermore, all employees should be offered a minimum amount of leave to care for the people they love. Employees are unique in their needs and the most successful companies will offer benefit choices that work for everyone. Companies and governments should be racing towards inclusive family leave policies, not plodding towards them – and some are beginning to show significant progress.

Culture Matters but Policy Helps

Territories leading in family leave policies are — not coincidentally — also top of the World Economic Forum’s Gender Equality Index. Iceland, a perennial leader on the Index, grants three months of non-transferable parental leave to both mothers and fathers and an additional three months of leave to couples to share as they choose. Its success lies in the uptake: about 90% of Icelandic fathers take the leave.

Netflix offers 52 weeks of paid family leave to women and men (and, with 41% female employees is one of tech’s leaders in gender equality across its staff population); Google and Facebook offer equal family leave to women and men. Last year, PwC US introduced six weeks of fully paid parental leave for all employees, with about 72% of new fathers using the full amount. Employees also have the option to implement a phased return to work after parental leave, allowing new parents to work 60% of their contracted hours at full pay for four weeks following a paid parental leave of absence. Other types of caregivers can receive four weeks of paid leave in order to care for certain family members with serious health conditions. PwC UK offers eligible parents of either gender 22 weeks of full pay and is encouraging more dads to feel like they can take it. Breaking through assumptions about men’s role in families and changing attitudes will be key to capitalizing fully on the good policies that already exist.

To be sure, gender equality is a complex issue with children socialized from a young age to play into narrow roles – and this calcifies the stereotypes that play out later in life. Even in countries with longstanding progressive parental leave – like Sweden – deeply embedded gender stereotypes from sources, namely, the media, hinder gender equality progress.

Globally, women continue to bear the bulk of unpaid care work. Leave to care for children and other loved ones matters now as it has never before because the workforce has transformed, while policies and even norms have stagnated. Many leave policies are woefully out of date, constructed to serve a majority of mothers who didn’t work outside the home and a majority of fathers who were happy to leave domestic duties to their wives. Around the world, family leave policies vary dramatically, with some countries lacking any mandated paid parental leave (United States), and others offering up to three years (Germany, Eastern Europe). In the UAE, new fathers get two days of paid leave, while in South Africa and India they get five. Research shows that new mothers are penalized financially at work, while new fathers are rewarded and these outdated or unfit leave systems perpetuate that trend. It’s not the fact of a woman having a child that hurts her career, but the assumptions that she is less competent and less willing to take on high-profile assignments.

When these policies were crafted, zero percent of corporate workers had caring responsibilities. Today, according to a recent HBR study, seventy-five percent of all workers have care responsibilities, regardless of gender, and regardless of whether they are single or coupled. Families have also evolved: same-sex, single parents, and blended families are exponentially increasing. It’s important to note that leave policies shouldn’t be limited to caring for children, but can and often do also encompass caring for partners/spouses, parents, grandparents, nieces/nephews, or other close family members. Many corporations don’t directly address leave for anyone other than children.

The imperative is there

According to a 2016 study, only 36% of companies have a global parental leave policy covering multiple types of leave, 94% include maternity leave, 76% include paternity leave, and 73% included leave when adopting children. Our leave policies are no longer fit for purpose.

We must provide more support and choices for our diverse workforce and use the term family leave to describe anything other than a woman’s short-term medical leave, when recovering from childbirth. Family leave is not only a gender-neutral term, but covers a wider swathe of employees and accounts for the changing family and household dynamics of today’s world.

About the author

Dale Meikle is the Global People Experience Leader at PwC International

Connect on LinkedIn

Follow on Twitter @dmeik

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Effective Networking for Female Professionals: The Old Girls Club?

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By Nicki Gilmour

It is Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day this week (Friday 8th March, 2019) so tune in for hard hitting editorial on women’s advancement at work, like we do the other fifty weeks of the year also.

According to a new study published last month, women should be networking with other women as well as men if they want to land more prestigious and better paid jobs. This study of suggests women need a women-only inner circle and a larger, well-connected network generally. The study analyzed the peer networks and job placements of 728 students at leading university, representing two class years, from an MBA program in 2006 and 2007. All of the graduates landed leadership jobs, so the (well respected) researchers ranked the positions according to prestige and other factors. The subjects studied consisted of 542 were men and 186 women, which is roughly consistent with the researchers’ findings that women make up about a quarter of business school students nationwide. The conclusion being that a person’s network composition regarding gender split can predict the career success of women. Wired magazine broke down the study and talked to the study authors and interpreted the study with the main message being women and men who are connected to other well-connected peers across their social network do better. In addition, it is extrapolated that women thrive from “gender-specific private information and support.” And men do not need insider information to thrive and advance because, wait for it ‘work is built for them’. Words that interested me from the study’s lead author, Northwestern University data scientist, Brian Uzzi, he goes on to state,

“Quite frankly, most of the jobs are still male-dominated and therefore the kind of private information that’s so important to help women get ahead isn’t as important to men’s advancement,”

Despite Brain Uzzi being possible the leading network expert, a respected expert in social psychology with a very respectable body of work that no one can argue with and some really good advice, it is hard to accept that his conclusion from just final job outcome is the end of the story.

For me, it is very much the opening of the conversation around bias, gender stratification and gender roles, because people decide if the men and women of this study get hired and people negotiate offers for salaries. That is to say, a man and a woman could have made the same connection at the same networking mixer, but the man got hired.

But, if we take this study at face value, then we can conclude that this is not new news as we know women have to work twice as hard at networking just as they do with other areas.

Uzzi shares his opinion on how he feels women should behave via his interpretation only of the results,

“When it comes to networking, women need two things and men only need one, so for every one contact a man makes, a woman has to split her time between the contact that’s going to give her market information and the contact who’s going to give her private information. If you’ve got to split the time between the two, you’ve got to be very smart about the kinds of choices you make.”

It is not a revelation that women have to work harder or are given less credibility for the same thing, or are dinged for same traits. Nor is it a shock to most of you that you do get the scoop from other women, because it could be friendship or a deeper phenomenon involving “out group” dynamics. Call it what you will, because what is real that we pay the same money for those MBAs so we need a way to ensure we get the same Return on Investment as literally the next guy. And for the love of golf, do not ask us to play unless you want to and even then, you are not one of them.

A step backwards?

What this research does not talk about is what men can do to prevent women from having to make choices. You can be a good man yet not be a man who advocates for women to have equal pathways to success.

Then, #metoo comes along with the shouts of “not all men” which of course is entirely valid because we all know some really great caring men who understand consent and respect and where the lines of proper behavior lie. The problem with the “not all men” chant is that it can silence the nuance of useful conservation around “although you do not, but by virtue of a legacy power structure you probably could be you were inclined to, therefore how do we ensure the bad guys are stopped by a new structure so you do not ever have to feel lumped in with them, because you are in fact part of the solution”. Instead, out of fear many men have taken a step back from interacting with women at work. Not helpful. Just actually more indulgent of a privilege to withdraw of a historically dominant group instead of facing the work that has to be done. Some people do not have that privilege to say no without consequence.

Networking past the biases and fear

Most networking information is entirely based on men networking with men with male examples given as an argument for basing your connection on hobbies and passions. Herminia Ibarra’s work clearly delineates the differences between personal, operational and strategic networks and is worth a read.

In this era of strong gender roles still being perpetuated by most people, men and women alike (granted glimpses of hope around understanding the negative effects on boys as well as girls of the patriarchy and toxic masculinity), it no shock that men continue to network with each other in the way they have always known how, excited primal physical arousal states usually with sports and competition. Which is why we have to believe there are physiological differences without believing we are beholden to them. We all have the ability to disrupt our cognitive process with a behavior change. That goes for women too. Start with your own biases. How much do you do love the patriarchy? Odd question you might think, but really look at to what extent do you favor men and boy’s needs over those of women and girls? This question is not about whether you like men or whether you believe in raising strong daughters or whether your husband does the dishes. It is a question about your own value sets, deep, intrinsic ones that are probably buried in your unconscious and then how that affects your conscious and unconscious behaviors.

Why do you go to women for information and perhaps comfort but not for promotion, stretch projects and general greatness? Why do men get immediate credibility and do you give it freely while in parallel asking women to prove themselves?

As we enter the hoopla, ceremony and celebration of International Women’s Day, the question to ask yourself is where are you on this spectrum of consciously and unconsciously endorsing for men because they are men, because it’s a spectrum we are all on.

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Women at Work: The Importance of Strategic Support

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Aoife FloodContributed by Aoife Flood. Based in Dublin, Ireland, Aoife is Senior Manager of the Global Diversity and Inclusion Programme Office at PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited.

International Women’s Day is the perfect time to celebrate the many achievements of women, and think about what more can be done to help them achieve their career goals.

The good news: women are more confident and ambitious then ever. This is one of the findings of a new PwC report – Time to talk: what needs to change for women at work – which looks at the views of over 3,600 women around the world from employers representing 27 different industry sectors. We focused on women in the pipeline, aged 28-40, because it’s at this stage that we start to see female representation gaps widen and the challenges of combining personal and career priorities increase.

Leadership aspirations on the rise

Women are more career confident and ambitious than ever; 82% are confident in their ability to fulfil their career aspirations, 77% in their ability to lead, and 73% are actively seeking career advancement opportunities. Furthermore, they have strong leadership aspirations, with 75% of women saying it was important to them they reach the top of their chosen career, namely obtain a leadership position. Women are confident, ambitious and ready to progress.

But the survey also highlights we still have a long way to go and identifies three strategies which are essential to creating a more inclusive working environment. One of these strategies centers on the importance of strategic support, ultimately highlighting that support networks and advocacy go a long way. In a nutshell women need strategic support.

Women need strategic support to succeed

Think of this strategic support structure as a series of circles. In the middle is the individual woman: an ambitious skilled professional who needs the confidence to put herself forward to achieve her career and personal aspirations. Fundamental to this is the support she gets from the circles around her: her workplace and personal support networks.

Time to talk

In the workplace, she not only needs a manager who will help develop her talent and advocate on her behalf, but a series of informal and formal support people and programmes. She needs role models of both genders to look up to and learn from, mentors who help her navigate the path to success and sponsors who can push her to the next level. Personal experience has taught me just how critical sponsorship and advocacy is. The two biggest career milestones of my career, which involved me moving into new areas of the Human Capital spectrum in which I’d no previous experience, would simply not have happened without male sponsors who on each individual occasion were advocating that I was worth taking a chance on when I wasn’t in the room.

In the world outside of work, the third circle, she needs a supportive network, from parents to partner, and friends to peers, that reinforce her career ambitions and work life decisions. For example, women might need to enlist family members and other people to take on more home life or caregiving responsibilities in order to allow her to be successful at work. Interestingly, 84% of the women in our survey in a relationship identified as being part of a dual-career couple and 80% of the women in the survey said they have support from their family and/or partner in their career ambitions.

Self-advocacy pays off

Traditionally, women have been uncomfortable with self-promotion. Our research shows that when presented with a promotion opportunity, women are much more likely to expect to get a tap on the shoulder from their employer; expecting their hard work to be recognised as a symbol of their ambition to progress. They are also hesitant to put themselves forward where they feel they don’t meet all the job criteria for the role.

On the other-side of the spectrum, however, the good news is that women are definitely being more proactive in pursuing their career goals. They are more actively negotiating for and seeking out the experiences seen as critical to advancing their career such as high-visibility projects and stretch-assignments. And our survey showed it is working – there is a strong positive correlation that the women who negotiate are getting what they ask for.

Women won’t succeed without formal and informal support networks. In the workplace, the critical issue is finding the right mix of push and pull to help women simultaneously realise their personal and professional ambitions. And in their personal life, women need to discuss balancing their career and personal ambitious and asking for the help and support they need to achieve these.

Women are more confident and ambitious than ever before, but they need to be able to self-advocate and vocalise where they want to go. This blend of workplace and personal relationships and support is critical to supporting and reinforcing a woman’s self-belief and catalysing their self-advocacy.

My advice to women this International Women’s Day is:

1. Think about what you can do to solicit greater levels of strategic support.
2. Reframe the action of ‘self-promotion’, which has negative connotations for many women, as self-advocacy.
3. This month, put your hand up for a stretch assignment you may be hesitant about, say yes to something you are not sure you are ready for, or schedule time with your boss to make your career aspirations known. Realise the power of self-advocacy and relish the results.

I know it certainly has worked for me. I wouldn’t have been involved in leading this research publication if I didn’t put my hand up four years ago to lead PwC’s first global diversity thought leadership project, something I had never done before. That decision four years ago has led to me being involved in some of my most enjoyable and career developing work, in addition to raising my profile both within and beyond PwC.

Find out more about the importance of strategic support in PwC’s Time to talk: What has to change for women at work publication: www.pwc.com/timetotalk

Follow Aoife Flood at @aoiferflood.

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