A tale of two feminisms

Do women opt out or are they pushed out of a global economic agenda?:

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

Every year the World Economic Forum laments the lack of women in top corporate ranks. The number of women attending has never broken 20%, notwithstanding strenuous efforts to create incentives for participants to add women to their delegations. Many sessions focus on women, work, and family; female leadership and mentorship; and the global education and promotion of women and girls.

Unconscious bias runs rampant in offices, in men and indeed often women. Deep assumptions about who women are and what leadership looks like often leads management to have less confidence in women than in men. Those same assumptions can also sap confidence among women themselves.

Radical imbalance

A second approach to advancing women focuses on the radical imbalance between breadwinning and care-giving. Well over 50% of women in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries are breadwinners, but a tiny percentage of men are caregivers.

Among American parents, mothers spend roughly twice as much time as fathers on childcare. Having a daughter is a predictor of avoiding being in a nursing home. That means that most working women are trying to hold down two full-time jobs while competing with men who have the luxury of focusing on only one. Even when husbands “help,” the responsibility of managing and directing the work that needs to be done still falls to wives. But the workplace still simply does not make room for care – of children, parents, or sick or disabled family members. Sociologist Pamela Stone puts it, women are less likely to ‘opt out’ than to be ‘shut out,’ denied the flexibility and part-time arrangements they often need to be both the parents and the professionals they want to be.

These two feminisms – call them confidence feminism and care feminism – are complementary. Both are needed to achieve actual equality between men and women in the developed countries. (In developing countries it is still necessary to start at a much more basic level, providing women with equal legal rights, the ability to plan the size of and timing of their families and the education and training to earn their own livings.) Either one alone will fall short. It is much cheaper, however, to embrace confidence feminism, through special bias training, women’s groups and mentorship programs, than care feminism, which requires much more extensive and expensive changes in the way we work. Workers who do not have care-giving responsibilities can advance faster or take advantage of flexible hours and time off for self-care.

Retaining talented women

Other ways of tapping the talent of workers who are both breadwinners and caregivers include allowing and indeed inviting job-shares, a way of providing full-time coverage for a client or project with half-time workers or creating sabbatical or leave programs.

The US Navy, for instance, has a ‘career intermission’ program designed to retain highly trained personnel by allowing selected service members to make a transition from active duty to the reserves for a period of up to three years, with a means for ‘seamless return to active duty.’

The military invests an enormous amount in training their people; they understand that losing women is losing an investment. Athletes reach peak performance through interval training W shouldn’t we look at careers the same way, with intervals of intense work and intervals of work combined with care or care alone. On a more routine basis, Cynthia Calvert of Workforce 21C recommends that all managers develop ‘work coverage plans’ identifying workers and teams that can cover a colleague’s workload if and when that colleague is out for an extended period.

Good corporate practice routinely requires top managers at least to have succession plans, identifying who in the ranks would take over if the boss is hit by a bus. Planning for the inevitable but unpredictable rhythms of human reproduction, growing, ageing and dying should be equally routine.

Equally expensive, however, is the cost of change – disruption of established ways of working.

Harvard Business School Professor Robin Ely, who has conducted extensive research on why firms lose talent – both female and male – describes an intense resistance to the changes that she and many of her fellow consultants recommend: A rethinking about what good work is, where and when it needs to be done and how to value performance over presence. Adopting policies aimed at helping women can be done on the margin. Changing work practices for everyone is much harder.

Here’s a different lens. Why not view disrupting the workplace with the same enthusiasm we embrace disrupting the hotel, taxi or professional services businesses? Call it innovation for life, for women and men alike. Let’s give them the confidence to advance themselves and the ability to care for each other.

The author Anne-Marie Slaughter is the President and CEO of New America, a US think tank.

- World Economic Forum