Slow Progress and More Broken Rungs
LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company's tenth annual Women in the Workforce report makes for grim reading.
ALSO IN THIS POST…
Amazon’s back-to-office mandate
Babies in slings are tied to London statues
Last Tuesday, LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company published the tenth annual edition of their Women in the Workforce report, a damning reminder of the gender inequality that so stubbornly shapes our economies.
The report is notable because it’s the largest study of the state of women in corporate America and Canada. This year, researchers incorporated the perspectives and experiences of more than 15,000 employees working across more than 280 companies. They took a particularly close look at intersectionality: the biases and barriers faced by Black women, Latinas, Asian women, LGBTQ+ women, and women with disabilities.
Over the last few years, I’ve probably studied hundreds of reports on the challenges that women face in the labor market. Some have, of course, been more valuable than others, but the vast majority have featured a similar refrain: Women are more empowered than every before, but we’re also nowhere near gender parity.
Tuesday’s Lean In and McKinsey report is no exception. Over the last ten years, women have made gains at “every level of the corporate pipeline,” the report found. But also: “We are nearly 50 years from reaching parity in the workplace.” The report found that “women still face the same early-career headwinds as a decade ago.” It’s that infamous broken rung that so many women are intimately familiar with.
One particularly interesting observation in this report, relates to the plight of the so-called “Only”—individuals who find themselves as the only woman in the room, or the only woman of color in the room.
The report found that one-fifth of all women in the workplace today are “onlys” for their gender and about 40% are “onlys” for their race. (Of course, when you look at the demographic makeup of the highest echelons of the corporate world those statistics aren’t exactly surprising: Remember that just 10.4 percent of Fortune 500 companies are currently run by women.)
Being the only woman in a class, on a team, at an office, or in an entire company is, of course, lonely. We know that feeling isolated can be demotivating and depressing. As humans, we’re susceptible to in-group bias, or a tendency to give preferential treatment to those who we perceive as belonging to the same group as ourselves. It follows that the only woman on a team will be less likely than her male colleagues to get the sole promotion, even if everyone is equally qualified.
Then there’s this: Women who are “onlys” for their gender, according to the report, are about 2.6 times more likely to experience microaggressions than women who aren’t. Women who are “onlys” for their race are about 1.7 times more likely to experience microaggressions.
“Women who are “onlys” are far more likely to have their leadership abilities undermined,” Rachel Thomas, the co-founder and CEO of Lean In told me. “Onlys” are also more likely to get hurtful comments than women who work on more diverse teams.
When we think, talk and write about gender inequality in the labor market, we so often fall into the trap of speaking in sweeping generalization. We frequently treat particular demographic groups as monoliths. This concept of the "only” intrigues me because it encourages us to do exactly the opposite: To consider the lived experiences of one single individual. And that’s why I decided to write about it for The Persistent last week. You can read the full piece here. And while you’re there, you might be interested in my deep-dive into the complicated legacy of Margaret Sanger which I wrote on the occasion of her 145th birthday.
Amazon Snaps Back
Apropos of women in the workplace, I joined the collective groan that sounded out when Amazon last week announced that it would be mandating all of its employees (yes, yes, with some exceptions) to come back into the office full time.
Here’s what CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo:
“To address the […] issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID. When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant. […] In summary, we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another. If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.”
Of course Jassy is not wrong. In-person work really does facilitate the sharing of knowledge and that very special osmosis of ideas and creativity. But I do worry that this is a blanket policy that sets us back in our pursuit of creating workplaces that are more human-centric and therefore sets us back in our pursuit of creating workplaces that are more accessible to all and more diverse and inclusive.
As a reminder, in 2021, when initial Covid-related restrictions eased, allowing daycares to reopen and school-age children to return to in-person learning, the number of mothers in the paid labor market—especially mothers of very young children—actually started to climb and eventually surpass a pre-pandemic high.
The reason was simple: Many of these women were working for the first time because the changed norms of the labor market meant that they now could. Not having to commit to being in the office eight hours a day, five days a week, gave them the chance to apply for, and accept, jobs that had previously been untenable.
A report published by the workplace consultancy Glassdoor in 2023, estimated that between 800,000 and 1.3 million more women joined the U.S. paid labor force during that time, because a greater availability of remote-work positions made it easier for them to balance the demand of care with well-paid work.
Since the pandemic, plenty of evidence has also shown that women, and especially mothers, place a huge amount of value on flexible hours and the opportunity to work in a hybrid manner when applying, accepting, or staying in a job. But top managers, it seems, are in many cases deaf to demands that, the last few years have proven, are entirely reasonable.
Instead of considering both the quantitative economic and more qualitative anecdotal evidence that overhauled workplace norms have the potential to make employees happier, companies more competitive, and economies stronger, many are falling into the trap of reverting to the familiar.
And in this case, the familiar is a system of living and working that it premised on little more than the predilections of rich industrialists who lived a hundred and two hundred years ago.
My hope is that it will eventually transpire that we actually are in a period of evolution when it comes to workplace norms.
My hope is that mothers and anyone else for whom the in-person default doesn’t work, will vote with their feet. My hope is that employers will be forced to understand that they ultimately pay the price of fostering workplaces that don’t work for all. But let’s see. Amazon is, after all, a big fish: a work-culture bell-weather.
Changing History With Baby Slings
And finally this week, in case you haven’t seen, men campaigning for enhanced paternity leave last week attached slings with life-size model babies in to statues of men across London in a brilliant move to pressure the government into improving the UK’s parental leave policies.
As Amelia Gentleman reported for the Guardian, activists from a campaign group called the Dad Shift, targeted statues of the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the actors Laurence Olivier and Gene Kelly and the footballers Thierry Henry and Tony Adams.
“The UK has the worst paternity leave offer in Europe, with only two statutory weeks of leave, paid at £184.03 a week,” Gentleman wrote. “As a result, recent research found one in three UK fathers took no paternity leave after the birth of their child, and one in two families where the fathers took paternity leave reported struggling financially afterwards.”
She reported that the campaigners also plan to deliver an open letter to prime minister Keir Stamer later this month, calling on him to take swift action to improve paternity leave.
A quick reminder here that the US is still the only rich nation offering no national paid parental-leave program.
WOMEN MONEY POWER: THE BOOK
After a bit of a hiatus for book events, I’m really excited to be traveling to California next month where I’ll be speaking at UC Santa Barbara as part of what looks to be an incredible series: Justice for All.
I’ll be speaking at Campbell Hall at 7:30pm on Thursday, October 17. Tickets are free for students and $18 for everyone else. And they include a copy of the book. More details here!
That’s all from me this week. I won’t be publishing next Monday, September 30 but I’ll be back in your inboxes October 7.
Thank you so much for being a loyal reader!
Josie
Ps: As always, a last shameless request. If you’ve read WOMEN MONEY POWER, the book, or listened to the audiobook, I would hugely appreciate it if you could take just thirty seconds to post a review or rate it on Amazon using this link. If Goodreads is your jam, that’s just as great, and you can leave a review or rating here. Thank you so much for your support!