While women appear to be doing better in many ways — two have even run for U.S. president as major party candidates — there has been limited progress in gaining leadership positions in business. That has to do with a lack of corporate and government policies to support women as they balance work life and home demands, concluded a task force of female business leaders, entrepreneurs and activists convened by The New York Times at the DealBook Summit on Dec. 4.
There is no question that women have made some major gains: Women now sit on the Supreme Court and Joint Chiefs of Staff, are among House leadership, and even on the International Space Station. Still, women hold only 10 percent of the leadership positions of Fortune 500 companies.
“Do you see that as depressing?” asked Jodi Kantor, a New York Times reporter who moderated the panel. “Do you see that as enormous progress?” The hard question, she said, is “why at the time when women are really, in so many ways, doing better than ever in society — have experienced so much educational, social, financial progress — why is progress still limited in the business world in leadership positions?”
Corporations and the U.S. government have done little, the panel agreed, to make it easier for women to juggle caregiving demands with the time and dedication required to climb the corporate ladder. What is needed are policies providing for greater paternity leave, more diversity in the workplace, better child care options and a more flexible work environment, they said.
Donna Langley, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment & Studios, said it was a pivotal moment. “We’ve got to hunker down, pivot, shift our strategies, really think about how we harness all the power that we have accumulated over the last few years, and put it to use, but in a different way than we’ve been doing it,” she said.
Thasunda Brown Duckett, the president and chief executive of TIAA, one of the world’s largest pension funds with nearly $1.3 trillion in assets under management, said that while women had now achieved a “base camp” of rights, “there’s another mountain to climb.”
She noted that women, on average, live five years longer than men but retire with 30 percent less in savings. Many women work in entry-level jobs for small employers that do not offer benefit packages, and women do not have pay parity with men for comparable work. It is a rare woman who has ascended to the executive suite.
“Talent is created equally,” Ms. Duckett said. “Opportunity is not.”
“We have to see what is getting in the way of the everyday woman to be able to feel that she can succeed,” she added.
One obstacle, the panelists said, has been the belief that women could “have it all.” Brooke Boyarsky Pratt, founder and chief executive of knownwell, a health care provider focusing on weight issues, said a quarter of the women she knew at Harvard Business School froze their eggs to have a career first and a pregnancy later. The only problem was, very few of those embryos actually resulted in a pregnancy, she said.
“There’s false hope in the sense that, now that you have these eggs, you can just have a baby at 40, 35, 45 and everything is going to go swimmingly,” she said. Information about the poor outcomes of egg freezing would have allowed women to plan more realistically for their futures, she added.
Brooke Shields, an actress and entrepreneur, agreed. “More information is power,” said Ms. Shields, who mentioned that she had undergone seven in vitro fertilizations. “If you go in with the knowledge, you’re able to be more proactive.”
Many companies may be generous in providing fertility benefits, but that’s where the support often ends, the panel noted. In fact, there is a “motherhood penalty,” said Reshma Saujani, founder of the nonprofits Moms First and Girls Who Code, one of which focuses on women in the workplace, the other on girls seeking tech careers.
“We have to often ask ourselves, ‘Why do we have the most educated population of women with the least amount of participation in the labor force?’” Ms. Saujani said. “It’s because we become mothers.
“Motherhood is the unfinished business of equality,” she added. “We are good. We are smart enough. We are prepared enough. But we are not given the structural supports to balance being a caregiver and being a worker. And that’s it.”
Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange Group, sees progress as a “giant leap forward” and then “two steps back.” In her case, she said she returned to work two weeks after giving birth, reflecting her desire for motherhood and a career.
“I wanted to be a mom and have this joy around a new person I created,” she said. “But I still wanted to be me and talk about financial markets.” The challenge was to be someone who “has a lot of love” to give to a baby and her parents, and is “an incredibly, wildly ambitious, intelligent person who can be an outside contributor to the best society that exists in this world.”
Amy Griffin, founder and managing partner of G9 Ventures, a venture capital firm with an all-female staff, said that she had seen more venture capital funding flowing to start-ups co-owned by women: a growth from 2 percent of all funding a few years ago to around 24 percent today, she said.
“Our goal is to go out and tell investors and people who are starting companies that ‘You need to take women as investors,’” she said. “‘You need to put women at your table. Look at what you are missing. ’ ”
One big help to women in the workplace would be having greater paternity benefits for men and assurances from companies that men would not be penalized for taking time off, the panel agreed. This would have the added benefit of getting men to shoulder more of the burden of child care, allowing women to focus more on their careers.
The panelists also discussed the need to change the culture so a man is not stigmatized for staying home to raise children. If women are to succeed professionally, it may require men to do more at home, changing the dynamics of traditional relationships.
“It’s not a question of your dignity,” Ms. Duckett said. “It is not a question of value. And it’s not a question of what it means to be the ‘head of the household.’ Those are conversations that we need to have.”
Efforts to limit diversity initiatives were also cited as a threat to women’s advancement. “We don’t live in a meritocracy,” Ms. Saujani said. “And yet we pretend we do.” She said that companies that had supported initiatives to get more girls interested in tech had closed their activities because of the growing attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Remote work got mixed reviews. While some welcomed it as providing flexibility, Emma Grede, co-founder and chief executive of Good American, a clothing company, said it hindered advancement.
“The idea that you can be successful from your dining room table is about as much of a joke as work-life balance conversations,” said Ms. Grede. “You aren’t going to get far unless you surround yourself with people, because nobody is successful on their own.”
Nonetheless, Ms. Grede said, some flexibility was needed when her employees had family matters that inevitably came up.
From her perspective as a successful fashion designer, Diane von Furstenberg said what was important was “to build women’s confidence.”
“And that confidence in being a woman can do so much,” she said.
Ms. von Furstenberg also emphasized the importance of kindness, especially as discourse globally has become more harsh.
“I’m in the winter of my life,” she said. “I have made it my mission to make kindness sexy. That’s what I want to do because I think that kindness is a currency and generosity is the best investment. It helps everything.”
Takeaways
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More corporations have been offering fertility treatments as part of their health care plans. But that’s not enough. Equally necessary is help after a child is born — more paternity leave, child care support and flexible career paths.
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Men need to step up and assume more of the caretaking at home. To do so, corporations and society need to value men’s contributions on the home front and support policies that allow for more flexibility in men’s careers as well.
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Flexible work schedules and remote work can benefit women, but only to a point. To rise in a corporation, a woman needs to be visible, to have daily contact with others and to be part of a corporate team.
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