Does workplace equality come home?

Over the last few generations, many societies have made major strides towards gender equity, particularly in the public sphere. Some of this may come from the demands of economics of the industrial and post-industrial revolutions, others from changes in attitudes, but all over the world, women are coming back into the workplace.

So what effect is this having in households? What is the relationship between women’s income generation outside the house, and intra-household bargaining, i.e. housework shared between spouses?


Last week Kathleen McGinn and Maya Ruiz Castro of Harvard Business School presented some of their preliminary research on these very questions. They suspect that:

1. Women’s income and their involvement in societal leadership roles are shaped by both gender attitudes and intra-household bargaining outcomes, including the allocation of household work and childcare.
2. More equal distribution of household work and childcare between spouses and less traditional gender attitudes are associated with higher earnings, greater supervisory responsibility, less work-life conflict and greater life satisfaction for both men and women.

They’re currently analyzing data from the global 2002 International Social Survey Program to see whether things like 'who does the laundry?' or whether there’s additional help from grandparents might affect equality within marriage and income. Meanwhile, how can public policy on parental leave and workplace equality affect changes in gender attitudes that are carried into the household?

Just last week, The New York Times published an article adding another dimension to the conversation: do women’s empowerment and intra-household bargaining, then, affect marriage dynamics, and in particular sexual behavior?

While having a “peer marriage” in which both partners do housework and childcare has become a bigger factor in women’s marital satisfaction, the article finds that, very often, “the less gender differentiation, the less sexual desire.”

With all of these changes---in women’s workforce participation, intra-household bargaining power, sexuality, and power---will societies adjust their expectations accordingly?



Photo: Bertha Stallworth, age 21, inspects 40mm artillery cartridges at Frankford Arsenal during WWII. Source: National Archives, 208-NP-1WW-1

Reflections on the Second Wave of Feminism

The Woman:Judge Nancy Gertner, Professor of Practice, Harvard Law School
The Talk: Is the Cup Half Full or Half Empty: Reflections on the Second Wave of Feminism
The Question: How can women achieve parity? Demand more; Never settle.

When Judge Nancy Gertner interviewed for her first clerkship as a Yale Law School graduate in the spring of 1971, the judge asked her, “Do you plan to marry and have children?”. Now, four decades and two children later, Gertner reflects in her new book, In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate, how she challenged the male-dominated law profession, upset the status-quo, and continues to inspire parity in the field.

Forty years ago, Judge Gertner believed that when women achieved 50 percent of law school degrees, they would become 50 percent of law firm partners and federal judges. But woman attained 50 percent of law school graduate degrees in the early ‘90s -- almost 20 years ago -- and yet they hold only 19 percent of law firm partner positions and are less than 30 percent of federal judges.

"The Leaky Pipeline"

Gertner’s research, coupled with similar undertakings from the nonprofit, Catalyst, found that women are more likely than men to leave firms or drop down to part-time employment. When these women left their firms, they did not switch positions; instead, they went home. Family and personal responsibilities were the number one reason women left their firm jobs. She refers to this dropout as "The Leaky Pipeline".

More strikingly, however, her talk mentioned an even greater phenomenon coined by Facebook CEO, Sheryl Sandberg: Women lean out, not in.

"Young women lean out right away, knowing that they are going to have children. They choose a career path that enables them to have children," says Gertner. "Instead of choosing the partner route at a large firm, they choose a medium-sized firm; instead of corporate law, they choose family practice… and this is changing attitudes." It appears that the first wave of feminism -- where women donned shoulder pads and briefcases -- is being met with the reality of the infamous, and seemingly unattainable, "work-life balance". As long as women continue to be (or are believed to be) the main caregiver, the percentage of women in the upper echelons threatens to remain static. To contrast this, women need to lean in, not out.

"The Opaqueness of Discrimination"

But Gertner finds another pressing issue in the work place: discrimination is no longer explicit, it’s implicit. Unconscious biases slip into judgments, stereotypes, and decision-making, and it prevents women from attaining top positions. “If the only discrimination is the one where a boss says, ‘I hate women’, we’ re not going to see this,” explained Gertner.

A study from the White House Project emphasizes this same conclusion: “..the largest barriers to women’s progress in the legal profession come from systemic and subtle bias rather than overt discrimination. Unconscious stereotypes, inadequate access to support networks, inflexible workplace structures, and sexual harassment are widely-cited factors.”*

What can be done.

Gertner gave two solutions for those in attendance: government incentives and personal perseverance.

For example, imagine if families received a tax credit for childcare? Or if paid corporate maternity -- and paternity -- leave were reimbursed? Or if companies had a fiscal incentive to create a corporate culture balancing work and familial responsibilities for both women and men? This would not only encourage more balanced gender norms, but would begin to institutionalize it.

And finally, says Gertner, to achieve parity at the highest levels, women need to demand more. They need to be unsatisfied with the status quo, because while the status quo may be “better” than 20 years ago, it is still not equal.


*White House Project Report: Benchmarking Women’s Leadership (2009). http://www.benchmarks.thewhitehouseproject.org  


Melissa Sandgren is an MPP1 candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and a participant in WAPPP's From Harvard Square to the Oval Office program

Do Women Make Board Meetings More Effective? - WAPPP Seminar Series

The Woman: Miriam Schwartz-Ziv, Fellow, Program on Corporate Governance, Harvard Law School
The Talk: When All Are A-board: Does the Gender of Directors Matter? (paper pdf)
The Question: Do Women Make Firm Boards More Effective?

Imagine you're a man walking into a meeting of your firm for the first time and see this group of individuals discussing decisions in the company:

Seems like a pretty normal set-up. A majority-male board -- which remains the standard in most private-sector firms -- awaits you.

Your group of 7-10 people will meet, discuss, and make recommendations to the CEO in an environment that is off the record, behind closed doors.

Now, imagine you walk into the same board room and see this:

Does the gender change effect how productive a company is?

According to Miriam Schwartz-Ziv, mixed gender boards that have 3 or more female directors present at meetings perform better than all-male boards.

Researching over a year's worth of minutes from 11 firms in Israel, Schwartz-Ziv was able to calculate small but significant rises in the amount of initiative boards took relative to previous meetings, as well as how much information the board asks from the CEO (when controlling for 3+ women, she found that there was an 87% increase in asking for information).

According to Schwartz-Ziv, these two metrics imply that there is a "peer monitoring" effect that forces the genders to be more proactive. "Women may tend to not assume as much as men do, so they ask for more information," say Schwartz-Ziv. "And because someone besides men is in the room, there's a feeling of needing to take action'."

What exactly is at play is hard to tell. Since board meetings happen behind closed doors, it's often difficult to understand how content, interpersonal relations, and personality play into the decision-making process. Since the study was conducted in Israel, it's also difficult to know if the results would be replicable in countries where gender parity is far wider, or where women do not have strong leadership roles in the private sector.

Lastly, is the peer monitoring effect a question of gender and status, or just gender? Put another way, if a female secretary were in the room instead of a director, would men still feel pressed to be more productive at their meetings?

While these questions remain, Schwartz-Ziv's study has important policy implications for firms that are thinking about whether or not they should factor gender into their leadership decisions. At best, there is evidence to imply that it may be better to encourage more female leadership at the decision-making process in order to make firms more productive.