Hannah Riley Bowles on NBC's TODAY Show

This weekend, WAPPP research director, Hannah Riley Bowles appeared on NBC's TODAY Show to discuss Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella's comments about how women should not ask for a raise.

“It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along.”

Hannah shares the research: that women are hesitant to ask for a raise in large part because of this type of social backlash. Until organizations and systems are fixed, women can overcome this bias by employing relational accounts when asking for a raise.

Watch Hannah's piece here:

How do we fix the work-life balance for everyone?

Over the last generation, we've seen a lot of changes. These days, more than two-thirds of children have two parents that are working full time. Meanwhile, those parents are simultaneously responsible for elderly, babyboomer dependents---which cuts into their financial responsibilities as well as their time. Add on other vital hobbies, leisure, a social life, and other priorities, and we see that balancing work and life is getting more and more difficult.

This was the challenge that Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University addressed in her recent seminar on “Work-Family Policy in the United States.”

Some private companies have allowances for personal leave, but low-income workers, who wouldn’t be able to pay for supplementary help (like babysitters or nurses), don’t necessarily benefit from this. So there’s clearly a need for the public sector to get involved.

While the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 requires companies with more than 50 employees to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, the United States does not have paid maternity leave. Some of the states that are considering laws of that nature---California, Washington, New Jersey, and Rhode Island among them---are the same ones that currently have Temporary Disability Insurance. TDI is a publicly funded pool of money (taken from a small amount of payroll tax) that provides about 55% of wages for employees that are temporarily unable to work for up to six weeks, and job protection upon their return. Of course, when the US Supreme Court mandated that TDI must cover maternity leave as well, no other states adopted it.

Some other options for assisting with work-life balance have been paid sick leave, flexible work hours (outside the 9-5 box), and assisted care. Currently, child and elderly care only exist in a very expensive private market, while middle income families are often eligible for tax credits. Lower income families receive some subsidies---and since the welfare reform of 1994, HeadStart programs have been expanded to care for younger children. But those programs still cover only 30% of eligible families due to a lack of funding.

So what’s the next step?

One big challenge is simply framing the issue. The feminist movement in the US has been reluctant to talk about family issues out of fear that doing so will hamper equality in the workplace.

Instead, Professor Waldfogel has proposed something different: speak more broadly of the importance of work-life balance for not just fathers and mothers---but for caregivers. And more broadly, for those who have responsibilities and personal priorities outside of work---a balance is important not just to one’s self, but to an employee’s health, sanity, and ensuing contributions to hir organization.

Frankly, the nature of work has changed in America, and not necessarily for the better. We value even the perception of quantity over quality; as Anne-Marie Slaughter rightly wrote, “more time in the office does not always mean more ‘value added’.”

While we rethink the work-life balance, we really ought to reconsider the work-work balance itself.

Beyond the Glass Ceiling

Today my friend sent me a link to Boys Clubs Tumblr – a visual collection of “the corners of the world where women have yet to tread.” It is mind-boggling how much progress we still have to make in closing gender gaps.

At WAPPP Seminars this year we discussed some of these “corners of the world.” There are the overwhelmingly male corporate boards, the merely 18 female CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies, and the female stock brokers earning less than their male peers. But we also heard about female leaders helping their countries address inter-group conflict, female professors inspiring young women to pursue STEM careers, and the women mobilizing their communities for land rights. 

In the final seminar of the academic year, Professor Matt Huffman, of the UC Irvine Sociology Department and the Paul Merage School of Business, brought research to bear on another question – do women managers change the workplace itself?

There is some evidence that female managers do close gender gaps among their employees. One study found that wage gaps were smaller inlocal U.S. industries with many high-status females. Two other studies explored gender segregation and found that female managers increased female hiring and gender integration in the California savings and loan industry and in California’s state agencies.

Huffman set out to study these phenomena on a much larger scale, using Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s data. EEO-1 reports, which are filed by all “medium and large” firms under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, amount to a set of longitudinal workplace data spanning decades. Each report breaks out the managerial and non-managerial occupations at a specific work site and reports on the number of women and racial minorities in each category. Because the work sites are identified by name and address, the individual files are confidential and only available to a handful of researchers. For Huffman, this presents a goldmine for empirical analysis, complete with information on industry types, organization sizes, and other potential control variables.

Since the data did not include wages, instead of focusing on wage gaps, Huffman decided to study organizational segregation – a measure of how evenly men and women were distributed across the non-managerial categories in the organization. Using regression analysis on 1975, 1986, 1995 and 2005 data, he demonstrated that organizations with a higher percentage of women in management positions were less gender-segregated in the non-managerial ranks.

Though the most recent work places were generally far less gender-segregated than the older cohorts, even without female managers, the pattern across all four points in time was similar – higher percentage of female managers meant more integrated subordinates. In other words, breaking up the boys' club at the top, helped break the barriers among departments and functional areas below. 

Huffman ran a series of other analyses to pinpoint aspects of the workplace context that amplified or diminished the gender-integrating effect of female managers on their organizations. He found that managerial formalization and company growth were both conducive to the gender integrating effect of female managers. Perhaps it is because formal structures can give women more access to power than a loose work environment might. It may also be because a female manager in a growing organization has more opportunities to hire people, altering the gender balance of her workforce.

Why does gender diversity and gender integration matter? First, women bring unique lived experiences to the workplace, and given that women are also half of the consumers, it is prudent to include their perspectives in developing and selling products and services. (Maybe if the Apple Inc. team added some women, someone would have thought that iPad could be a bit of an awkward name...). Second, companies with more female leaders make more money and women executives make venture-backed companies more successful, despite the fact that the venture capital world is still decidedly a boys club. 

Finally, gender equality is the just and the smart thing to do, which is why WAPPP's work closing gender gaps in economic opportunity, political participation, health and education is so important.

Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.