Wednesday For Women: Professional Working Women…an inspiration.

Today’s post was inspired by my 3 contacts I had with professional working women yesterday.

Take One: At a function last night, I met a single parent.  She raised her son on her own since her son was an infant.  She put herself through an undergraduate school, graduate school and has advanced her career nicely.  She’s also engaged in leadership positions outside of her job.  Her strapping teenage son has excellent prospects.  Despite having endured and persevered more than most, this young lady was as optimistic about her future as anyone I have met.

Take Two: I spoke to my daughter last night.  She is interviewing this morning for a summer internship position.  She called on an HR colleague to assist her in prepping for the interview.  My HR colleague is a working Mom.  One of the most diligent, effective and optimistic professionals I have met. And she has time to help my daughter, after juggling job, commute, dinner, children, laundry etc. etc.

Take Three: I traded emails with a new blog follower yesterday, formerly not an acquaintance.  I asked her how she found me.  She shared with me that she’s tied to her computer for 72 hours toward the end of the cycle for product delivery and happened to come across my posts on women in leadership positions, Buddha, Winston et al.  Another professional working woman hard at it.  Welcome…I’m glad to have you on board.

Working women – I don’t know how you do it.

Three recent Women in Business articles that are worth reading:

1) Harvard Business Review: Why Women Leaders Need Self-Confidence

2) Forbes: The Secret to Being a Power Woman: Wake Up Early

3) The Economist: Special Report On Women & Work (See excerpts below)

• Women have made huge progress in the workplace, but still get lower pay and far fewer top jobs than men.
• Since 1970, women of working age who have paid jobs across the rich world has risen from 48% to 64%
• In America last year, more women were working than men—until the recession caught up with them.
• In America in the early 1970s, more than half of all families with children consisted of a breadwinner husband, a stay-at-home wife and two or more kids; now only a fifth do. Instead there are lots of single-parent households, and even if couples live together they no longer necessarily marry. If they do, the wives are likely to go out to work, whether or not they have dependent children, and take only a short break for maternity. Life is too expensive for most families to be able to manage on one pay cheque. In most rich countries the dominant model now is the two-earner family, with both parents working full-time.
• Women have gained the freedom to pursue a wide range of careers, financial independence and much greater control over their lives.
• Women have made great strides in all kinds of careers, but they still find it much harder than men to bag the most senior jobs. The picture is much the same everywhere: men and women fresh out of college or university are being recruited in roughly equal numbers; half-way up the ladder a lot of the women have already dropped out; and at the top there are hardly any left. The rate of attrition in the middle ranks has slowed a bit in recent years, but the most senior jobs remain almost exclusively male. Women make up just 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs.
• And despite sheaves of equal-pay legislation, women get paid less than men for comparable work. That is partly because they often work in different fields, and many of them are part-timers with lower hourly rates. But even in identical jobs they earn slightly less than men from the beginning, and as time goes by the gap gets ever bigger. Across the OECD it now averages 18%. That is a lot less than what it was 40 years ago but in recent years it has stopped narrowing.
• By 1980, American women were graduating from college in the same numbers as men and have since overtaken them by a significant margin…and the dual income couple was born.  Across rich countries the share of those aged over 25 who have had some form of higher education is now 33%, against 28% of men in the same age group.
• Despite growing numbers with higher education, women are still not landing top jobs.  It’s not enough, why?

• Women may not be helping themselves by concentrating heavily on subjects that set them apart from men. In rich countries they account for over 70% of degrees in humanities and health, whereas the vast majority of degrees in mathematics and engineering go to men. Women with humanities degrees are less likely to be in demand for jobs in high-tech industries, which tend to pay well. At postgraduate level the gap between subjects gets even bigger. And on MBA courses, the classic avenue to senior corporate jobs, women make up only about a third of the students.

• One reason is that female managers tend to work in so-called functional specialities (such as HR) rather than line management, which is the main hunting ground for the very top but often involves extensive travel and unsocial hours.

• Boards have traditionally been made up of white middle-aged males of similar backgrounds who are comfortable with each other and recruit new colleagues in their own image. Women, even if they can be found, “are a bigger risk”…they have a different style and are more visible, so if something goes wrong everyone notices.

• Women themselves are often reluctant to put themselves forward for promotion. They have few female role models to look up to, so it takes a leap of the imagination to picture themselves in charge. Promising young men are often guided or sponsored by older colleagues, but there are few senior women who can do the same for younger female colleagues, and if an older man roots for a younger woman it can send the wrong signal. Men also benefit from informal networks that often involve socialising after hours and talking about sport. Women may not want to join these, or may find themselves excluded.  Some women find the culture of organisations so offputting that they see little point in rising to the top.

• Work in most organisations is structured in ways that were established many decades ago, when married men were the breadwinners and most married women stayed at home. Yet even though the great majority of families no longer fit that pattern, most workplaces have failed to take the change on board. They think they are being egalitarian by treating women exactly the same as men, but women’s circumstances are often different. “We shouldn’t be fixing the women but the system,” says Alison Maitland, a senior fellow with The Conference Board, a think-tank, and joint author with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox of “Why Women Mean Business”, a book about women in leadership roles. A lot of men, as it happens, would also like to see work organised more flexibly to fit their lives better.

• Though biology need not be destiny, it would be silly to pretend that having babies has no effect on women’s careers. Although women now have children later and in smaller numbers, they often start thinking about having a family just at the time when career-oriented people are scrambling madly to get to the top of their particular tree. Most workplaces set critical goals for aspiring leaders (such as making partner or joining the board) at specific ages. Some women join the scramble and forget about having children, but if they take time out to start a family they find it very hard to catch up afterwards.

• Women can be their own worst enemies. They tend to be less self-confident than men and do not put their hands up, so they do not get the plum assignments or promotions or pay rises. Iris Bohnet, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, says that women are less likely than men to negotiate for themselves (although they do very well when negotiating for others), and less willing to volunteer an opinion when they are not sure. They can also be too honest. When a team led by Robin Ely, a professor at the Harvard Business School, was asked to advise a consultancy on the reasons for high turnover among its women, it found that the firm’s projects were often badly managed, making for long hours. The men, it discovered, were not happy either, but they quietly rearranged things to make life easier for themselves. The women went part-time or quit.

• Discrimination continues in subtle ways. Business schools that follow their alumni’s careers find that men are promoted on their potential but women are promoted on their performance, so they advance more slowly. The women adjust to this, which slows their progress even more, and so the discrimination goes on without either side necessarily being aware of it.

• Underusing women across the spectrum of human activity is obviously wasteful. Their cognitive endowment is the same as men’s, but because they have different interests and styles, they make for more diverse and probably more innovative workplaces. And since most rich countries’ working populations are ageing, women’s talents will be needed even more in the future. So what is to be done?…1) Legislation/Quotas…2) Government regulations that ensure that tax rules do not discriminate against dual earner families; legislate for reasonable maternity and paternity leave; push for school hours that allow both parents to have paid jobs; subsidize child care for the very young or make it tax deductible…3) Keep plugging away with current model.  Progress is slow but it is happening.  Women’s career options are vastly improved over last generation.