Study: What’s holding women back in the workplace?
LIFT IOWA STAFF Oct 5, 2015 | 6:37 pm
2 min read time
592 wordsAll Latest News, Lift IOWA, Retail and BusinessLast week, LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Co. released the results of a study of 118 companies and nearly 30,000 employees that found that corporate diversity initiatives aren’t doing much for gender equality — and not just in the C-suite where the disparity is greatest, but at every corporate level.
Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook Inc. and founder of the Lean In Foundation, said in an article for The Wall Street Journal that corporate America is not on the path to gender equality.
“If NASA launched a person into space today, she could soar past Mars, travel all the way to Pluto and return to Earth 10 times before women occupy half of C-suite offices,” she wrote. “Yes, we’re that far away.”
So, what’s holding women back in the workplace? The typical story goes like this: Women rein in career plans to spend more time caring for family. What’s more, they are inherently less ambitious than men and don’t have the confidence that commands seats in the C-suite.
But the study reveals that something else is happening on the way to the top. Contrary to popular belief, writes Rachel Schall Thomas, president of Lean In, the women in the study are not leaving companies at higher rates than men. The structure and culture of work is slowing them down.
The Wall Street Journal reports in a separate article that women are not abandoning their careers in large numbers; motherhood, in fact, increases their appetite for winning promotions; and women overall don’t lack for ambition and confidence that they can take on big jobs.
Yet when asked whether they want a top role in their companies or industries, a majority of women say they would rather not grab the brass ring.
Roughly equal numbers of men and women say they want to be promoted: 78 percent and 75 percent, respectively. But as men’s desire for big jobs intensifies in the course of their careers, only 43 percent of women said they want to be a top executive, compared with 53 percent of men. Perhaps most startling, 25 percent of women feel their gender has hindered their progress, a perception that grows more acute once women reach senior levels.
Why is that? Thomasl writes that women experience an uneven playing field, a workplace skewed in favor of men. They are twice as likely to think their gender will make it harder for them to advance, and research suggests they are right.
Gender bias disadvantages women. Women walk a tightrope at work that men don’t. If a woman is seen as competent, she is often less liked, and if she is well-liked, she is often seen as less competent. Further, women’s performance is often underestimated, and women are frequently held to higher performance standards than men.
Also revealed in the study was that gender diversity was not widely believed to be a priority. Although almost three-fourths of CEOs are highly committed to gender diversity, fewer than half of employees believe it is a top priority for their CEO, and only a third believe it is for their direct manager. And while 70 percent of men think gender diversity is important, only 12 percent believe women have fewer opportunities than men.
In the end, according to the survey, women are 15 percent less likely than men to be promoted to the next level. At the current pace, it will be more than a century before there is gender equality in the C-suite.
The message for corporations: There’s a lot of work to do, and it starts at the top.
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