CEOs and Secretaries by Edwina Burn
Edwina Burn examines gender bias in the workplace and finds the glass ceiling largely intact.
For many years I have struggled with the various feminist attitudes that have crossed my path. Apparently, according to many of the feminist groups on campus, I’m unequal and men rule the world. It doesn’t matter that I don’t feel remotely oppressed. According to these women, I am a victim of an inherently sexist social structure.
That sort of mentality just doesn’t sit well with me. After all, women are not a minority group. We outnumber men 52 to 48 per cent. I have an arts degree and half a law degree, a good job, and have never been professionally, personally or academically overlooked because of my gender. From this platform it seems ridiculous to suggest that I am less likely to succeed professionally than my male counterparts.
Indeed, based on the University enrolments for 2007, it seems to me that men ought to have a much harder time gaining employment than women. In 2007, 26,335 women enrolled at the University of Sydney, as opposed to 18,847 men. Graduations reflect this gender disparity, with women continually outnumbering men, particularly at the higher levels of study.
So you can imagine my shock when I learnt that the feminists were right – men actually do rule the world. Or at least the corporate world. In 2003 a survey of the ASX 200 companies showed that women made up only 8.4% of company directors and 3.2% of CEO positions. Within the professions, women typically make up about half of the company employees but are underrepresented at partner level. And the statistics are not changing over time. The figures from the 2003 survey show less than one per cent increase in female representation at director and CEO level since 1994.
With high numbers of female graduates contrasting an alarmingly low number of women at the top levels of corporations, one has to wonder what is going wrong.
The reality of corporate culture
Corporate culture is a funny thing. The people who work in the large corporate firms are generally highly competitive, quite intelligent and very hardworking. Or very well connected. Either way, taking a graduate position at a corporate firm is like climbing onto a ladder – you start right at the bottom and you kick, bite, and crawl your way up.
Every day is spent with your performance monitored and billable hours measured. After all, you are just a small part in a very large machine whose aim is to make money, and lots of it. And as far as these large firms go, when there are hundreds of young whippersnappers vying for your job, individuals who aren’t performing are disposable.
Granted, these sorts of pressures affect men and women alike. But women face extra stresses in professional life. For starters, the under-representation of women in higher levels of corporate firms, a fact true across nearly all professions, means that there are fewer mentors available for women than men, and women at high levels are forced to work in a male-dominated environment.
But what other factors are responsible for women failing to progress to the higher echelons of corporations?
First of all, women are likely to earn less than men. Based on 2003 figures from the Annual Practicing Certificate survey of the legal profession, the average income for women was $75,700 as opposed to men who earn $92,000. That is a twenty thousand dollar deterrent to persevering in a corporate firm. But it gets worse – when you look at lawyers who have been practicing for thirty or more years, there is on average a $19,800 disparity based on gender.
Add to this the hours involved in corporate work. Twelve-hour days are standard at an entry level and tend to increase as you rise up the food chain. But this emphasis on long hours is a systemic barrier to female advancement, since women are forced to take time off to have and look after children.
To be fair, men are also subject to the same professional pressures as women, often resulting in the relationships with their children suffering immensely. But typically, the bulk of domestic responsibility falls upon women.
For male readers who are about to start screaming about househusbands, I refer you to the recent Family Responsibilities Study that said that only 32% of male professionals have a partner who works full-time, as opposed to 85% of women. It is extraordinarily difficult to work a twelve-hour day when you’re picking up the kids from school, organising dinner or looking after a sick child. And for many women, working from home is bad for your career when ‘hours at the desk’ is what endears you to management.
Further, maternity leave in corporate firms is dismal. Women are expected to give birth, recover, and bond with their child in a modest three months. But even that short period would be suicide for one’s career. Three months out of the office, not using your professional skills and not keeping up to date with industry developments is a significant blow to one’s professional advancement. With scant few programs in place to assist women to reintegrate after maternity leave, it’s no wonder that women are being left behind. It’s nobody’s fault that women are child bearers, but we’ve known about this for a while – it’s high time that large firms start to accommodate this fact.
Women also tend to feel excluded from workplace environments. The culture of Friday night drinks is one that helps build teamwork and allows employees to develop a report with their superiors in a casual environment. But for women with family commitments, staying out drinking with your colleagues is often not an option. This means that women tend to be excluded by their colleagues and anonymous to their employers.
Finally, to put the cherry on top of the working-woman’s sundae, one in three professional women will be the victim of discrimination and/or sexual harassment - a number that can only decrease with more women in positions of power.
What to do?
Thankfully, most professions have officially recognised the difficulties faced by women in terms of career progression. Many firms are starting to implement programs in response to this. Progressive firms have started women’s mentoring programs, designed to build confidence in younger women and help them to develop strategies to succeed. Further, many firms have now adopted a more relaxed attitude to part-time work.
But these responses are superficial.
First, having coffee with a senior partner once a month is not going to change the fact that you are expected to juggle very long hours with ‘frivolous’ concerns like raising your children.
Second, working part-time, whilst allowing more flexibility as to hours, does not help women to gain promotion and rise to the top positions within firms. Indeed, adopting part-time work would significantly decrease the likelihood of your being promoted, as you are simply not in the office half as much as everybody else. Such a measure, whilst helping women to stay at work does not help to change the fact that women are underrepresented in senior positions.
But this is where it gets sticky. Is it really fair to men, who work full time and often have families of their own, to be overlooked in favour of a woman who is only in the office two days a week? Further, and importantly, is it fair to other women who have chosen not to have children to have their long hours at the office overshadowed by someone who has been changing diapers and watching playschool for the past six months?
Many would argue that this is a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. That if you choose to have children, you are signifying a preference against your career.
Such attitudes, though, are simply indicative of the lack of importance placed on parenting work. The fact that people think that looking after children is somehow easier than working in a large firm is indicative of corporate approaches to parenting. I would argue, however, that this approach disproportionately affects women. A woman who leaves work at seven o’clock to go and cook dinner ‘lacks commitment’ to their job. Conversely, a man who leaves work early to see his daughter in a ballet concert is likely to be applauded.
The only solution that strikes any sort of balance between these competing interests is a restructuring of the ways in which corporations evaluate their employees. Working from home should be embraced. Online document management systems should be utilised. Currently, firms discourage working from home because of the risk of having confidential documents outside of the office. This complaint, though, is a weak one and can be circumvented by rigorous password security measures.
It’s hard to envisage a corporate environment where the hours are shorter. However, systems can certainly be implemented to facilitate men and women working at home.
There is, however, also a commercial aspect to this debate. Why should a company hire two part-time employees when it could hire one full-time employee? Should companies be expected to loose money to accommodate the personal choices of their employees? The answer to these questions is invariably ‘yes’. Firms cannot be allowed to make money at the expense of gender equality. The fact that the current commercial structure is systematically disadvantageous to the professional progression of women is evidence that the structure is not working.
Many would argue that the high number of female graduates will lead to a grass-roots change. But as long as women are forced out of their career trajectory by family commitments, and isolated by the self-perpetuating male-dominated culture, there will be no real change. Women will continue to be punished by corporate culture until the system of evaluation and promotion is altered.