A Family-Friendly Recession?: Cut Hours, Not Jobs

We've heard a lot recently about how this recession is affecting men's jobs more than women's. But while women's relative labor-force participation rises in recessions, most of the jobs women hold on to earn small wages and low status. In the long-term, recessions can have very negative effects on women's careers -- both at the individual and national levels. Gains for women earned through years of effort may be swept away in the undertow of layoffs, when flexibility and diversity efforts suddenly disappear.

Women's movement up business ladders and through glass ceilings is endangered right now. Early reports suggest that on Wall Street, a disproportionate number of women overall and almost all those hired in through firms' "opt-in" programs to work flex time have been let go. Little thought is being given to maintaining diversity as layoff decisions are made. This could have huge negative effect long-term. One financial insider (who requests anonymity in sensitive times) observes about the downturn: "In this industry, it definitely set women's progress back at least 20 years."

The current issue of Forbes documents a resurgence of sexism in the finance field -- "In the worst financial crash since the Depression, financial services and insurance firms have cut 260,000 jobs. Seventy-two percent of the missing workers laid off have been women, even though they constituted 64% of employment before the crash began."

Women overall earn a lot less than men do because many industries are still strongly sex-segregated, often because women with kids need part-time or otherwise flexible work. Historically the jobs offering such arrangements have paid less.

But the professions are not as gendered as they used to be, and some women do make high wages. Additionally, once sufficient numbers of women reach positions of influence within business and government, they change the gender-dynamics of the workplace at all levels, introducing family-friendly policies and challenging the gendering of the pay structure. The work still gets done, but on a new, more flexible schedule. It takes a while to establish these new dynamics, which allow women to contribute more fully to the national economy.

While women comprise only 15.2% of boards of directors and 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs, they hold 50.6% of professional and management positions. As a result, 79% of businesses reported offering some flex options in 2008, the pay equity bill is now law, and we have several initiatives in Congress to put all workers on an equal playing field.

Progress has been made, but the recession could halt it, and not just in the finance world. In troubled economic times the historical tendency has been to send the ladies with higher-status jobs back home, or down ladder, pushing them out not just through individual actions but through policy changes and negative media messages.

In the Depression, working women were scapegoated for men's lack of jobs, and the group's career progress was set back for decades. Similarly, in the recessions of the 70s and 80s and in this decade, women's progress up ladder was slowed by a hostile environment that paralyzed the EEOC, undermined access to abortion and birth control, and portrayed women's job losses as the result of a choice to stay home.

When recessions past ended, laid-off men returned to good jobs. Women remained largely in dead-end, low-wage work. With their collective status diminished, post-recessionary women had less ability to influence business policy than before the recession, and the system remained biased in favor of people without care-giving commitments (remember that these are not "merely personal" commitments, they are essential to the running of the nation). Eventually the trickle up began again, but the recessionary cycle ensured that it remained just a trickle. Recessionary setbacks have been a big part of the answer to the question "Why has women's progress been so slow?" The Wall Street example makes it clear that long-term setbacks could occur again now.

Can we break the recessionary pattern? Absolutely.

Firstly, as Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute notes, flexibility has suddenly become a mainstream business strategy for companies seeking to retain current workers rather than having to start from scratch with new employees come the upturn. Reduced hours are among the cut-backs on the table, until things improve. President Obama endorsed that option in his Inaugural speech, and the savings to the nation when people stay in jobs speak for themselves.

Reduced hours may look like automatic family friendliness, but if the reduction is entirely on the employers' terms it doesn't help parents in need of flexibility much more than the standard workweek did. If employers work with employees, male and female, in devising reduced schedules, all parties gain.

And the government can assist. In 17 states, a Shared Work program helps employees and employers who must reduce hours by paying pro-rated unemployment benefits. In 2008 in New York 83% more employers participated in this program than in 2007, and a 2009 surge is already underway. In Texas the program is little known, but word is spreading. This option makes much more sense than layoffs in many environments and should be available nationwide.

Where potential savings on worker health care pushes employers to consider cutting workers they might prefer to cut hours for, government should cover the difference.

A second break with old patterns lies in society's enormous capital investment in women's education and in the extensive work experience women now have. Like any other form of capital, business leaders should find ways to utilize this human capital in a downturn. Smart employers will make every effort to hold onto their best talent, whatever the worker's gender.

Thirdly, the enormity of the failure of the business culture of greed means the time is ripe to rewrite the model and move toward a culture of care. Rather than view the downturn as reason to turn away from initiatives that support women's participation in better-paid jobs, the nation will be best served if we redouble our efforts in that direction, to take advantage of our full national talent pool.

It's time for new ideas and big pictures. In today's troubled economy, one way business and government can collaborate to keep workers, male and female, employed is by cutting hours instead of jobs, at all levels. One by-product could be that the old recessionary patterns that slow women's progress up career ladders finally fall away. But we're going to have to work actively and intentionally to make that happen.

Elizabeth Gregory is the author of Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood (Basic Books); she teaches at the University of Houston.

Comments

[h0tr0d]

Are there any studies that show flexibility and diversity are actually good for productivity ? In all the companies I have worked for these key tenets seem to reduce productivity rather than improve it.

[Elizabeth Gregory - Huffpost Blogger]

Like anything, flexibility and diversity can be done well or badly. See familiesandwork.org for multiple studies of how innovative approaches to HR assist the bottomline via productivity and retention. Here's a piece on BestBuy's successes with flexibility: http://www.customerthink.com/blog/why_circuit_city_bankrupt_best_buy_thrives
We all get to observe a real-world test of what strategies are most effective for short-term and long-term success in the coming months.

[h0tr0d]

Interesting article, although personally I don't agree. I spend lot's of money on electronics and I can tell you I haven't bought anything at Circuit City in 10 years. I shop at Best Buy because they always seem to have the lowest price.

[spinns17]

im enjoying seeing greedy companies going out of biz to.they also lived beyond there means.most dont even know how to run a biz..take one for the gipper .not

[spinns17]

my friend lost his job to a someone thats not legal .if thats not a [e-mail] for less money then he made.guess we have no say on anything anymore.american workers are losing everything now .jobs ,homes, medical insurance .the most productive in the world,.and we are getting less.what a joke.

[corwin]

I don't know what you teach at Houston,but would be surprised if it's business.(­Actually,I­'d be astounded.)
Re' the women earning less.If women doing the same job made 77% -or whatever the inane number being used,why would any company hire a man.remember,the same service is offered at 77% of masculine wages.What is being compared is jobs someone arbitrarily decides are 'equivalent'.In other words,n oil roustabout makes a lot more that a day care worker;one is male dominated.The other is female.The­refore,sex­ism.I suppose Shell could cut wages for roustabouts,but they wouldn't have workers.so,you are deciding some poor schmuch pay more than he needs to fill the job?
Secondly.Hugo Black proposed legislation for job sharing in 1936.It went nowhere .a bunch of people said;"We're already staggering.And you think you know more about how we should handle our workforce than we do?'For obvious reasons,it went nowhere.

[Elizabeth Gregory - Huffpost Blogger]

Actually, I'm not discussing comparable worth here -- not invoking the 77 cents on the dollar figure. Instead, I'm beginning from the fact you acknowledge, that women have historically worked in lower paid fields (like daycare)--then moving on to discuss the fact that SOME women have moved into higher paid jobs (like law and finance). All the recession talk has focused on women losing fewer jobs than men, most of them low paid. My question here concerns what happens to better paid women in a recession. Historically, they've been pushed out, and the Forbes article suggests something similar is happening in finance. Then I go on to explore one potential solution in shared work. Businesses can figure out for themselves if it makes sense, but necessary to consider it in the first place. A good time for innovation?

[schatsie]

My company actually cut our time off... essentially a 4% pay cut...