When the European Union commissioner Viviane Reding called for a quota system last week so that more women would get into boardrooms, she raised predictable protests. Even Reding, the senior justice official for the EU, admitted that she wasn't a fan of quotas.
"However,'' she said, "I like the results they bring."
But what if her real mistake was that she asked for the wrong quota?
In the U.S. women occupy fewer than 15% of the seats on corporate boards, and only 2.6% of chief executive offices of Fortune 500 companies. In Europe, the numbers are even worse, prompting Reding's exasperation. But for women to really get ahead in the boardroom, we need a quota on how much time men spend helping out at home.
Women already have what it takes to make to the corner office on their own. Females are competitive with males in academic programs when they are given the chance to compete. And according to a 2007 McKinsey and Co study of 89 European companies, firms with more female leadership had a better return on equity, growth in stock prices and operating results than firms dominated by men.
Correlation is not causality. Perhaps there were other reasons those firms with women were profitable. But in a globally competitive market, there is no reason to think that passing over talent in a skirt is a winning strategy or that it's a good idea to forgo insights from leaders likely to have better insights into consumer demand for half of the world's population. You might think that firms should be rushing to hire more women.
Why not? Fewer women than men have the "round the clock availability" that it takes to be a corporate leader. The problem is that, in today's world, women do more family work than men -- a lot more. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks how much time people spend in various activities, reports that in 2010 American families with children under the age of six did not share family work equally. Women spent an average of 1.1 hours a day with children while men spent an average of 26 minutes.
Employers know that women are more likely than men to drop out or reduce their hours during child-bearing years -- precisely the time in a person's life when many men put on the steam to achieve career success. But the problem is not only during the child-bearing years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports than on an average day in 2010, "20 percent of men did housework -- such as cleaning or doing laundry -- compared with 49 percent of women. Forty-one percent of men did food preparation or cleanup, compared with 68 percent of women." Then there are aging parents to take care of, and the list goes on.
A 2009 survey of faculty at Berkeley found that men and women do not spend equal time on family work until age 62. To the extent that productivity is related to hours worked, the ability to put long hours in the office and to forgo work interruptions on account of family responsibilities are important factors in career success.
The bottom line is that the plum jobs and the fattest paychecks go to the people who have the hours to spend in the office.
What should we do about it? Mandating paternity leave and family work would fix the problem but it would not work in practice. Even if such a scheme were to pass muster with the U.S. Supreme Court, ambitious men could refuse to claim paternity rather than to help with the kids -- an option not available to mothers. In Sweden, where men are bribed to take parental leave with a take it or leave it "daddy month," many men choose to continue working, signaling their willingness to "do what it takes" to get to the top. MIT has found that male faculty granted parental leave are more likely than female faculty to spend the time working on their scholarship and attending conferences rather than staying home with the baby.
Better and cheaper childcare would help more women enter and stay in the workforce. But we know from Scandinavia, where universal childcare is available, that helping women get and hold jobs does not help them climb all the way to the top of the corporate ladder. Even in Sweden, where government support for childcare is among the most generous in the world, few women make it into the top corporate jobs, and among those who do, disproportionately few (60% compared to 95% for men) are married with children.
So what can we do? Help poor women afford good childcare so they can earn an income and so their children can become strong contributors to society. Organize the workplace so people don't need to work continuous hours to remain productive. Find better ways to measure productivity than hours logged. But most importantly, raise children who will grow up thinking that family work is not a woman's job. Unless and until men are willing to spend as much time at home as women, the boardroom will be a man's world.
As with any "quota," it merely disguises the fact that it's not the education, or experience you bring to the table...it's all about how the person was born. That is strictly against everything this country stands for. No one should be "placed" in a position over someone else who has earned it. So in order to combat it, we want to DO it? It makes no sense whatsoever. Equality has always been, and will always be about opportunity...NOT result.
The same was said about women in the workplace by sexists who were just making observations. Women couldn't view things without emotion, they couldn't be objective, they didn't have the same logical thought for business... All of this is false. It is what they WANTED to believe. People study the RESULTS of what our society achieves, not the ability for others in society to achieve it. Men are as capable of handling anything in the home that women are capable of doing in business. It is not a gender issue. It is a gender divide. We choose to see and believe only we can do something that someone else can't because of gender/race/religion, etc. But as innocently as it is relayed, it shows a deep lack of understanding in our society and our culture of what true equality is.
It does sound like you understand that you made a decision to not make money your top priority, so I can only assume that you also understand the gender/wage gap is merely a reflection of those choices. You don't sound like you'd blame men for not making 2x as much as them because it reflects your personal values, not some great societal bias.
So you have an apple pie and a cherry pie. One has a piece of apple, one has a piece of cherry. The one with the apple screams it's not fair they don't get any cherry. The one with the cherry screams it's not fair they don't get the apple. They keep fighting with each other claiming the other needs to give them some. And depending on the people, they can claim sexism, racism or any other form of bigotry as to why they don't have both flavors. In this scenario, it takes a 5-year old to work out the solution so both are equally rewarded. But in our society? Oh no...we've got a bunch of selfish toddlers who have no concept at what equality takes. They just like to sit and scream about what they don't have. Children grow out of that. Society builds political parties on it.
hmmmm. So when you get a flat tire at @ 2:a.m. YOU are the one who gets out in the snow storm to change the tire because he did it last time?
'Cause I'd gladly do the laundry every single time forever if I knew he would always take that duty.
YOU do all the heavy lifting while he directs you?
Someday take the focus off yourself and actually notice what HE does.
That perpetual to-do list in their heads is what's known as a HONEY-DO list.
Gender equality only requires a attitude shift which already occurred, not a redistribution of people into new roles. People should be free to do what they want to do without a feminist or anybody else deciding for them where they fit into the interconnected global civilization we live in.
Men make up 90% of the prisoners which is a fairly uniform proportion internationally. Men also make similar proportions of top leadership positions. A abundance of good comes with a abundance of bad. For men love must be earned where as women can take it as a given. Men are willing to take a lot of risk to get ahead for this reason. Men fill more high risk, high reward roles.
This is complete nonsense. Love is not a given for women - especially not the love of sexually opportunistic men, which of course isn't love at all.
Everyone has to earn what they get in life - both personally and professionally. Your illusion that women have a free ride is how you perpetuate your own sense of victimization. I find it so strange that men who have been unsuccessful with women think women can have "love" whenever they want it - if only they would accept the offers of men they don't want!
"We don't see mountains of legislation doing nice things for men, instead we see men focused on doing things for women because that serves the self interest of those men."
More illusion. Men don't do "nice things" for women in the professional world - quite the opposite! And the "nice things" they do for "self serving" reasons - that's called manipulation. It's not nice and it's not love.
Sorry I said love, when I could have just said SEX. Men have to earn access to that too.
This is not my sense of victimization talking. We need to recognize the world we live in the way it is and not the way we want it to be. IN short KEEP IT REAL! You seem to twist things to fit the human behavior mode
we've seen so many examples of that in the past few thousands of years, and there's so much of it going on today. for example, they're very willing for women to control their own bodies, and the number of children they have. they were very willing to have women go to school, work, control their own money, have their own credit cards and loans, etc.
this will totally work. it's totally ingrained in men to have women control their own lives and have influence in society. THIS WILL TOTALLY HAPPEN BECAUSE MEN HAVE VERY SECURE EGOS.
oh for pete's sake. it's going to be a war to get women into any boardroom, because that's what men turn everything into. get ready for it.
Men have this nasty habit of thinking everything has to be EARNED instead of realizing homw much more important it is to GIVE to the more deserving.
everything that males have achieved, they done so by applying fair standards to women. look at the middle east! nothing but fair treatment there. look at what we're talking about now in america--birth control and abortion! meanwhile, men have totally earned the right to have viagra and vasectomies completely covered.
you want to talk about the nasty habits of men, dear? do you want me to get me started on that? just shut up.
The exact same thing can be said about increasing the power a man has in the home, and decreases her power. It's shouldn't be a zero-sum, but many believe that it is. This article points to it pretty clearly.
The writer herself points out, "we need a quota on how much time men spend helping out at home."
But that's a loaded statement isn't it? What if one were to say, "we need a quota on how much time women spend helping out in the boardroom." Pretty sexist, right? We're not asking for women to control the boardroom, we just want them to help out...what does that mean, get coffee? So you can see, that statement is just smoke and mirrors as far as "power" is concerned. It sounds good on the surface, but the reality is that the statement still wants her to control the home. If it were to work, it would have to be quotas of men that control the home and family, meaning they HAVE to get custody in 50% of the cases in a society that sees 50% of marriages breaking down. That's just not going to fly...
continued...
I thought it was BEDroom.
At what point is society going to address most women's insistence on marrying up?
Girls in school tend to establish small defined cliques. They work well together within their clique, but cliques don't work together. Most of the bullying, in my middle school experience, is done by girls and they are quite viscious towards each other. Boys do bully, but it's usually short lived. Girls in school also fall right into roles that tend to put boys at higher leadership levels even though they are not necessarily better leaders.
However, where I've seen women working together and supporting each other greatly school wide was when I taught at an all girls school. My conclusion is without the distraction of boys, adolescent girls are very capable of performing in ways that would be key to higher levels of success among women.
I'm all for separating the sexes for grades 7-12. Girls and even boys would do so much better academically.
check out the gender composition of upper management. it's all men, dear. women don't make it up that far because men keep them out. don't try this GIRLS ARE MEAN crap. short-lived bullying? boys do this? yeah, look at the middle east. that's what the men over there are doing. working together and being supportive. meanwhile, women in sweden, denmark, and new zealand are totally ripping those countries apart.
you're very ignorant. please stop talking.
To point women are political and more social than men; men will not pine over the new fall line of clothing.
Face it women are critical of every detail a person is or presents themselves as.
If women were not so critical of superficial things men would still be wearing loincloths and animal skins.
Often when planning for the baby they decide they'll both keep working. After the end of maternity leave often the mother decides she can't stand the idea of daycare so then the couple decide that she'll stay home til the kids are in school. Once the kids are in school she rationalizes either not working outside the home or only under-employed because she doesn't see a point to working for the amount of money she'd make having been out of the work force for so long.
No. Not in the context of this article. We're not talking 40hr work weeks. We're talking 60-80 work weeks. It means not having much of a life outside of the office.
If both spouses really want to climb the corporate ladder AND have kids, they should strongly consider polyamory.
Once children enter school it makes no sense for a parent to stay home, but for a woman to rise up in the corporate ladder the man would have to take on the primary caregiving role even after kids enter school - taking them to doctor's appts, going on field trips, preparing lunches, shopping for clothes, caring for children when they are sick, etc.
I dont think you understand what polyamory is, lol.