"Shriver Report" Lauds "A Woman's Nation" - Building Gender Balanced Business

• “A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything,” the title of the Center for American Progress study more generally known as the Shriver Report, addresses how all facets of US life and work have been changed by women’s becoming a full half of the country’s work force and the primary or significant earner in two-thirds of American families. “Quite simply, women as half of all workers changes everything.”

• The report outlines both the effects of these changes and, crucially, the modifications to American life they necessitate to help women, men and especially families navigate and profit from the shift.

• The report, named for Maria Shriver, the wife of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and a scion of a longtime American political family, maintains that while the change in women’s roles should be apparent to all, “we, as a nation, have not come to terms with what this means.”

• A survey of more than 3,000 Americans presented in the study concludes that a “truce” has been declared in the war of the sexes, and that the emphasis now is on how outside entities such as business and government must adapt to this truce to facilitate all the advantages and new behavior of the “woman’s nation”.

• Different chapters of the report address:
  — the economic and familial fallout of the expansion of the labour force;
  — what government and corporate policies are needed to better profit, on a micro- and macroeconomic basis, from the reliance on women in the workplace;
  — the impact on men of the changes, and what benefits they can and should be realising, for themselves and their families;
  — media’s (mis)impressions of the new status and power of women, and what girls think of the new world, both the reality they see and the media version of it.

• As well, the study outlines new policies that would make “the woman’s nation” better, for women, families, companies and society as a whole:
  — government should require such family-friendly labour policies as paid family leave and increased funding for child and elder care;
  — social insurance needs to be adapted to new family dynamics;
  — companies and managers need more flexible thinking in terms of when, where and especially how work is done, for employees of both genders, all ages and all levels of the corporate ladder;
  — education funding and timing must be altered to facilitate women’s continuing education and training;
  — husbands and wives need to understand that shared familial responsibility, rather than the old model of clearly deliniated roles, is the new glue to lasting marriages.

• Shriver wrote only the first chapter of the study but has been its public face, including giving and granting interviews to a US television network that has provided a week of intermittent coverage of the report, in an effort to increase public awareness of its contents and findings.

• The public image aspect also includes essays, most of them quite short, from a variety of celebrities and other Americans of both genders, that add gloss as well as some reality to the overall picture the study paints of America as a woman’s nation.

To download the 454-page report or read it online, chapter by chapter