Flexibility for Everyone - Building Gender Balanced Business

October 30, 2008

The US is one of four countries in the world that still does not offer any paid maternity leave. Understandbly, many women who can afford it take career breaks when they have children. Sylvia Ann Hewlett has written extensively on the need for companies to develop what she refers to as “on-ramps and off-ramps” to facilitate this. They are. Is this the best response?

Hewlett describes, in a recent Harvard Business blog, how financial firms are introducing a number of programs, specifically targeted at women, to help them “return” to work after a career break. The description of these programmes is revelatory. Merrill Lynch provides “re-tooling” for women returning after a break (what tools do women lose in producing babies?) Goldman Sachs provides “an opportunity for women to demonstrate their ability” (prove to me your tools still work) while Bank of America invites alumni back to company events “to build and strengthen their skills” (get some new tools).

While well-intentioned and surely welcome to many of the women involved, I think this is 20th century thinking. And risks having unfortunate consequences for women’s careers and men’s ability to parent.

Around the world, studies from the OECD, the UN and Goldman Sachs, have shown that parents don’t want to choose between work and family. Countries and companies that force this sort of choice by not recognising and facilitating the reality of dual-earner 21st century parenting, are behind the times.

Insisting that it is only women who have children with programs aimed at ‘maternity’ issues only serves to marginalise women further from the mainstream corporate highway. One third of American wives out-earn their husbands, even on Wall Street, where younger women are out-earning their male peers. Isn’t it time to recognise that it might be men taking parental leave?

The more advanced countries in Europe have pushed instead for child care policies and facilities that allow parents to stay at work. The result is that parents take shorter breaks, and have more children. That’s why France and the Nordic countries now enjoy Europe’s highest birth rates. They have understood that the either/or choices between work and family is likely to become obsolete in a highly educated workforce world.

The US prefers to leave the policy-making in this area (as in others) to the private sector. As women come to represent an ever-greater proportion of the educated talent pool, companies are starting to craft policies that cater to women’s different career cycles, with the female leadership-deprived financial sector leading the way. It is perhaps cheering to see that, even from the depths of the current crisis, the banks are investing in women.

But if they really have “long-term strategies to retain key talent,” as Shannon Burns, Senior VP of Global Staffing at Bank of America says, it is time to recognise that in the 21st century, a majority of that talent is female. And rather than proffering “on or off-ramps”, how about providing both mothers and fathers with the flexibility to reconcile the dual pressures of work and parenting? These banks won’t unlock the door to the full potential of female leadership talent until they allow their male employees to “ramp-up” to be fathers as well.

In any case, today’s highly educated knowledge workers aren’t very interested in linear, unbroken careers. They want flexibility and lifelong learning, sabbaticals and self-development.

Today’s talented workers – male and female – aspire to be career-breakers. Give them the tools.