How To Fix Our Flawed Assumptions On Women At Work

Here is NPR weighing in on women at work.

Within there, they say:

In May, the share of working-age women between 25 and 54 who are working or looking for work hit 77.6% — an all-time high. Among African American women in that age range, more than 80% are in the workforce.

If you’ve been following along, we had a narrative that women were fleeing work.

And then simultaneously we had a narrative that all middle-aged men were fleeing work to masturbate and learn how to play Fortnite with their 14 year-old sons.

Taken together, apparently pretty much no one of prime working age was actually working anymore, yet somehow the stock market seemed to be doing well and we were avoiding a recession. Unclear how all those parts fit together. And now …

… the women are back. OK.

The NPR article also hits on this:

“The silver lining of the pandemic is that everyone started to understand the ways that caregiving and career intersect,” says Christine Winston, who heads an organization called Path Forward that helps women return to the workforce. “Because everybody was at home with their five-year-old and their eight-year-old, doing school on Zoom.”

I would agree that was one potential silver lining of the pandemic. However, it’s very hard to say these things in a vacuum as if they apply to all companies and organizations. While maybe “everybody was at home with their five year-old and their eight year-old (nice spacing of kids, Lindsay),” the reality is that the executive class, who has traditionally never believed in women and assigned them a “pregnancy tax” almost from the moment they enter the workforce, was at home with nannies and fourth bedrooms and lots of toys and games. Not everyone was home in that way.

One of the biggest problems of work is that people who make a ton of money from work, either in salary for having an inflated title or because they own the company, always have this expectation that other people will just work in the way they work — which is preposterous, because the compensation is nowhere near equal. Not everyone should work like a founder/owner, but a lot of founders/owners expect that, and many of those same guys don’t see “child care” or “elder care” or “a 2:30pm soccer game” as something that should come before the virtuous hustle of work.

So these things are happening and these attitudes are changing, yes, but it completely varies by organization and the self-awareness of the senior leadership team. If you have an old-school, standard senior team? Absolutely not. All those lessons from 2020 Zoom are long gone. Utterly lost.

Here’s some economist:

“Workers have had a lot of bargaining power, not just for higher wages but to say, ‘You know, I can’t come in five days a week.’ Or ‘I’ve got to be able to pick my kids up from school and get them home, and then I can go back to working remotely,” she says. “People learned to work around the child-care demands in the last few years. And that’s actually been really helpful.

I absolutely don’t think women have “bargaining power.” Maybe in industries where people are getting desperate, but by and large employees do not have power in this moment. The post-pandemic attempt to shove pre-pandemic norms down our throats took care of that.

So women are coming back — good! — and if the data is right — who knows? — then maybe some organizations are starting to realize that moms of two are often 10x more organized than the dad, so why not hire them? As for “bargaining power,” I still think that’s a ways off.

What’s your take? Are women flooding the work zone again?