Reaching the C-Suite Can Start at Home

Last month, I was on an Economist panel with a few incredible women I’ve long considered role models, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Chairman and Chief Executive of Pernod Ricard North America Ann Muhkerjee; President of Wellesley College Paula Johnson; and President and Chief Executive of Grameen and former Avon CEO Andrea Jung.

We had a lively conversation about how, in a world significantly altered by the pandemic, employers can implement policies and practices that advance women’s careers. These issues are especially critical at a time when we are losing hard-fought ground on political progress related to all manner of women’s issues. And I’ve long been a believer that the private sector has an absolutely pivotal role to play, especially in the United States where there is next to no centralized support in place on a federal level.??

On the one hand, we celebrated a more flexible workplace as a boon for women and families. And in some ways it is. For those of us lucky to be working in corporate America, we’ve normalized living and working with more flexibility. I’ve been able to have dinner with my kids most nights over the past few years and this in-person connection that I often lacked pre-pandemic has been incredibly meaningful.??

But how do women continue to advance when we’re actually becoming LESS visible in the workplace? Historically we know that being physically present plays a major role in professional advancement. We promote, sponsor and champion those who we know and believe in, and we are able to know and believe in people better if and when we spend time with them in person. This is even more important for women, who are overwhelmingly statistically underpaid and overlooked for promotions.?

Pandemic aside, I believe that an oft overlooked opportunity for women’s advancement is highly connected to our personal lives and how we run our homes and families. In male-female partnerships, the average woman in the U.S. marries at 28 years old a man who is on average 30 years old. This two year difference often means that on paper, at the time of marriage, the man makes more money than the woman, especially given that men tend to get paid more for equivalent work and advance faster in the workplace. And we could take this differentiated income at 28 and 30 as an unstated assumption that the man has a steeper upward professional trajectory ahead of him. It would make sense, then, that in a marriage, you might start making small decisions that would prioritize the husband’s career over his wife’s career. This might be evidenced through the woman taking on a greater percentage of the responsibilities and mental load associated with running the household. What can start off as small differences in responsibilities can grow exponentially as time passes and children are added into the picture.?

As a result of this imbalance, our homes still aren’t managed equally between partners–a reality that became glaringly evident during the pandemic. Women’s career prospects may have progressed over the past few decades but our roles as primary caregivers and CEOs of our homes have stuck because our careers often haven’t been prioritized equally in the context of our families.?

We’re the ones who primarily care for our children (and of course physically carry them), maintain and oversee our homes, manage the coordination of childcare if we are lucky enough to have it, and even do many of the logistical to-dos that take up time such as grocery shopping, laundry, paying bills, and planning enrichment activities for children. While none of these items is limiting or super taxing in and of itself, when taken together, the mental and logistical load of running a home on top of a career, is a heavy burden to carry – made heavier in a new world order where work is in the home and lines between our jobs and family life have disintegrated.?

We have gained unprecedented flexibility, and with it taken on unprecedented responsibility.? The structural inequalities driving this imbalance will take a long time to remedy, and have only deteriorated as an overwhelming number of women left their jobs as a direct result of crushing responsibilities during the pandemic.?

I believe that one of the solutions here, in the meantime, lies at home with our most sacred relationships. We must engage in clear, direct dialogue with our partners about how we will operate the business that is our family: Who do you want to be, personally and professionally? What roles do we aspire to have within the family and at work? Will one partner take the front seat in all matters related to family or are we sharing them? If the latter, how exactly are we dividing responsibilities?? Even though one partner may make less at the point of marriage, whose career do we believe has the highest slope over time and whose should be prioritized? This is a *big* one because it implies attacking head-on the deep rooted assumption of man-as-financial-provider. .

As women, our future–quite literally– depends on this deceptively simple conversation.