Unlocking Value: The Intersection of Women, Work, and Flexibility

When we were all just humans trying to navigate life…

I don’t often take a gender-specific stance in my writings because I’ve always seen myself as just another human, with some talents and some flaws, and rarely as a female with these characteristics.?

I was a kid in the seventies and my sister, brother and I were all treated the same in our family.? We shared and handed-down bikes, sporting equipment, toys and some clothes - not much was gendered then except maybe Barbie? but there was no pink and blue everything – and I didn’t think to question whether or not I could be a vet, a doctor (I would have been awful!), a scientist or a park ranger.? I wasn’t a tomboy (I was far too shy and bookish for that) but I was far from a princess.

Admittedly growing up in Australia in a solidly middle-class family with the opportunity to go to a private girl’s school in my high school years was pretty privileged, not that I was aware of this at the time.

The first time I became aware of gender as something that could affect men and women differently was in my second Uni degree where the boys were about 80% of the students.? So I learned to enjoy beer and made some of the best friends of my life.?

But the differences in perceived options, in opportunities and what we believed were good or right life choices became apparent as soon as we graduated in the middle of an asset market crash.?

Male and female graduates were equally affected by the lack of work in our profession. ?I lost my coveted student valuer role with a top-tier real estate firm after pulling out of a professional scholarship contest at a rival firm – partly out of loyalty to my then employer and partly out of misguided romantic feelings for my only real competitor for the award.? However I found another great role before I had even finished my final exam, so no regrets there.?

And to be honest I didn’t see these events and decisions as being related to gender at the time – they were things that I experienced as a human, not as a woman.? I moved on, and sideways and eventually up in the corporate world - although not to Asia which at the time was considered too full of cowboys to consider transferring a young woman in her mid-twenties.? And to be fair, at the time I was probably not nearly as aggressive in my goals as some of my male peers were.

I took the road less travelled

In hindsight this was the beginning of my falling out of love with climbing the corporate ladder and relying on other people to make decisions about me, and by my twenty-seventh birthday I had left the security of fulltime employment (and all hope of getting a mortgage any time soon!) and started the first of three highly-rewarding new business ventures over the course of my career.

Fast forward to today; during this month with its focus on International Women’s Day I've read a lot of articles about women's participation in the workforce and have reflected on my own role in this evolution as an employee, employer, entrepreneur, leader, colleague, mentor and human.? We have come a long way in thirty years, and many corporates do a lot more to promote and highlight women and improve overall diversity than was the case even a decade ago.?

However, the workstyles, overwork culture and the politics of success often still demand things that don't sit comfortably with many women.

It's not that we don't want to fulfil our potential and be challenged by our work (Roughly 80 percent of women want to be promoted to the next level, compared with 70 percent in 2019, and the same holds true for men), or that we aren't smart or savvy enough to climb the corporate ladder - but that many of us simply don't want to compromise ourselves, our families and often a degree of our integrity (or at least empathy) to do so.? Women face their biggest hurdle at the ?rst critical step up to manager and at this ‘broken rung’ many women fall back and can’t catch up (for every 100 men only 87 women are promoted). ?Its at this time that women start to make choices about their priorities and aspirations, as I did almost 30 years ago.

Flexibility doesn’t address the drivers of inequality

You might feel tempted to interrupt me here with the statistic on the increased availability of flexible and distributed work (including hybrid and remote options, four-day week, job-sharing, part time etc.) giving women and many others in the community more work choices.? And you are right – to a degree – but this is not the whole picture.?

The reasons people prefer remote work are many and varied, but the benefits women cite in survey after survey tell us something about the way in-office work affects them and the aspects they look to avoid or reduce in their experience of work.? Significantly more women than men (+12-13%) value remote work because they can:? ?

• Avoid having to dress- and make-up;
• Have more control and informal flexibility over their daily schedule;
• Avoid office politics; and
• Avoid the commute.

Flexible work allows people to minimise the impact of workplace discrimination, lack of psychological safety, presenteeism cultures and access to affordable carer support – and more women than men want to take advantage of this.?

This fuels the widely held perception that flexibility could be a cure-all for the systemic issues that hold back women in the workplace. ?This is a myth. Flexibility cannot, alone, tackle deep-rooted issues such as the gender pay gap, workplace discrimination, 'always-on' culture and lack of psychological safety (women experience microaggressions at a signi?cantly higher rate than men: they are twice as likely to be mistaken for someone junior and hear comments on their emotional state or appearance and for women with traditionally marginalised identities, these slights happen more often and are even more demeaning).

“A flexible schedule often comes at a high price, particularly in the corporate, financial, and legal world….? The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might even vanish if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who worked long hours and who worked particular hours. Such change has already occurred in various sectors, but not in enough.”

Claudia Goldin, A Grand Gender Convergence, 2014.? Awarded the 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her documentation of women’s labor force participation and earnings and drivers of gender differences in the labor market.

A story I hear frequently is that despite good intentions, flexible work is often not flexible when it comes up against the demands and priorities of the job.? A friend of mine, Belinda (not her real name) is employed fulltime by a fortune 100 company in a sub-regional management role.? She had an honest discussion when she joined about her need to be an ‘active parent’ to their two young children even though they have a fulltime helper (as do most professional families in Singapore both local and expat. ?Her boss and HR have been very supportive, and the company has a robust flexible work policy and a great culture.?

The challenge for Belinda is the sheer volume of work to be done, the deluge of emails that arrive 24 hours a day and a meeting culture that accommodates global timezones and creates a culture of FOMO.? While Belinda can work from home two days a week and mostly accommodate school pickup times, the number of hours needed each week just to stay on top of her job is more than she can handle with a family – upwards of 50 hours a week average.? Her first boss resigned due to work-related burnout 6 months after she joined.? Belinda is good at her job, enjoys the challenge and the people she works with and of course the money is a huge help with the costs of raising a family in one of the most expensive cities in the world, but she’s considering resigning.? That’s not just her loss, it’s the company’s loss as well.

This is the elephant in the room when we talk about flexible work enabling more women to fully participate in professional roles.? It’s obvious that many aspects of work remain unchanged, and as with Belinda's situation these problems are not overcome simply by having a flexible work policy in place.?

According to the 2023 Work in America Survey by the American Psychological Association, workers who are satisfied with their level of control over how, when, and where they do their work were almost half as likely to report that their work environment has a negative impact on their mental health (32%) compared with those who feel they have little real control (62%).? This is a major issue because 77% of workers reported experiencing work-related stress in the last month, the main causes of which are cultural and behavioural, not structural or procedural:

• only about one-third (35%) reported that their employer offers a culture where breaks are encouraged;
• only 40% reported that their employer respects time off;
• Almost a quarter of female workers (23%) reported a toxic workplace compared to only 15% of males and those in upper management were much less likely to report a toxic workplace (9%) than those in middle management (21%), front-line workers (26%), and individual contributors1 (18%). ?While improving, women hold only 30% on average of roles of VP and higher so are disproportionately affected.
• More than a quarter of those who work in-person reported some form of verbal abuse (26%), which is significantly more than those who work remotely (18%), again disproportionately affecting women.

Of course this situation affects men as well, the salient point is that flexibility is great in theory but often falls short in practice - not through lack of policy or manager support but because we have not taken advantage of what we learned during the pandemic to fundamentally rethink the meaning of work and the contract between employer and employee – one that creates a genuine ability to responsibly blend personal and professional priorities and drives a truly inclusive culture.

Believing flexible work policies can change these ingrained norms and liberate women to take on more senior roles is a fallacy.? As more companies shift the balance of hybrid to in-office work there is a risk that new patterns of hybrid work disadvantage women’s career progression.? This affects female professionals disproportionately because we are twice as likely as men to want to work remotely and twice as likely to quit if asked to return to office five days a week.?

There is unfortunately a longstanding historical trend for promotions to go to people who are more present and visible in the office, especially in Asia and other parts of the world where a longstanding workplace culture of presenteeism is ingrained.? On top of this, men benefit disproportionately from on-site work: compared with women who work on-site, men are seven to nine percentage points more likely to be “in the know,” receive the mentorship and sponsorships they need, and have their accomplishments noticed and rewarded.

The rise of ‘corporate refugees’

Unfortunately there is a real danger through this gender-framed discourse that flexible work becomes conflated with ‘women’s work’ – less serious, less reliable, less valuable - more of a ‘job’ than a real career.? This implicit bias risks reinforcing existing glass ceilings and the imbalance in access to secure, appropriately paid work.? ?

I believe it’s why many women I know and work with are what I refer to as 'corporate refugees’ (I'm one of them too!) who seek out smaller companies, family enterprises or start their own business as a way of creating a more nuanced performance culture, of being able to harmonise personal and professional responsibility through real flexibility, and to have control over "what good looks like".

A company I founded eight years ago has unintentionally evolved into a female-centric community with palpable benefits for us all - especially in levels of psychological safety, empathy, trust, mutual responsibility and accountability.

Not for a minute does this make us weak, uncompetitive, less-motivated or accommodating - on the contrary our women are incredibly intellectually and emotionally intelligent, resilient, reliable, grounded yet ambitious, open-minded, hilarious and all-round gorgeous!

And we are not alone - pre-pandemic trends of women entrepreneurship have (not surprisingly) accelerated since 2020.? And what's good for women in business appears to amplify the benefits of overall diversity and inclusion. The World Economic Forum suggests that:

• More young people, women and ethnic minorities are starting microbusinesses (<10 employees).? Women now run almost 40% in the UK, up from 32% pre-2020.
• Entrepreneurs are also getting younger - the proportion of under-35s starting businesses has more than doubled from 16.4% in 2020 to 34% today.
• More minorities are starting UK businesses.? Black founders grew from 5.4% pre-pandemic to 6.6%, while the share of Asian entrepreneurs has risen slightly from 10.1% to 11.9%.

The figures are similar around much of the world - in the US almost half of start-ups in 2021 were formed by women - a dramatic increase from 28% in 2019.

This is a positive trend, but small business is loaded with risk and challenges and is often discriminated against by the big end of town.? This morning I hosted two regular global conversations with different and diverse groups of professional women in my network, all of whom have left outwardly successful corporate careers at various stages to become independent contractors, start their own business and employ others, join a small business or embark on a portfolio of professional pursuits.?? In both discussions we kept returning to the challenges of market discrimination in a myriad of forms – we are too small, too risky, too new or too old, too hard to get on board through procurement, too expensive (none of us can afford to buy work), too different or too challenging (we are all independent, intelligent, diligent professionals).

Not for a minute am I or any of my colleagues complaining, however we are increasingly challenged to fully reap the rewards of entrepreneurship for the risks we take.? This is not a women’s issue, but as more women follow this path to professional satisfaction they are disproportionately affected, and self-employment should not be seen as a reason not to tackle the systemic issues that hold people back from fully participating in the workforce and driving business performance.

How we can be better employers

As organisations see the performance benefits of supporting and advancing women and minorities they should focus on four core areas:

1. Empower and equip managers through coaching/training to support high-performing flexible and distributed teamwork.
2. Overhaul performance and promotion management systems to reduce biases against remote and flexible workstyles
3. Create breathing space for teams and individuals who want to work differently to demonstrate and advocate for different types of value creation in the organisation – often seeing is believing!
4. Clearly communicate priorities and outcomes that matter to organisational performance and respect workload management choices to limit individual overwork and benefit from flexible policies.?
5. Expand the scope of the DEI policy to contractors and freelancers, partners and suppliers.? The narrow definition of ‘employee’ no longer applies to most people in the workforce.

As more companies place limitations on hybrid and remote work, paying attention to these five enablers will help ensure new patterns of hybrid working do not disadvantage women’s career progression, or inadvertently cause the organisation to lose capable people. ?When discussing flexibility in relation to gender, we need to be careful to avoid implicit bias as women are twice as likely as men to want to work remotely.?

This requires a more fundamental rethinking of the meaning of work and the employer-employee relationship – one that supports a genuine ability to control your schedule responsibly and manage professional and personal priorities.?

Substantial progress has been made since I graduated from Uni, and just as my generation took the gains made from the feminist movement in the seventies for granted, so Gen Z women should take these decades and in particular the last ten years of advocacy and advances as a minimum baseline on which to build even stronger foundations for equivalent opportunity to participate in the workforce.?

I struck out on a less traditional path early in my career and have always valued my independence and 'mastery of my own destiny' - for better or for worse! – although the ranks of we 'corporate refugees' have grown substantially during the past decade and I'm not an outlier any more!? I like to think that my journey and my support for professional women through employment, partnering, mentoring and community-building have helped other women find rewarding work lives. ?

Mutual respect and integrity, access to opportunity, merit-based reward, privacy and accountability are human expectations.? The ongoing quest to secure these for more people regardless of gender or any other attribute raises the water level for all of us – economically, socially and ethically.