When did we get workplaces so wrong for women?

For a while I really believed we were getting there. Women seemed to be dominating education, snaring lots of senior jobs and emerging everywhere as CEOs and directors. The old stereotypes were breaking down; women had momentum and confidence. Equality – tick. Everyone take a bow. High fives all-round.

Now I’m not so sure. I’m not sure at all.

I fear that since the global financial crisis and the temporary reprieve from the skills shortage, workplaces have gone hyper-pragmatic and many seem to be in a state of constant dread. Continuous corporate disruption has left what seems like a pseudo-permanent pall over the corporate landscape and changed the psyche.

There are two clear side effects: 1) We are back to the situation we had in the mid-1990s in which everyone felt the need to be seen to be working crazy hours for job security. 2) It has exposed the fact that, despite decades of progress, women are still taking most of the responsibility for child care and household management (as well as holding down jobs). In this new knuckle-down economic and corporate paradigm, women are generally the biggest losers. Men work harder and longer and often drop the ball at home. Women typically just try to do everything and live with a constant “which thing will I half-do today” feeling.

At a time when families and communities need workplace flexibility more than ever, flexibility has become a dirty word in many organisations. Even to raise it is often seen as a sign of weakness and flaky commitment.

The result is that much of the progress to make women’s, and to a lesser extent, men’s lives more balanced and achievable has gone backwards.

These are some of the signs that things are askew:

1. Women with kids spend a lot of time apologising

Have you noticed this? Hard-working, highly-skilled women have to pick their kids from some form of child care. They have to go. They have put in their hours. Yet, they feel guilty about it because so many other people are still in the office. When did we get it so wrong that something as important as making sure kids are safely collected becomes a source of guilt? There is something seriously erroneous with that picture. The needs of young children have to be a collective community responsibility. Remember the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. Still does.

2. We treat part-time work as a problem

Many women (and some men) with young children can’t work five days. It just doesn’t work. They need shorter weeks or their kids and home life suffer. So, what do we do? Typically the part-time request becomes a problem: “We really need someone fulltime, someone who is really committed to the role”. Or even worse, we take highly experienced women and automatically treat a part-time job as a lesser job – less pay, lower responsibilities, disconnected from the strategic core. The attitude towards job sharing is generally similar.

Often accommodating part-time work and job sharing is hard. That is no reason not to do it. Most things worth doing are hard. And what if we treated it as an opportunity to be more creative with our organisational structures rather than as an inconvenient asterisk on the org chart? We could retain talent, foster loyalty and keep families functional. Corporate social responsibility begins here.

3. Nobody celebrates working smarter

Despite the plethora of evidence that long hours (often just for show) are not good for anybody, including corporations, we still have a habit of celebrating and rewarding this type of behaviour. It is like we wear our busyness and tiredness as a badge of honour.  It would be far more logical to celebrate smart working – the ability to achieve just as much in a shorter timeframe and lead a balanced life. It is as if we just can’t bring ourselves to do it. It is worth remembering the famous children’s story in which only the child was brave enough to admit the emperor had no clothes. Sometimes we are all complicit in the dumb acceptance of things we know to be ludicrous.

4. The transition back to work after child birth is generally hard

No matter how far we come with equality, and no matter how many men take on primary child carer roles, women are going to be the ones having babies and this will put them at career disadvantage. This is a simple case where we need to over-correct for one gender to ensure that pregnancy is a light speed bump on the career highway, not a detour onto a gravel road that may never lead back to the main road. I can’t speak for women but my observation is that, in most workplaces, getting back into the work mode after pregnancy is particularly difficult. Yet I’m not aware of many organisations that have specific support programs for this. It is more like – welcome back, there’s your desk, there’s your phone, here’s you work – good luck with that.  

5. Our span of hours still reflects a 1950s mentality

The growth of the knowledge economy and the rapid advent of portable technology means we are in the best shape ever to allow genuine work flexibility. But mostly we don’t. Our span of hours for work still largely reflects a 1950s mentality and a notion that work is somewhere we go rather than something we do. For many people with family responsibilities, it might make sense to work a few hours in the morning and then resume from 9pm until midnight, for example. In a large number of jobs, such an approach would have no detrimental impact on work outcomes. In fact it might give us access to more highly-skilled female workers for longer periods.

And imagine if lots of people worked at home for a couple of hours in the morning so they could use their brain’s most productive time for creative work rather than mind-numbing commuting. This might also mean we could spend less on road infrastructure that mostly serves just two peak-hour times a day. And it would be easier to get a seat on the train or the bus.

Some final thoughts

It is now seven years since the GFC hit. This is “normal” now. There is no point waiting for another 2007. We need to get on with it. Disruption is here to stay, and getting worse.

Despite some tough economic times, long hours don’t make us more productive. In fact nearly all the credible research points to crazy hours and long stretches sitting at a desk making us unhappier, unhealthier, less creative and less efficient.

So much of the way we have evolved so many of our workplaces is anti-family, anti-health, anti-productivity and completely illogical.

We need to get real here. Weekdays are becoming void of any real social, community or family time, many women are being asked to juggle competing priorities that are close to impossible, vital sleeping hours are falling and, around the world, the unrelenting nature of modern life is sending cases of stress and anxiety off the charts (check the figures – it’s scary). We are overdue for a seismic social correction.

We can’t leave the change agenda only to a few strong women with the guts to speak up about how hard it is for them to juggle all of the demands on them. Men need to champion this too - loudly, and confidently.

This is not a problem we need governments or legislation to solve. It is purely about the attitudes of management and the psyche of our organisations. This is one we can fix tomorrow.

Comments in these posts are personal. My kids are now young adults. Shane Rodgers is a business executive, writer and marketer with a keen interest in social change and what makes people tick. He is the author of Tall People Don’t Jump – the curious behaviour of human beings.