Penalties, Syndromes, & Revolutions: Blah Blah Blah…
Everything has a label these days.
To label something with a sassy moniker is to make it real. It’s like Pinterest for the worriers and the naysayers, let’s just pin-it to a safe place and then we can look away.
When it comes to gender topics (most especially those associated with women) we see this negative rhetoric all the time. We hear things about the motherhood penalty, the double burden syndrome, and the stalled gender revolution. We also can’t forget about the walls (maternal) and the gaps (pay).
If you aren’t in the know, you may see these terms and wonder where is the war, who is getting fined, or will I catch the syndrome? If you are in the know, you may still question if these are actual real things or just marketing trends making their way through your online and offline worlds.
So, instead of pointless worry or ignorance, let’s break it down into simple English.
The Motherhood Penalty.
A working mothers wage decreases for every child born. In the US, women’s wages decrease 4% for every child born. See it clearly on this chart from The Economist or in this research from the International Labour Organization. *And by the way, in the U.S., fatherhood increases men’s wages by 6% per child.
It. Is. Real.
The Double Burden Syndrome & The Stalled Gender Revolution
Also coined the “second shift”, the double-burden syndrome reflects the fact that women perform 75% of unpaid care and household work globally. Unpaid care and household work is defined as child and sick care, cooking, cleaning, and regular house maintenance. Time spent in such unpaid care work has been the dominant issue that prevents women from achieving their full economic potential. Let’s repeat that:
Time spent in unpaid care work has been the dominant issue that prevents women from achieving their full economic potential.
While the “women’s movement” across the globe has been very successful in helping women break into the formerly male-dominated market of “paid labor”, there has been no corresponding movement of men into the female-dominated non-market of unpaid labor which is mostly performed within the home. So, because men are not generally performing enough of the necessary domestic labor and routine childcare within households, women who work outside the home take on a whole second shift of domestic labor by themselves, which is the root cause of stresses (often unbearable) between the domains of home, family, marriage, and work. Read more research on this from expert sociologists Paula England and Arlie Hochschild.
These. Are Real.
The Maternal Wall
The Maternal Wall, first coined by Deborah J. Swiss and Judith P. Walker in their 1993 book, Women and the Work/Family Dilemma: How Today’s Professional Women Are Confronting the Maternal Wall, is a metaphor to describe the marginalization and disadvantages that mothers face at work. (IKR, we have been talking about this since 1993?). While businesswomen are seen as highly competent, working mothers hit a wall with employers who often unconsciously dismiss them as unavailable or incompetent. And, not much has changed since 1993, 2004, to 2019. Read more from Harvard Business Review here.
It. Is. Real.
Gender Pay Gap
You know about this one. So, yes, it too is real. It’s much easier to quantify so we, as employers, are more accountable in solving the pay gap because it is visible on a spreadsheet. Nevertheless, while it has narrowed since 1980, the pay gap has remained mostly stable over the last decade and a half. Last year in the U.S., women earned 85% of what men earned. See more from Pew Research here.
So, now that we know these issues are real issues and not simply manufactured in the marketing sphere, what do we do to solve them and what is the impact of these “syndromes, penalties, and revolutions” to employees and the organizations that they inhabit?
What Do We Do?
We take action. We take action now.
We don’t sit around and raise our hand in “pledge” of gender balance and then wait to see what happens. We don’t keep repeating the same mistakes and following the same historical norms that we have always followed (hint: those aren’t working), we don’t just hire more women for women’s sake, we don’t just give women more time to get all their paid and unpaid work done. We don’t deliver one-off unconscious bias trainings and EQ development workshops and claim our work is done (ahem trends of 2017–2018).
No. Instead we chip away at the gender myths. We chip away at the workplace norms. We chip away at the systemic biases. We chip away at the stigmatization of flexible work. We chip away at our organizational structures of old. We improve organizational processes, we improve access to informal networks, we improve access to resources. We improve psychological experiences. We introduce whole person communication styles and we get behind leaders (men & women) that are authentic advocates for change.
We shovel the horse shit one scoop at a time and we don’t casually spend the next fifty years doing it. We get to work cleaning the barn, one stall at a time. More on horse shit here.
The Impact?
We will see more companies that people truly want to work for, more companies that reflect our modern era, more companies that feel good and don’t just look good, more companies delivering products and services that their customers love, more companies seeing financial results that exceed goals and expectations. (Facts from the World Economic Forum here.)
We will see employees that perform better, we will see trust and open communication, we will see a better integration of work and life with far less stress. We will see employees that are healthier and happier.
So, let’s get to work, shovel the shit, and eradicate the penalties, syndromes, and revolutions.
Originally published at www.thehuumangroup.com.
