Our Turn

by Stewart, Kirstine;

  I don’t for a moment think this transition will happen overnight (generational change never does), nor that it will be universal or painless. A profound disconnect—and reckoning—already lies on the horizon. Those same fathers in the Boston study who are keen to spend time with their kids and equally share parenting, also report that they’re looking for jobs with greater responsibility; while two out of three felt parenting responsibilities should be 50/50, less than one out of three said it actually is. I’d say fathers of the twenty-first century—and the sons they raise—will face their own pressures to be superdads. But their desire to be more involved in raising their children will also add to the pressure companies are facing to accommodate the whole lives of the people who work for them.

  Eggs and Leaves

  ANYTIME A TOP male or female executive resigns to spend more time with family, the same question surfaces: Are high-powered, high-demand jobs incompatible with parenthood—not motherhood or fatherhood, but parenthood? Our social challenge isn’t just to find ways, as employees, to cope with the responsibilities of home and work, but also for companies to figure out how to help their employees cope. And it’s not about companies just trying to be “nice” to their workers. The job market is global and fiercely competitive, so it’s in the interest of business to recruit and retain talent.

  It just so happens that in today’s world, increasingly, that talent is female. With so much evidence that women drive higher performance, the work world has a whole lot of catching up to do to overcome gender imbalance—particularly in its highest ranks.

  A concerted effort is now under way by a staggering and eclectic mix of industries eager to bring more women into their fold: the life sciences, energy, finance, law—basically, most every field from tech to trucking (yes, trucking). The catch is that females are far more likely than males to leave their jobs for their families. So figuring out ways to keep female employees on staff, and support their climb up the ladder, has become as important to companies as recruiting women in the first place. The imperative to attract and keep their women is forcing employers to get ever more creative in building a culture with policies to help women succeed: flexible schedules, generous leaves, on-site child care and mentoring programs. The tech industry, for instance, where the lack of women has been a particularly hot topic, has taken some unprecedented, and unorthodox, steps. For instance, both Apple and Facebook are reportedly paying to freeze the eggs of their female employees.

  The biological clock has always been a barrier to the boardroom for a woman, ticking down to its final life-giving moments just as she hits her career stride. (Never mind the urgency to find the right partner before her eggs hit their best-before date.) And while society has lagged behind the shifting realities of gender roles, science has not. Just as the birth control pill allowed women to separate sex from reproduction, the burgeoning field of reproductive technologies may give women the chance to separate age from procreation. It could allow a woman the freedom to have kids, and a career, on her own terms and her own schedule. The procedure involves extracting and freezing a woman’s eggs when she’s in her twenties or thirties. If all goes well, they can be thawed and are still viable at a later date.

  The tech giants have described it as policy designed to empower women to do their best work without biology compromising their efforts. But of course the move set off a storm of controversy, a “mommy-to-be war.” Some people were horrified that an employer would suggest women delay motherhood to focus on their work, the implication being that it pressures women to choose work over starting a family. Others applauded the move. Online and in the press, a number of women wrote commentaries about how egg freezing was finally a chance at a level playing field.

  I tend to side with those who see the egg-freezing benefit as a positive development, a valuable perk for any woman who wants to take advantage of it. And that’s the crucial point. When, and how, to have children is a personal decision, and, again, it’s one for a woman to make for herself and not be judged for what she decides.

  New reproductive technologies are always controversial. When IVF debuted, people were aghast, too, and skeptical that it would ever take off as a mainstream baby-making method. Yet today, about 1 percent of newborns in North America had their start in a “test tube” and many Fortune 500 companies cover IVF as an employee health benefit. I suspect the story could be similar with egg freezing (a number of other companies, including Google, are also reported to be considering offering it).

  But what does irk me about the egg-freezing policy is the old-fashioned message it still sends about the obligations of women. Why should only women receive such an incentive to defer motherhood? Why isn’t there a similar carrot for men, a policy that says, “Hey guys, here’s what we’ll do for you if you delay becoming a father while you’re concentrating on developing professionally?” There isn’t one because the view persists that fatherhood takes no toll on a man’s ability to do his work, because he won’t have to miss days to care for his kid, or come to work exhausted because of sleepless nights with a baby. It’s assumed that professionally he can still plow onward and upward after he becomes a parent because parenting is primarily the mother’s job, not his.

  Happily, there are signals that change is afoot here too. More companies (and countries) are offering male employees paid parental leaves, as they do women. The new father at Twitter Canada who took a paternal leave was entitled to three months paid. Several major tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Reddit, all provide fathers with paid paternity leaves that range from seven to seventeen weeks. By country, leaves for fathers vary widely, with the US having one of the worst (including its maternity leaves for women) and Canada having one of the best. Unfortunately, men who take advantage of parental leaves report that they face the same career penalties that women do, but also have to confront an ugly social backlash, as if only wimps would want to do such a thing. But the only way that attitude is going to change is if men stick to it. The more fathers who take parental leaves, the more involved in parenting they will be from the get-go. Slowly, society, and the workplace, will accept it as a universal necessity. Over time, employers will come to appreciate the wisdom of extending leaves, benefits and flex schedules to all employees, regardless of gender. Then everybody wins. Men have the chance to be more involved with their children and women are free, if they choose, to stay more involved in work. From my perspective, that’s critical; what you do at work in those early years could set the stage for how smoothly the long-term juggle of work and family will play out for you.

  The Myth of work-life balance

  IN LEAN IN, SHERYL SANDBERG beseeches women not to let the prospect of having a family derail career plans or shape professional choices. Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, argues that if women try harder, show more gumption and live their work, more women will rise to the top and the ambition gap will be filled. Her perspective makes an important contribution to the conversation around the challenges of women and work. But to my mind it also seems out of step in offering the well-meaning advice that for a woman to be as successful as a man, she should act like one.

  Sandberg makes a case that, essentially, women are not reaching professional heights because we don’t really know how to try. Her focus is mostly on what women are not doing, or not doing well: negotiating, tooting their own horns and so on. There’s a lot of truth to what she says, but I think it’s better to focus on what women do right and how what we bring to the table is crucial for corporate success moving forward. This past May, as I was finishing this book, Sandberg’s forty-seven-year-old husband and the father of their two children, David Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey—a man she described in her book as a true partner, her best friend and love of her life—died in a tragic accident during a family vacation in Mexico. It was a brutal reminder of the fragility of life and of what truly matters. In moments like these, it feels like what matters most is creating the life that fits each
of us best—whatever our backgrounds, ambitions or definitions of success—so that we live every day without regret.

  Isn’t it true that our ultimate, seemingly elusive goal as women, and men, is to find fulfilling ways to work that still allow room for pleasure, personal happiness and loving relationships? Succeeding shouldn’t mean having to work ever harder just for the sake of “getting ahead.” Many of us have no need to scale the heights of the corporate world to feel successful; definitions of a life well lived are personal.

  That said, there are definitely times in a career when putting your shoulder into it is critical—yes, as in leaning in. And as women, we need to keep our heads up enough to recognize when those important times appear. Taking the right chances to distinguish yourself, show initiative and make a contribution can happen anywhere along a career path. Those opportunities don’t always lead instantly to a promotion or a raise. But they become moments that matter and pay important dividends down the line; every time a woman establishes herself as a leader, she builds important professional and personal capital. Eventually that capital translates into professional flexibility, giving you greater control over how, and even when, you work.

  I don’t always juggle my work, business travel and home life with the deftness people assume I must, given my responsibilities and accomplishments. Balls do get dropped. I forget to check the kids’ homework. I’m forced to reschedule a meeting because I took on too much in one day. The saving grace is that my position affords me the luxury of flexibility. I am not watching the clock on a double shift, worried that I am going to be fifteen minutes late for the daycare pick-up time and not only collect a tired and hungry toddler but be charged $35 extra. For many parents, and especially women, that is working life. And I’m in awe of every day people in such situations who keep pulling it off.

  As Anne-Marie Slaughter noted in her Atlantic feature, the ability to have a flexible work schedule depends largely on the career path you choose. In my own case, I never could have been that go-to parent when my daughters were young if I had not first invested several years of effort into building my career. I wouldn’t have had the same freedom if I was still working as an assisstant. I am grateful every day for the flexibility a job like mine allows. It’s why I advise younger women to take stock of why they are afraid of taking the next career step. What looks like a more demanding job may bring with it the flexibility a lower-level job doesn’t allow, and in some ways life may become a little easier.

  Like it or not, the work world is still, and will always be, a results-driven realm. Maybe that’s where the saying “work hard, play hard” comes from. My performance gave me the freedom to stay home when I needed to, or spend a blurry-eyed morning in the pumpkin patch. The good news is that with companies hungrier than ever for a skill set women can bring to the table, the more opportunities there are for women to show how they can lead and earn the power to work, play and live by their own rules.

  And this is important, because along with the elusive “have-it-all” brass ring we’ve been primed to capture, the other concept that does a disservice to parents everywhere is the idea that you should strive for work–life balance. You may as well hunt unicorns. The very word “balance” suggests that somehow you can give equal importance and time to all corners of your life at the same time. The person who loses most in that equation is you; if exhaustion doesn’t get to you, the guilt will.

  The idea of balance doesn’t reflect how the world works, or how we truly spend our time. It’s not about achieving balance, it’s about flow. We swing from one priority to the next, pushing hard at work and then pulling back to be with family. How hard you push and pull depends entirely on the moment. There are high-pressure times on the job when deadlines loom, trips need to be taken, or tough decisions have to be made, and you work flat out for a long stretch without making it home for dinner. But there are other times when a sick child or parent or spouse, say, or simply a much-needed vacation, takes precedence over any job. The key is to aim for a career in which you can earn the freedom to achieve work–life flow.

  In the next chapter, I’ll explore how technology is not just changing the way business works, but profoundly altering the way people work. It’s allowing women, and men, to manage the conflicting demands of career and family in ways that were never before possible, allowing us to multi-task, virtually be many places at once and change roles in a click.

  Now we ditch that superhero cape for a really good smartphone.

  [ VII ]

  No Walls and No Corner Offices

  IN TALKS I GIVE ON THE new opportunities for women in leadership, I often include a reminder of the old guy in the corner office: a slide of the evil Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. The sight of Homer’s boss—obsessed with inflating his own power and forever forgetful of his employees’ names—never fails to spark a roomful of laughter. It’s not just that the old stereotypes of corporate leadership Mr. Burns represents are passé, they are so passé, they’re a joke.

  Not that long ago, leading by decree was the norm. In the golden age of industrialization, there was a big boss on high and an army of general managers to do his bidding. And it was his bidding, as it was a golden age of patriarchy too. Each employee had a defined role with specific tasks, all of which were assigned and assessed by his manager. Employees showed up to the same place at the same time, and the pattern of a working day was more predictable than the weather. What customers knew about your product or service was basically what you chose to tell them. It was the heyday of hierarchy represented by a primitive command-and-control culture probably best summed up by an infamous complaint from the legendary Henry Ford: “Why is it that every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”

  Managing became a little more complicated through the second half of the twentieth century. Competition went global, markets were deregulated, and along came new industries, companies and some seventy million Baby Boomers. According to a 2002 article, “Understanding the four generations to enhance workplace management,” published in the AFP Exchange, a magazine for global finance executives, Boomers brought their own spitfire culture to the workplace: “On the job, Boomers arrive early and leave late, visibility is key. The longer the day, the higher the pay …” That generational shift in attitude added spokes to the centralized hub of the former leadership model, bringing the rise of the C-suite that has blossomed ever since. Corner offices expanded to become corridors of power, with a specialized chief who reported to the CEO, manning every division: CFOs and COOs, CIOs and CMOs and so on. And yes, it’s mostly been men doing the manning.

  The point is that for more than a century, all variations on the management model have been hierarchical, whether the hierarchy was centralized or spread out among the C-suite. But the information age has changed almost everything about the way we work—the where, the when, and, most significantly, the how—and as a result the top-down model makes no sense. Our customers have become our bosses and we need to manage “out,” not down.

  Small-Town World

  TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN THE great leveller. It’s reshaped the world in ways that are profoundly different from the past. The last thirty years alone have brought us personal computers, email, tablets, smartphones, cloud computing, Wi-Fi and social networking. More than three billion people are active online. Nearly two billion, or close to a quarter of the world’s population, uses social media, and, according to a 2015 report compiled by the global marketing firm We Are Social, there are now more active mobile connections than there are people on the planet. Call it disruptive, or transformative, but tech really has turned the world into a global village; everyone is connected to someone and someone else’s business, and news, truth and gossip travel at small-town speeds. And like a village, rightly or wrongly, the online court of public opinion metes out its own brand of justice, swift and sometimes merciless.

  What companies, corporations, and, to some extent, even countries have lost in this
global village is the ability to control the agenda. The power of institutions and organizations to direct people’s behaviour has been eroded, and with it the ability of any leader to arbitrarily call the shots. Power has shifted. When governments want to exert control over their citizens, they fight the public’s access to social media. When companies want to reach consumers, they turn to the net. When consumers want to consume they do their due diligence online. With individual voices that can be heard far and wide, the information age has brought a new transparency to society. It’s made every organization beholden to the individual customer as a new kind of stakeholder and forced the flattening of hierarchies. It’s put real power in the hands of people.

  Through the net and social media, everyday people, regardless of status or station, have an unrivalled ability to inform and be informed, to praise and to punish. It’s a power that drives customer reviews, boycotts, protests, revolutions and web uprisings that can blow up in an instant. It’s the kind of power that can prompt Nestlé to find a sustainable source of palm oil and stop the deforestation in Indonesia by Sinar Mas. It can cost United Airlines 10 percent of its share price—a whopping $180 million hit—for refusing to compensate a Canadian musician for breaking his guitar. It can push Coca-Cola and PepsiCo to drop a controversial ingredient from their beverages, convince the Bank of America to abandon an unpopular debit-card fee and enable a class of fourth graders to persuade Universal Studios to add an environmental message to its promotion of The Lorax. Social media have prompted a modern-day recasting of David and Goliath, in which ordinary people—even children—can make titans buckle.