Rethink What You 'Know' about High-Achieving Women

Robin  Ely; Pamela  Stone; Colleen  Ammerman

Article | Harvard Business Review | December 2014

Rethink What You 'Know' about High-Achieving Women

by Robin Ely, Pamela Stone and Colleen Ammerman

Abstract

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to Harvard Business School's MBA program, the authors, who have spent more than 20 years studying professional women, set out to learn what HBS graduates had to say about work and family and how their experiences, attitudes, and decisions might shed light on prevailing controversies. What their comprehensive survey revealed suggests that the conventional wisdom about women's careers doesn't always square with reality. The survey showed, for instance, that 1) the highly educated, ambitious women and men of HBS don't differ much in terms of what they value and hope for in their lives and careers; 2) it simply isn't true that a large proportion of HBS alumnae have "opted out" to care for children; 3) going part-time or taking a career break to care for children doesn't explain the gender gap in senior management; and 4) the vast majority of women anticipated that their careers would rank equally with those of their partners. Many of them were disappointed. It is now time, the authors write, for companies to consider how they can institutionalize a level playing field for all employees, including caregivers of both genders. The misguided assumption that high-potential women are "riskier" hires than their male peers because they are apt to discard their careers after parenthood has become yet another bias for women to contend with.

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Ely, Robin, Pamela Stone, and Colleen Ammerman. "Rethink What You 'Know' about High-Achieving Women." R1412G. Harvard Business Review 92, no. 12 (December 2014): 101–109.

Article | Administrative Science Quarterly | March 2020

Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work-family Narrative as a Social Defense Against 24/7 Work Culture

Irene Padavic, Robin J. Ely and Erin M. Reid

It is widely accepted that the conflict between women’s family obligations and professional jobs’ long hours lies at the heart of their stalled advancement. Yet research suggests that this “work-family narrative” is incomplete: men also experience it and nevertheless advance; moreover, organizations’ effort to mitigate it through flexible work policies has not improved women’s advancement prospects and often hurts them. Hence this presumed remedy has the perverse effect of perpetuating the problem. Drawing on a case study of a professional service firm, we develop a multilevel theory to explain why organizations are caught in this conundrum. We present data suggesting that the work-family explanation has become a “hegemonic narrative”—a pervasive, status-quo-preserving story that prevails despite countervailing evidence. We then advance systems-psychodynamic theory to show how organizations use this narrative and attendant policies and practices as an unconscious “social defense” to help employees fend off anxieties raised by a 24/7 work culture and to protect organizationally powerful groups—in our case, men and the firm’s leaders—and in so doing sustain workplace inequality. Due to the social defense, two orthodoxies remain unchallenged—the necessity of long work hours and the inescapability of women’s stalled advancement. The result is that women’s thin representation at senior levels remains in place. We conclude by highlighting contributions to work-family, workplace inequality, and systems-psychodynamic theory.

Keywords: 24/7 work culture; hegemonic narrative; social defense; work-family conflict; systems-psychodynamic theory; Work-Life Balance; Personal Development and Career; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Organizational Culture;

Citation:

Padavic, Irene, Robin J. Ely, and Erin M. Reid. "Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work-family Narrative as a Social Defense Against 24/7 Work Culture." Administrative Science Quarterly 65, no. 1 (March 2020): 61–111. View Details

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Ask people to explain why women remain so dramatically underrepresented in the senior ranks of most companies, and you will hear from the vast majority a lament that goes something like this: High-level jobs require extremely long hours, women's devotion to family makes it impossible to put in those hours, and so their careers inevitably suffer. Not so, say the authors, who spent 18 months working with a global consulting firm that wanted to know why it had so few women in positions of power. Although virtually every employee the authors interviewed related a form of the standard explanation, the firm's data told a different story. Women weren't being held back because of trouble balancing work and family; men, too, suffered from that problem and nevertheless advanced. Women were held back because they were encouraged to take accommodations, such as going part-time and shifting to internally facing roles, which derailed their careers. The real culprit in women's stalled advancement, the authors conclude, is a general culture of overwork that hurts both sexes and locks gender equality in place. To solve this problem, they argue, we must reconsider what we’re willing to allow the workplace to demand of all employees.

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Rethink What You 'Know' about High-Achieving Women

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