Sheryl Sandberg has a message for managers: It’s not illegal to talk about gender issues in the workplace with your staff.
The Facebook chief operating officer’s best-selling manifesto, “Lean In,” has helped spark national discussion about career ambition, parenting and the state of women in the workplace. But these conversations are surprisingly difficult to have in one of the places where they matter most: In the office, between bosses and staff.
“People genuinely want to handle gender issues in the workplace well, but it’s a topic that makes everyone uncomfortable,” says Sandberg. “No one wants to be insensitive, so often they say nothing at all.” One male manager told Sandberg he would rather talk about his sex life in public than take up gender issues with his staff.
A new study looks at who's giving up their careers: mothers who attended elite colleges.
Joni Hersch, a law and economics at Vanderbilt University, analyzed data from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates and crossed the information with the Carnegie Foundation's classifications of schools and selectivity measures from Barron's Profiles of American Colleges. She found that women who attended highly selective schools are more likely to opt out of the workforce than are their counterparts from less selective schools.
Just 45.3% of mothers with bachelor's degrees from "Tier 1" schools had full-time jobs in the 2003 report, below the 57% of those from "Tier 4" schools.
The most dramatic difference in employment activity comes among married mothers with M.B.A.s. Ms. Hersch found that 34.8% of those who attended selective undergraduate schools were fully employed, compared with 66.1% of those who attended less selective colleges. That divergence is present even after controlling for the selectivity of the M.B.A. program, occupations, family background and number and age of children.
There are consequences to this opt-out trend, she says: Elite companies hire from elite schools, but women from elite schools don't stick around for long, limiting the talent pipeline for leadership positions.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2013
Sheryl Sandberg: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
John Agno: When Doing It All Won't Do: A Self-Coaching Guide for Career Women
Comments