Even though International Women’s Day is in the rear-view mirror, companies still need to focus on the issues plaguing women in the workplace—as well as the ones that had to opt out of the workforce. In order to enact positive change, businesses need to actively empower women, and not on just one calendar day of the year.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Valerie Beaulieu, Adecco Group’s chief sales and marketing officer, previously the chief marketing officer for Microsoft in the United States and a longtime international tech executive, pointed out a disturbing trend—men are entering the job market in larger numbers, while women are not. The National Women’s Law Center reported that from February 2020 to January 2022, male workers regained nearly all jobs they had lost during the pandemic, but more than one million women left the labor force during that time period. The departure amounted to 63% of all jobs lost.
Prior to the early days of the virus outbreak, the representation of women in Corporate America was trending in a positive upward direction. From January 2015 to December 2019, the number of women in senior vice president positions increased to 28%, and in the C-suite to 21%. Though the numbers were progressing slightly higher, women remained dramatically underrepresented, especially women of color.
On a positive note, women gained 188,000 jobs in January 2022. However, they are still short by more than 1.8 million jobs lost since February 2020. This is due, in large part, to the difference in gender household responsibilities. Women, mostly paid less than men, still hold the lion’s share of caregiver responsibilities. The data shows that millions of women felt the pressure to leave their jobs to take care of children, particularly when public schools shut down and started online learning.
According to Beaulieu, by offering upskilling, training in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to keep up with the new digital economy, federal, state or company subsidies and financial assistance with childcare—the norm for many European nations—and providing flexible work styles, it would help promote positive changes.
Q&A With Valerie Beaulieu
Jack Kelly: What did you see happen to women during the beginning of the pandemic?
Valerie Beaulieu: The first wave of the pandemic in 2020 saw a collapse in women’s employment. Since then, not enough of them have been returning to work.
Kelly: What explains this, and what can we do about it?
Beaulieu: The first and most obvious reason is that women work disproportionately in sectors that were especially hard hit by [Covid-19]. Some, such as hospitality and retail, were affected by shutdowns. In others, such as health and social care, women were on the front lines of the crisis and working conditions became more stressful.
Kelly: Do you have any data and color to share with us?
Beaulieu: Our Resetting Normal Report for 2021 found that men and women had experienced the pandemic differently. Women were more likely than men to say they felt burned out (39% vs 36%), their mental well-being had declined (34% vs 29%) and they were anxious about returning to the office (46% vs 38%).
Another important part of the explanation is that in many societies women still bear the brunt of domestic care responsibilities. These increased dramatically, as schools closed and families sought to protect elderly relatives from the virus by taking over more aspects of their care.
McKinsey and Lean In found in 2020 that U.S. mothers in a dual-career couple were more than twice as likely as fathers to say they’d taken on at least an additional five hours of household chores during the early stage of the pandemic. In two-income households where one partner gave up work, this was a woman in 80% of cases.
The continued burden of caregiving responsibilities still holds many women back from rejoining the workforce. Societies need to think much more seriously and imaginatively about how to address the often prohibitive costs of childcare and elder care.
Kelly: Would getting more women into digital jobs help level the playing field?
Beaulieu: Women’s slow speed of return accentuates a growing problem that [Covid-19] accelerated. For years, the digitalization of the economy has been excluding women due to the longstanding, systemic gender deficit in students doing STEM degrees.
I worked for 30 years in the tech industry before joining Adecco, and I saw firsthand the difficulties women face: the more important digital roles become in the economy, the lower the share of important roles go to women.
Kelly: How can we avoid the rapid shift to digital, making women feel even more excluded?
Beaulieu: First, role models are important to mobilize girls to want to study technology. Many women, for example, are now working as scientists in law enforcement because they loved the character of Abby Scuito in NCIS. Astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go into space with the U.S. space program, said she was inspired by actress Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek–who, in turn, had been encouraged by Martin Luther King to continue the role, so she could inspire others. We need more movies and TV shows featuring inspiring and powerful women as leaders and scientists. Gender equality starts with the arts.
Second, governments should accelerate regulatory action on wage discrimination— asking companies to prove that they are paying men and women equally for work of equal value—while investing in the care economy to enable women to return to work, and prioritizing women for upskilling and reskilling programs.
For many years, I was against positive discrimination, because I never wanted to wonder whether I had been promoted for my capabilities or my gender. But I have changed my mind because we cannot afford to wait. At the current rate of progress, we are not looking at only a generation to achieve gender equality in the economy— it’s 267 years.
Third, we need to devise better ways of delivering training programs in digital skills that fit practically with women’s lifestyles. Podcasts are one example. For many women, they offer an opportunity to absorb information, while also performing daily care tasks.
Kelly: Would flexible training and more male sponsors help matters?
Beaulieu: Some women are put off from digital roles because they imagine being isolated, working on their own with a computer. We need to emphasize that this is increasingly not the case. Plenty of roles involve digital elements alongside a diverse range of other skills.
Last but not least, more men need to ask themselves how they can be sponsors of women in the workforce. We are starting to see an attitude shift that mirrors the difference between the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s—which primarily involved Black people fighting for their own rights—and today’s Black Lives Matter movement, which has led wider swathes of society to recognize their own need to change.
Being a sponsor goes beyond being an ally. A sponsor is someone who will talk about you when you’re not in the room. Women tend to do this for other women, and men can do it too. I know how much my own career benefited from having amazing male sponsors who made a conscious effort to speak up on my behalf.
Women had made decades of progress in the workplace before the pandemic set it back. For the sake of our daughters, we need now to get that progress back on track.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Source: Forbes
