Reporting from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Nicholas Kristof describes a ?sea of men.? In ?She?s (Rarely) the Boss,? he writes that female participation at the ?annual conclave of the presumed powerful? is 17 percent. No word on how many of those 17 percent are mothers of young children, or how many of the 83 percent of male attendees are fathers who made sure to arrange for suitable child care before they came.
Why so few women? Mr. Kristof offers Sheryl Sandberg?s ?provocative? general answer to the question of why women are underrepresented in positions of power from her forthcoming book, ?Lean In?:
?We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. We internalize the negative messages we get throughout our lives, the messages that say it?s wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men. We lower our own expectations of what we can achieve. We continue to do the majority of the housework and child care. We compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet.?
There is something real and important in what she says, Mr. Kristof argues, citing his experiences of men asking questions more readily, along with a McKinsey survey (36 percent of male employees at major companies aspired to be top executives, compared with 18 percent of the women) and a study of Carnegie Mellon M.B.A. graduates in 2003 (57 percent of the men, but only 7 percent of the women, tried to negotiate a higher initial salary offer).
Neither Ms. Sandberg nor Mr. Kristof blames women for the numeric effect of their many failures and compromises, and both give significant weight to history, nature, social mores and the fact that, as Mr. Kristof puts it, ?the modern job was built for the distracted father.? But there is so much more to the story of why women are underrepresented in Davos, in boardrooms and in corporate executive roles.
In a complex, forthcoming study from the researchers Serena Chen at the University of California, Berkeley and Melissa Williams of Emory University, women who were asked to imagine a life in which they made most of the household decisions for a family consisting of a small child and a spouse showed less interest in achieving power in the workplace than women who imagined sharing those household decisions with a spouse, whereas men asked to imagine the same situations showed no change in their workplace ambitions.
A (male) writer, considering this data, produced a piece for The Huffington Post with the headline ?Working Moms Study: Household Managers Found to Have Less Ambition at Work? (The short line in the link? ?working-moms-less-likely-leaders?).
The researchers theorized that women were more likely to value household power, and therefore to feel less hypothetically in need of workplace power (unlike The Huffington Post writer, I find it hard to extrapolate from the imagined desires of research subjects to the real world), but the result was still yet another negative headline about women in the workplace.
This research seems to support Ms. Sandberg?s argument: even women imagining managing a household with a child ?lean back.? But we have to consider the extent to which that household (even the hypothetical household) pushes mothers back.
From birth to age 5 or 6, that single child will need someone present to care for her during every one of her waking and sleeping hours. That care has to be provided by a parent or paid for (and the parent who works at home caring for his or her child is ?paying? for child care in lost earnings elsewhere). Only when she?s old enough for public school does society support ? in the purely economic sense ? the idea that both of that child?s parents could work outside the home, and then one parent is expected (again, in the economic sense of a publicly provided alternative to the child being at home with the parent) to be present after 3 p.m.
Those are cold, hard economic facts (and please understand that they aren?t meant to reflect the very real emotional pleasures and even economic gains of having children). Men, who are accustomed to having women deal most fully with the consequences of that unavoidable requirement, may be more able to see it as less limiting. The fact that the men in the above hypothetical study weren?t daunted by the proposition of being wholly responsible for arranging that care may show an admirable level of ambition, but it may also show a poor grasp of reality.
The most salient line in Ms. Sandberg?s words was this one: ?We continue to do the majority of the housework and child care.? We ? as in, we women ? do, and that makes it difficult. But do we women continue to do the majority of the housework and child care because we want to? Because we have to? Because we?re expected to?
I?m not even sure we know the answer to that question. Regardless, until that greater household burden on women changes, the number of mothers in Davos won?t change. Two things could help: more fathers taking on real equal roles in child-rearing, and more structural support, not for women, but for families. Families who need paid sick leave. Families who need paternity and maternity leave. Families who need access to affordable, high-quality day care, and to birth control, and to preventative health care. (And unless you sprang from the brow of Zeus fully formed, those issues affect those without children as well.)
All of those are economic issues, and they certainly have an economic impact, in different ways, in different societies, worldwide. Lifting families from poverty requires all of those things. So they?ll probably be at least touched on in Davos. But will they be discussed in the same way as if 50 percent of the attendees were women, and if the other 50 percent were men who had always had, and expected to have, a gender-neutral equal role in family life?
No.
Source: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/davos-needs-parents-of-both-sexes/
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