Like a bad holiday present, late last year Harvard Business School released a study showing that high-potential women are still failing to meet their career ambitions. This research was particularly interesting because it looked at female graduates of Harvard Business School – a group with far more opportunities than most professional women.
The findings held for older women and millennials, lending evidence that younger women are facing the same challenges as they advance.
The study looked at expectations in particular, and how women’s expectations fall short of their ultimate realities in terms of their careers and family lives. Men don’t encounter the same issue, resulting in an expectation gap with serious consequences.
Reading this, it feels like déjà vu. It seems we’re in a national circular debate about working women that we can’t escape. Women begin to make progress, younger women raise their expectations, only to have them trashed by reality. I know that for my fellow Gen X women, we came out of school certain we’d have it all only to learn that the reality of being working mothers and professional women had many challenges in store for us. Millennials are tracking on our heels.
We’ve discussed ad nauseam the various reasons that women don’t hold more high-powered career positions. Sheryl Sandberg incited an entire movement with her book, Lean In. So what are some factors still causing women to fall behind their own expectations?
Discordant expectations in marriage
The study spent a considerable amount of time discussing the gap in expectations between men and women – what the authors called “discordant expectations in marriage.”
According to the study, “about 60 percent of male graduates who were 32 to 67 years old expected that their careers would take priority over their wives’, and nearly three-quarters of the men said that turned out to be true. About 80 percent expected their spouses to do most of the child care, and that happened for 86 percent of them.
“Among women in that age group, however, only 17 to 25 percent expected their husbands’ careers to take precedence, but they did so 40 percent of the time. Half of the women expected to handle a majority of child care, but nearly three-quarters said they ended up doing so.”
There’s a gap in women’s expectations for themselves, but also a large gap in expectations about work and family lives between men and women from the outset. The study raises questions about how well we’re communicating up front – before marriage – to align expectations for careers and families.
Or as Sheryl Sanberg said, “The most important career choice is who you’ll marry.”
Lack of positive female role models.
We know that women are far underrepresented at the highest echelons of society. According to a 2013 survey, just 16.9% of corporate board seats were held by women, and only 8.1% of the Fortune 500’s top earners were female. Of the Fortune 500 companies, 135 had no female executive officers. The number of women in Congress has stalled at around 20%.
Even when women are heading up big corporations, few are openly discussing issues of women in leadership.
Further, these leaders, according to HSBC USA Chief Executive Irene Dorner, may not be acting as the best role models: “The women at the top of organizations that I know will tell you that we think that we’ve made it because we were born the way we are and can play by these rules without feeling damaged by them. Or, we’ve learned how to play by these rules and use them to our own advantage. I suspect that we were simply not very good role models.”
Dorner added, “There aren’t enough of us to be visible so that people can work out how to do what we did.”
Dorner is daring to say publicly what many women express privately – when they look at the lives of women they know in high-ranking positions, they don’t want them. This is not to blame women as there are a myriad of reasons behind this. (Read Brigid Schulte’s compelling book, Overwhelmed, for the depressing details.)
Still, I’ve heard many female clients express that they don’t want to follow in the same footsteps as the women before them. So not only do we not have enough role models for women – we have even fewer that we aspire to.
We’re not in the hot jobs.
A 2012 Catalyst study found that there are fewer women holding so-called hot jobs, positions with high visibility, P&L responsibility and international experience that are often prerequisites to the C-suite. By not being in contention for these jobs, women have limited opportunities to make it to the highest echelons of corporate officers.
Sixty-two percent of survey participants said that assignments that gave them high visibility and leadership experience (i.e., P&L positions) had the greatest impact on their careers, while only 10% said formal training programs were the most beneficial.
This research dovetails with a common frustration from women that they felt sidelined in their careers and weren’t seen as candidates for the top positions.
Women’s second shift takes a toll.
It’s been well established, and the Harvard study reinforces, that women do the majority of the domestic work. Dubbed the “second shift” in the 1980s, women face time pressures as they juggle everything from picking up children and coordinating family activities to getting dinner on the table. With the ever increasing demands on parents, this trend has only gotten worse.
Even for families who have the best full-time domestic help, the management and decision-making of the family still primarily falls on women's shoulders. Whether women sacrifice their careers or sleep to accomplish everything, I’ve yet to meet a mother who’s escaped untouched.
And yes, many women elect to take on the bulk of the domestic responsibilities – and are happy to do so. This is not to degrade anyone’s choices. But after children enter school, many also want to come back and find few career-track opportunities. In this study in particular, only 11% had left the workforce, and the majority had done so because they felt they had no choice.
Men who want to be equal partners don’t have it easy either.
There certainly are supportive husbands who want to – and are – contributing to their partner’s career. But our culture doesn't make it easy on them either. Paternity leave is decreasing in the U.S., and there’s a well-established stigma for taking anything beyond a minimal amount of time in most companies.
As this article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Women at Work: A Guide For Men points out, there are many opinions and confusion about how men can best support women in the workplace. And as the comment section demonstrates, no shortage of frustration.
One glimmer of hope is the trend of flexible time for all workers, which allows a natural give and take between partners. One study by Working Mother Research Institute showed that nearly 80% of men have flex time and feel confident in using it.
Share your comments here or @kristihedges.
Kristi Hedges is a leadership coach, speaker and author of The Power of Presence: Unlock Your Potential to Influence and Engage Others. She blogs at kristihedges.com.
