March is Women’s History Month, and this past week was International Women’s Day, an annual moment to honor the contributions of women from all walks of life. It’s a valuable reminder, for those of us who need it, that women are and have always been a part of history, no matter how deeply our participation and influence have been buried. Women are the primary drivers of linguistic growth, musical taste, fashion; women are inventors, computer programmers, artists of the finest caliber; women have started wars and stopped them, toppled regimes and founded them. If it strikes you as a mite absurd that all of this even needs to be said, congratulations! You are still sane.
This International Women’s Day fell in the midst of an ongoing decay in our employment prospects. I’ve written extensively about this before; how the numbers are stacked against us, how men have been recovering jobs faster than women. While February posted solid numbers, it remains to be seen if that will continue; the pattern over the last two years suggests it may not.
But one of the knock-on effects of talking about the she-cession has been an increase in at least formal interest in recruiting women more actively (something that was needed long before the pandemic, but is now more vital than ever).
This is unambiguously a good thing, and companies who want to recruit women need to be smart about it if they don’t want another mass exit. In the year ahead of the pandemic, I was able to speak with representatives from Goldman Sachs about their revolutionary, if new and still in progress, standards for recruiting, retaining, and promoting women. I remain impressed; it is, by a wide margin, the most comprehensive attempt to identify and resolve the primary reasons women drop out of the labor market. Their data-driven approach had little time to operate before the pandemic turned the labor market, and heck, the whole economy, on its head, but it’s genuinely a shining, glittering example of what “we need to do better by women” really means. Every company interested in improving its practices in this area should learn from it, because it tackles issues holding back women with surgical precision.
I bring all this up because, if companies are serious about helping women recover the job losses that knocked us down to our lowest participation rate in the workforce in decades, they need to understand why those losses happened and how they could have been prevented. Obviously, the pandemic was akin to a flaming garbage truck t-boning the planet at a blind intersection—not everything was necessarily preventable. But, a lot of it was—the cracks were already there, the pandemic just smashed them wide open. According to Gallup, the number one concern women looking for work have—work-life balance, even over salary—was also a primary driver of women leaving the workforce at the start of the pandemic, whether by choice or by fiat. Women, faced with the challenge of trying to simultaneously do their jobs, care for their homebound families, homeschool their kids, and all the myriad other responsibilities that fall primarily on women, suffered termination, burnout, downsizing, or “gentle encouragement” to resign voluntarily. On top of the perhaps unconscious bias driving that from the top down, many women, especially mothers, were acutely aware of how dependent on childcare access their jobs were, and in the runup to uncertain school years, themselves stopped trying to get jobs when they knew someone had to be at home.
All of that combined has meant that women have recovered a million fewer jobs than men since all this began, and whether top down or bottom up, choices were made that marginalized us in the workforce, and recovery means recognizing what those choices were, what drove them, and how to avoid them in the future.
According to Gallup, the two biggest differences between what men want versus what women want out of a new job are work-life balance and diversity, both of which amount to the same thing; companies that respect their employees real lives will also be more diverse, and more diverse companies will be better equipped to meet the needs of their team. So, recruiting and retaining women requires that you understand what women actually need: the flexibility to do their work on their own time and confidence from their teammates that they can do their jobs, even despite everything. What it doesn’t require is expecting men and women alike to act as if their lived circumstances are identical, which is and remains a huge hurdle when they are not and cannot be. Respect doesn’t mean undifferentiated; respect means seeing your employees as human beings and not cogs in the machine.
The thing with cogs is that cogs all have to be the same size; they have to be interchangeable. But human beings are not and never will be, nor do women live under the same conditions and expectations as men. I said at the start of this pandemic that the key to global recovery would be recognizing the humanity of a workforce struggling amid wildly uncertain circumstances; this recognition has only partially materialized. But, if the wage or salaried job is to remain the primary vector of resource distribution, and by extension the primary vector for healthcare, access to education, access to healthy food, and on and on and on, companies must step up. That could mean providing for more remote positions, or offering in-house childcare, or unlimited PTO in the confidence (and respect!) they will not abuse it. It means treating women like adults capable of making responsible decisions; if they weren’t, why did you even hire them?
I’m confident, still, that this new world can be a more human one, that the economy can be one that serves instead of the one being served, and that women are capable of excellence. And if companies learn to account for the lives of their employees, they'll reap the rewards of that excellence.
For almost a century, American enterprise has been allergic to this fact. But, as some like to say, facts don’t care about your feelings. We all rise together, or we all sink together. That's a fact.
WRITTEN BY
Liz Elting