Hasta la vista, baby
May, 2008
Dr Isabel Metz, Business Review Weekly, 22 May 2008
Many women wanting to return to work after giving birth are still finding a hostile reception, a new survey has found.
There's a myth surrounding the lack of women in executive management roles. It is that women leave the workforce to have babies.
A recent study debunks this misconception. Its findings unravel a complex web of factors that often leave women feeling as if they are “hitting their heads against a brick wall” and are either unwelcome in their organisations or being "squeezed out".
We interviewed 44 women who had worked in the finance industry, to find out why they left their employer. Surprisingly, most were retrenched, often when attempting to return to work from maternity leave. Two-thirds of these women held middle or senior management positions. Many had intended to continue working (a quarter of those interviewed did not have children) or to return to work after maternity leave.
Women's accounts of events leading up to their departure include reluctance by managers to offer flexible, part-time positions which would have enabled them to combine work and family responsibilities, and being denied equal access to job opportunities.
Their stories also expose unwelcoming and unsupportive management practices such as dramatic changes in job responsibilities, downgrading of position levels, and relocation on return from maternity leave.
Further, in environments of staff cuts and uncertainty, gender discrimination was seemingly unchecked. One woman said: "I had a new boss who actually preferred working with men than women … my job had not gone. He just wanted somebody else. Sure enough, he replaced me with a young man."
Another said: "Coming back again after the second maternity leave, there was just no proper job. I think they did a review of the communications area, which I was in, and I think I might have been the only person who was made redundant out of that review. “But I was also the only person who was a senior manager. I was paid more and there was a view that there wasn’t a job for anyone who was part-time at that level. Therefore, I had to go."
"Blokey" cultures and politics in companies affect the parties involved in ending women’s employment after maternity leave. It is possible that transgressions of women’s expectations of their employers’ obligations are more likely to occur in work cultures dominated by masculine values, such as the superiority of the hegemonic men over other men and women, characteristics such as very long work hours, and shows of power and physical strength.
As a result of organisational change, contravened understandings of the work contract, and inequitable treatment, the women’s decisions to leave were often accompanied by feelings ranging from disappointment to anger at the human resources and management practices involving maternity leave, retrenchments and redundancies.
One woman said: "My career took a massive dive when I wanted to work part-time, when I had my first child. That was just the end of my career, basically, which was quite upsetting for a long time. You imagine that you can combine work and family but the reality is that in many organisations you can’t."
Yet many of the organisations had outwardly attractive family-friendly programs and, in some cases, had even won awards for their efforts.
Losing experienced and talented employees is costly. But losing women reduces the gender diversity of an organisation's workforce and, in turn, reduces its ability to meet the needs of a diverse customer base.
It is not enough for organisations to have family-friendly policies, because the manager, who is often male, has discretion over who those policies apply to, and under what circumstances.
Some managers use restructures and competitive pressures as excuses to break contractual understandings with women on maternity leave.
For example, women were offered part-time jobs at lower levels than their previous position that were not as financially or intrinsically rewarding.
Not surprisingly, many women found these expectations unacceptable because the jobs would have under¬utilised their work skills.
The result? Organisation-initiated incidences and unreasonable expectations of what constitutes fair part-time employment, coupled with generous retrenchment and redundancy packages, pushed women with young families out of the organisation.
According to the research, HR executives offered no support to the women employees. HR needs to be more active and aware of these types of practices, which often fall under the radar.
Managers need to be made accountable for everyone who leaves their department, so that any insidious, possibly personal, discriminatory trends, such as a high proportion of women leaving, may be exposed.
This measure should form part of their short-term key performance indicators and be measured alongside their other short-term KPIs.
Other human capital indicators should include the degree of gender diversity in work teams; the proportion of women who leave in comparison with men; the percentage of women applicants for a job and what percentage were hired; and the proportion of staff (broken down by gender and position level) who take advantage of any flexible work policies.
Many women interviewed confided that although these policies were in place, they seldom made use of them because they knew it would damage their careers. In other words, the organisational culture and/or the managers actively discouraged such work practices.
Training and development is another area which should be more carefully monitored by either a more active HR department or KPIs.
Do managers provide "career breakthrough" opportunities equally to men and women in their department or are these coveted opportunities reserved for men?
Exit interviews should be held well after employment ends, rather than immediately afterwards, so that women are not fearful of jeopardising future employment prospects by speaking ill of their previous manager or employer.
This study shows that managerial discretion is more likely to go unchecked and family unfriendly work practices are more likely to prevail in work environments characterised by change, uncertainty and masculine cultures.
Organisations must ensure that restructures aimed at reducing costs and increasing productivity are not used to "push" women out of the workforce.
They need to ensure that their managers are committed to, and supportive of, the flexible work arrangements offered in their policies.
As well, they need to be vigilant about unsupportive management practices such as dramatic changes in job responsibilities, downgrading of position levels, and relocation on return from maternity leave.
HR staff can assist by providing line managers and female employees with advice on how flexible work arrangements can work. In some cases, if the HR department had made just one phone call to each woman who submitted her resignation or accepted a package, to discuss work expectations and arrangements, these women could have been easily dissuaded from leaving. Instead, the HR people left far too much responsibility to line management.
The loss and lack of recognition of women is a financial matter, not just a moral and ethical one. If they wish to succeed with generations Y and Z, organisations must make decision-makers as accountable for the equitable and effective management of women as for shareholder value.
Published in BRW, 22 May 2008
Dr Isabel Metz is Associate Professor in Organisational Behaviour at Melbourne Business School.
