Findings show women are leading “the Great Breakup” with traditional corporate jobs.
According to the 2022 Women in the Workplace Report, women are demanding more from their employeers than ever before. For the past eight years, research experts McKinsey & Company have partnered with LeanIn.Org to conduct the largest study on the state of women in corporate America. Titled Women in the Workplace, the report is based on “information from 333 participating organizations employing more than 12 million people” and the groups “surveyed more than 40,000 employees, and conducted interviews with women of diverse identities, including women of color, LGBTQ+ women, and women with disabilities.”
Each year, I read the report with equal parts pleasure and pain, and my reaction to 2022’s findings were no different. From the data it’s highly evident that, after COVID disrupted traditional work, people have different expectations about what their workday looks like and are less willing to compromise. Women, especially, are demanding more from their employers than ever before. They are also leaving at a much faster rate than their male counterparts if they are not accommodated. The report states: “To put the scale of the problem in perspective: for every woman at the director level who gets promoted to the next level, two women directors are choosing to leave their company.”
The report cleverly labels this “the Great Break-up” and opines that “it’s increasingly important to women leaders that they work for companies that prioritize flexibility, employee well-being, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Here are my top takeaways from the 2022 Women in the Workplace Report:
Women don’t get enough credit–or money–for their contributions.
This has probably happened to you: in a meeting, you pitch an idea and it’s ignored, only to have a male colleague say basically the same thing later to thunderous acceptance. It’s frustrating, and apparently happens to a lot of women: 37% of women leaders surveyed said they have had a coworker get credit for their idea, compared to 27% of men leaders. Women also do more to support employee well-being and satisfaction, but that work is not formally rewarded in most companies. Women are expected to volunteer for things like party committees and mentorship without any renumeration.
Choice and flexibility are critical to retaining female workers.
Newsflash: “Employees who can choose to work in the arrangement they prefer—whether remote or on-site—are less burned out, happier in their jobs, and much less likely to consider leaving their companies.” Even with all of the hype around remote and hybrid work, it seems the most important thing to women is the agency to decide how and when they get their tasks done. Only 1 in 10 women wants to work mostly on-site, according to the report, and many women point to remote and hybrid work options as one of their top reasons for joining or staying with an organization.
Even more interesting to me was the amount of women that reported feeling “safer” when able to work remotely, saying that “they experience fewer microaggressions and higher levels of psychological safety. The decrease in microaggressions is especially pronounced for women of color, LGBTQ+ women, and women with disabilities—groups who typically face more demeaning and othering behavior.”
Black women are the most ambitious and marginalized.
If all women have to work harder than men for money and acknowledgment, Black women have it the hardest. “Black women leaders are more ambitious than other women at their level: 59 percent of Black women leaders want to be top executives, compared to 49 percent of women leaders overall. But they are also more likely than women leaders of other races and ethnicities to receive signals that it will be harder for them to advance. Compared to other women at their level, Black women leaders are more likely to have colleagues question their competence and to be subjected to demeaning behavior—and one in three Black women leaders says they’ve been denied or passed over for opportunities because of personal characteristics, including their race and gender.”
Women are tired.
The mental and physical health of women in corporate America is also considerably worse than that of men. 43% of women leaders reported being burned out, compared to only 31% of men at their level. There is also a demonstrative pattern of additional caregiving responsibility that women perform at home. You would think that the higher a women rises in her career, the less she would expected to do in the home management and child rearing arena, but the opposite is true. Among entry-level employees, women are about twice as likely as men to be doing all or most of their family’s housework and caregiving. Among employees in leadership, the gap nearly doubles. Only 13% of male senior managers report doing household labor, for women senior managers 52% are most responsible.
Progress has been made, of course, though its painful pace can feel debilitating. It’s not just America: if we zoom out to a global perspective, the news isn’t much better. The global gender gap remains wide. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Report, it will take another 132 years to reach gender equality worldwide. Embarrassingly, the United States places 27th on the Gender Gap Index rankings, right behind Latvia: a country most Americans wouldn’t be able to find on a map. We can and must do better. It’s going to take each of us standing up for ourselves and our sisters to affect lasting change. I’m ready.
To read the entire 2022 Women in the Workplace Report, go to www.womenintheworkplace.com.
