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New Attitudes About Gender, Work, and Family — Kathleen Gerson and Jerry Jacobs

Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday at 7 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

 

Jerry Jacobs is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and Founding President of the Work and Family Researchers Network, an interdisciplinary and international scholarly association that focuses on work and family issues. His research with Kathleen Gerson was honored with the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research in 2002, and led to the publication of The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality, published by Harvard University Press in 2004.

Kathleen Gerson is Collegiate Professor of Sociology at NYU, where she studies gender, work, and family change. Her most recent book, The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family, is an award-winning study of how new generations have responded to the gender revolution of the last several decades. She is now conducting a study about the challenges facing today’s adults, who must build their work and family lives amid the increasingly insecure economic climate of the new economy.

The following are edited excerpts of their conversation. Full podcast.

 

Kathleen Gerson: kathleen gersonOur findings seem to provide one more piece of the puzzle of how dramatic change has been. Jerry [Jacobs] and I continue to be baffled that so many people are skeptical that these changes have occurred. I think in some ways our private lives have moved forward in a way that public discussions about them simply haven’t caught up.

Stewart Friedman: Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

KG: There’s a bad news orientation in the media and, to some extent, in our political discourse, in which people tend to be quite skeptical about social change. If I were to sum that up, I would say two opposite arguments are being made. First, nothing is really changed, we’re going back to the old ways, women are still facing these huge barriers and men continue to be resistant to these changes. The other side of the story, which ironically or paradoxically presents the opposite picture, is women have changed so quickly that men are being left behind and this is not good for society and men and women are unhappy about this reversal. What Jerry and I have found is that neither of those stories is true. In fact, what’s happening is men and women are converging in terms of not only how they want to live their lives and what they want to get done in their lives, but also in terms of their views about what other people’s choices should be, and how we as a society should allow people to make those choices. Even though the political discourse is very contentious, what Jerry and I have found is that ordinary Americans, across a very broad spectrum of demographic and social categories, support the idea that gender, in fact, should not be the primary driver of who does what, at work or in the home. These decisions should be driven by what people want, what people prefer, and what’s best for their families, and how they can do the best in a very increasingly uncertain and difficult situation.  What we really need is to relieve the difficulties that families are facing to allow them to develop the strategy they prefer.

SF: To produce greater human freedom, after all, right?

KG: I would underline the world human.  It would be nice if we could move beyond these categories of women and men, and talk about human beings, parents, workers.

SF: Creating options and choices for people, then produces the kinds of roles they want to create with the support that they need.  But there’s so much here to unpack.

Jerry Jacobs: Jerry JacobsBut before you unpack, let me explain a little more specifically what we did. There’s a body of research that talks about gender role ideology, and it shows that a lot of people are much more flexible in terms of their views on what women’s and men’s role should be. It also shows there’s a substantial minority stuck in the old ways, committed to traditional, standard gender ideology.

SF: That is, of course, the model of the single-earner dad with a mom at home taking care of kids;  caregiving and breadwinning split by men and women doing one or the other roles.

JJ: Our concern about this research is it doesn’t really say very much about situations and specifics. One of the motivating factors behind what we did is we asked ourselves, if we give the average person, respondents chosen at random, a national random sample, if we give them specific stories, specific situations regarding men’s and women’s choices, what will turn out to be more important: the situations or commitment to gender ideology? The question is are people stuck in a set of blinders that basically say women belong in the home no matter what, or does it depend? Does it depend on if she likes her job? The other thing we specifically looked at was whether her family depended on her income. We have remarkably powerful evidence to suggest that situations are more important than anything else, than whether you’re a man or a woman, whether you’re single or married, it’s not that the patterns are identical for fathers and mothers, but the situations were more important than gender.

SF: Why is that so important, as an observation about our society? I think most of our listeners are less interested in sociological literature, but of course those two are related, what’s the so what there in terms of what people in business as well as public policy makers ought to be thinking about as a result of what you observed?

KG: it’s important because what it tells us is is that ordinary Americans, women and men across ages, races, and situations, are far more sympathetic to the particular situations that individuals families are facing and are far more flexible in their views about what women and men should do than either our political discourse or our public policy or our workplace policies, even for private workplaces, recognize. If both our government policies and employers would pay more attention to this, then I think that would not just improve the way we talk about these issues but could make a real difference in the lives of men and women, mothers and fathers, and children.

JJ: If we could make childcare more affordable and higher quality, our data suggests that more people would support women working, or more people would support mothers of young children being in a labor force.

SF: How does that equation work? Why is the advent of a greater daycare support going to lead to greater support of women in the workplace?

JJ: One of our key findings was that when mothers are satisfied with the childcare that they’re getting, people are more supportive of her working. They’re much more skeptical of mothers’ employment if there’s a feeling that the childcare that they have access to is inadequate or unsatisfactory.

KG: Another finding is that if women can earn enough to support their families, there’s enough support for fathers staying home with their children, especially if those fathers are dissatisfied and unhappy with their jobs and their families don’t feel they have adequate childcare. In a sense, the implications for public policy are both about the childrearing and family side but we need more support, both for employment of mothers and fathers, and also for gender equity at work.  If mothers and fathers have access to well-paying and secure jobs, it gives them more options about who can do what in the home.

SF: It’s clear that the more men lean in at home, the more women can lean in at work and enjoy the fruits of their productive output in the labor market contributing to society through their work.  But it does mean that men need to be not only supportive but really given legitimacy in the role of caregiver. It sounds like your evidence suggests that the legitimacy is out there.

KG: I think that was one of the more uplifting and surprising findings. It’s not really surprising to find out that people support single mothers working, for example, and it’s even less surprising that they would support married mothers with good jobs and good childcare working.  But I think it is definitely worth noting that they also support fathers who don’t have good childcare and aren’t happy with their jobs and aren’t providing necessary income, that they support those fathers being more involved at home and being the primary caretaker.

SF: I, too, find it uplifting Kathleen that men be seen as legitimate in the role of caregiver, that is something that we found in our study comparing the Gen Xers with the millennials here at Wharton and that men’s and women’s roles are converging and how they think about what’s valid and true. I also got an email yesterday from someone who attended one of my workshops on leadership from the point of the whole person, where people look at what’s important to them, who is important to them, and they make creative changes based on those diagnostic analyses and here’s what she wrote to me:

While doing the exercises in the book and discussing with my coaches we discovered a great way to improve my whole self and my life has dramatically changed. Prior to this change, I was working 26 hours and my husband was working 40 hours in a job he disliked that was too far from home. We discovered a solution that led me to coming back to work full-time with a flexible schedule and location and my husband now doesn’t have a paying job; he takes care of the house. If nothing else, I’d like to thank you for putting this information out there and let you know that you helped me change my life for the better.

Of course, I hear this type of thing all the time from students, but they don’t necessarily thank me, but I hear these issues a lot. You’re finding research evidence that this is common, that people are making choices on the basis of economics, the need for childcare, and not whether it’s the man or woman doing the caregiving at home.

KG: I think one thing that is important for us to point out is that this study was really asking people what their opinions and beliefs and attitudes were, but we shouldn’t gloss over the fact that implementing those beliefs may be a lot harder than having them. That’s where I think we’re lagging behind and not giving people real options to implement those beliefs, rather than having them but not feeling they’re socially legitimate or even logistically possible.

SF: It’s something that’s at issue in the presidential campaign. Some of the people who are wanting to be our president are talking quite strenuously about this issue and I think it’s going to be one of the platform issues that’s going to draw a lot of attention, because it will be a stark contrast between the Democrats and Republicans, right?

KG: It’s certainly something that Obama has put on the agenda in the last several years of his presidency as well.

SF: What you two have done here is to advance the knowledge about what is fundamental to any kind of real change and that is the legitimacy of this shift and simply acknowledging that people’s attitudes really have changed, and that’s very powerful. What’s been the reaction to this work?

JJ: There’s been a lot of interest, and we got some very interesting feedback in our New York Times piece. Among our colleagues, there’s a lot of engagement in these issues and trying to see how we can probe further into the aspects of work that are most essential and the aspects of family life that are most important. In a sense, this is a first step in that area, but the feedback we’ve been getting is very positive.

SF: What are people saying?

KG: One of the more important reactions has been not simply about the findings themselves but also about the way we went about asking the question, because part of the problem, as Jerry pointed out earlier, is I think we’ve been asking the wrong questions up to this point. We’ve been asking questions like is it alright for a mother to work and will their children suffer and those questions already start to presuppose an answer, you almost have to disagree with the assumption of the question, which is hard for people to do to give a more accurate answer, but they also focus only on women and mothers. If we have any larger effect on even the way that these questions are phrased, I think that will be important, not only because we’ve included fathers as well as mothers.   And we’ve also taken account of the fact that not everyone is married and there are all sorts of family forms and patterns these days that were not prevalent 30 or 40 years ago.  We’re asking people not just a global question, but rather given this particular situation where these parents are facing these constraints and these opportunities, what do you believe is the appropriate action. That’s very different from just saying this blanket statement about whether or not it’s good for mothers to work.

SF: It seems so obvious that we should have been doing that all along, so how did you come up with this better method?

JJ: It’s an experiment. We had an opportunity to do a controlled experiment in a survey setting, which is kind of unusual.  A number researchers around the country and around the world are thinking about how they can replicate what we’ve done, extend what we’ve done, and that’s always exciting.

KG: We had this opportunity to use this method where you’re actually setting the stage before you ask people questions and then seeing how people might respond differently depending on how that stage is set differently. We’re able to add all these different situations, which is very hard to do if you’re asking everyone the same questions. Part of what happened is we began to realize from our own research how misleading some of these surveys that were asking questions formulated 30 years ago were. Because we know 40 years ago most people lived in a particular kind of family and a certain set of beliefs were prevalent.   But we’ve gone through a revolution since then and we began to ask ourselves how we can begin to formulate questions for the 21st century that don’t make the assumptions that might have been reasonable to make in the 1950s. For example, if someone is faced with bad childcare, and this is something else we looked at, they have a set of choices. They might stop working, but they also might decide to get better childcare. Same with a job. If you were unhappy with your job, one option might be to pull back from work but another option is to look for a different job. We wanted to give people realistic options rather than forcing them to give answers that really didn’t fit with the realities Americans face today.

SF: Randy is calling from Texas. Randy, welcome to Work and Life. What’s on your mind?

Randy: I was thrilled when I heard this topic. In my family, my husband and I had a very heated discussion about this exact same topic over the weekend. It seems like the research is focusing on do we think it’s okay, is there a societal shift in the belief that it’s okay for men and women to do something that’s not sticking with a gender stereotype. My question is was there any look at a non-binary question so is there an impact if you choose a non-gender-specific role, do you face consequences in the workforce, specifically thinking about men who choose to make family a larger priority than work, are they then experiencing negative consequences in the workforce because we aren’t willing to accept it in practice?

JJ: We work with companies all the time and talk to corporate leaders and try to encourage them to promote workplace flexibility and to give working parents the option to work less to pursue lots of different creative choices. You’re absolutely right that there’s a reluctance with many people because they’re concerned that there are real consequences. There is often some income loss in the short term, but I think people worry even more about the long-term consequences for their careers, and that’s both men and women. I think you may be right that there’s still more of a sales job that’s needed for men to convince everybody that this is a legitimate choice.  Kathleen and I are arguing that we’re moving toward convergence. Neither of us feel that we’re there yet. I think there’s an understanding that there are costs for both male and female employees, and that’s one of the reasons we want to move toward more explicit, systematic policies like paid leave so that it’s more institutionalized and accepted.

SF: And available for both men and women. It’s clearly not just a women’s issue anymore. Your research really helps to move us past that debate of is work and family a women’s issue. It’s a human issue, as we said earlier.

KG: There is research by others that does show that there is a stigma attached to taking advantage of the family leave policies that companies offer, and ironically I think to some extent, is greater for men than for women, because we still have a ways to go in terms of thinking about these as issues that men and women both care about and face.

SF: The data from that research is probably five years old now.

KG: Let’s hope that current and future research shows that’s declining. The more we talk about it, I think the greater chances are that it will. In the past, I think we’ve talked too much about the clash between women and men and perhaps the way we need to start talking about this now is the clash between workers’ needs and workplace policy. That will help us begin to reduce the stigma and actual career and long-term economic consequences.

JJ: Randy, what kind of choices were you considering —  cutting back or opting out of the labor force for a spell?

Randy: For the longest time, we were both equals and we had a nanny, which was wonderful. Through changes in the economy and one of our companies closing, we had the opportunity for one of us to stay home. It was me, and that’s what we decided to do. There’s a whole host of issues with that for me, but for my husband, career continues to go up and mine doesn’t go anywhere. Part of that was it’s socially acceptable for me to opt out for period. It would be harder for him to opt out even when we were both equals.   But if there was push-comes-to-shove with a family requirement, I was always the one that figured out a way to make things work because it’s okay if I leave to take someone to the doctor and not okay if he leaves to take someone to the doctor.

JJ: I do think the world is changing. Mark Zuckerberg was very public about taking paternity leave. I think there are lots of men who get points for going to their kids’ soccer games and taking off for their kids’ softball practice.  I think as more and more examples become known, I think we’re chipping away with this. The other thing I want to add is we are also very interested in re-entry ramps, trying to make it easier for people to come back into the labor force.  Stay-at-home dad is not a perfect situation. It’s not as though dads are staying home for 16 years or 18 years, they’re often doing it for six months or a year, or a lot of times they’re just cutting back to part-time. It’s not that different for women. A lot of women opt out of the labor market at some point. A lot of times it’s not their choice, things happen at work, the company closes, the office moves to a different location or whatever, and one of things that we need to do is to facilitate the re-entry of people who developed tremendous skills and abilities and are able to contribute significantly to our economy. We have to create an economy for settings where it’s easier to get back in.

SF: To off-ramp and on-ramp and to use the assets that you obtain in the parental role. There are things that you learn as a parent or by managing a household that make you more effective in the workplace; it’s not that it’s down time. Jerry, you just mentioned Zuckerberg’s very visible paternity leave.  One of the things I didn’t like about his announcement on Facebook was that he talked only about benefits for his child, which is lovely of course, citing the importance of fathers in child development, but what he didn’t speak to were the business benefits of his doing this, and I’m sure he’s thinking about them. How do you see the argument unfolding in terms of these high-profile examples but also the shift in attitudes in America about the need for support for parental leave, whether paternity or maternity?

KG: It makes a great difference, especially when the leaders at the top set the example, because that sends a signal to the people below them that they’re not going to be penalized, and if they are, it would be completely illegitimate. I think the best example I can provide is from Norway. There, they develop a use-it-or-lose-it policy, which means all parents have the right to paid parental leave for six months, but it cannot be given to the other parent. If a father doesn’t use it, then he relinquishes it and the family loses that option. Surprisingly, what that’s done is up the percentage of fathers who take it to the point where that’s the predominant pattern. What’s interesting to me is the cultural spillover effect of that change. Now, the norm has generally shifted so if a father doesn’t take leave, that’s considered strange and that requires an explanation, as opposed to the situation here where if a father does take leave, that’s considered strange and has to be justified.

SF: And that’s all as a result of social policy change.

KG: It’s not just that cultural change can lead to policy change, policy change can cause cultural change as well and we need to keep that in mind when we talk about things like Zuckerberg providing a good example for his company. If he provides an example, it also means that it changes the signals that other men and fathers and mothers receive and it gives them rights they may not have thought they had before.

SF: It might also spur people to try to push for changes in policy.   We’ll probably not see a policy like Norway’s in our lifetime. Aside from knowing that attitudes are changing and there are these outcroppings of real progress in the corporate world and a push for changes in social policy that we’ve talked a lot about on this show and that we’ve been active in, what can an individual do based on your findings in this study? Are there any implications for fathers and mothers out there listening?

JJ: Kathleen and I had the great privilege of attending the White House Summit on Working Families. Not only were the president and Michelle Obama and the vice president and Jill Biden there, they were all speaking very frankly and from the heart about their own work/family challenges including Vice President Biden commuting back and forth everyday from Washington to Delaware on Amtrak when his kids were very young. Those were incredibly powerful stories, and talk about taking leadership from the top, their commitment to these issues I thought was very powerful.

SF: I was there, too, and it was truly moving to hear all four of them and so many others speak about this issue from the heart and from real experience just like the rest of us.

JJ: Getting back to individual choices, in job interviews, this is information to be asked about. What are your work/life policies? That’s something that people need to find out about. Many corporations are increasingly flexible, and technology is making some of that more possible like working from home one day a week or part of a day. Having flexibility, again that doesn’t work for every job, but it works for a lot of jobs. Having technological opportunities, they’re increasingly common workplace practices and this might sound optimistic, but there is some beginning evidence that we’re going to be facing a tighter labor market as unemployment declines and specifically for certain occupations that are increasingly in demand. Employers are going to be seeking out employees.

SF: This is what’s happening out in Silicon Valley. Kathleen, I know you were researching that. Jerry, as the Founding President of the Work and Family Researchers Network, what are these researchers doing?

JJ: The Work and Family Researchers Network brings academics and policy-makers and corporate HR practitioners together to discuss a very wide range of issues. We don’t only talk about sick leave policy and family leave policy but also about stress, eldercare, childcare, sleep, workplace productivity, and workplace flexibility. We have over 1,000 members from 40 countries around the world and we’re going to be convening again in June in Washington, D.C. Anyone who’s interested in learning more about our organization, we’re at workfamily.sas.upenn.edu. We have a website and we’d love to see some of your listeners join us at the conference.

SF: Kathleen, I understand you’re doing some work on changes in the technology world. What is it that you’re discovering or pursuing in that work?

KG: Let me follow up to the question about what you can do in your lives. I’ve been doing research in the Silicon Valley area and the New York metropolitan area, especially among people who are in technology and new economy jobs. The first thing I would say to everyone out there is you are not alone. The momentum is growing and I think we’re almost at a tipping point where the majority of people are wanting and pushing for the same thing, and don’t be fearful to speak up because you’re part of a much larger movement of people and the more we express these needs, the more they will be acceptable and legitimate. The second thing is we’re also in the midst of an enormous change in our economic fortunes and the nature of work. Increasingly, work for everyone, men and women alike, especially in these growing sectors of the labor market, is not so much about joining a labor organization and moving up the ladder and proving your loyalty, it’s really about managing your own career and integrating that with your other values and family life and private life. Therefore, it’s on employers to pay attention to that and it means that while uncertainty or change is always scary, it also provides enormous opportunities to build the kinds of lives we want to build. To think about it, but be willing to take the risks that matter to you to build the life you want, I think the more that happens the more that we will not only have support for the social policies we need but also for the workplace changes that employers are going to have to make in order to keep up with this new labor force.

SF: And to be competitive in the labor market. We’ve been saying this for years in the world of organizational psychology and sociology, but it really is happening now. If you come to the Wharton campus and you listen to the recruiting pitches, students are asking these questions and very much upfront, and companies are saying come to work at our company, have a whole life, have meaningful work, have a positive social impact, all the things that new entrants are claiming as rights. The companies that are going to be able to attract and retain those people are going to have to be able to adjust, and they are or at least saying that they’re trying to. Whether they are actually is really the rub, but it’s a long, slow process.

KG: Assuming we’re able to make these changes, let’s try to make them for everyone, not just those people that have the skills that are so desirable, but for people up and down the economic ladder who have less control over their work. We can institutionalize these changes, and everyone will have the power to create the lives they want for themselves.

Posted on March 24, 2016 by
Filed Under: Career Paths, Fatherhood/Men's Roles, Flex Work/Project Work, Gender Equity, Gender Roles, On-Ramping/Re-Launching, Opting-Out, Policy changes, Research, Women and Work, Women Primary Breadwinners, Working Families | Leave a Comment

Investing in Human Capital: Conversation with Anne Erni

Contributor: Ali Ahmed

Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday at 7 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

Anne Erni is former head of Human Resources at Bloomberg and before that Managing Director and Chief Diversity Officer at Lehman Brothers where she pioneered global efforts in the recruiting, retention, and advancement of women and under-represented groups in financial services. She came to talent management with more than 15 years of front-line banking experience in fixed income and equity sales, at Lehman Brothers, Bankers Trust and Swiss Bank Corporation. Erni serves on several not for Profit advisory boards. She recently left her position for a much needed sabbatical.  Anne Erni spoke with Stew Friedman about HR in the 21st century and how we can invest wisely in human capital.

You can listen to the podcast here:

 

Stew Friedman: What did you do, in brief, over your course of tenure at Bloomberg?

Anne Erni: anne erniI joined Bloomberg in January of 2009.  My role was to build leadership, learning, and diversity. Bloomberg was in a big growth phase.  We were looking not only to grow the number of employees (which, by the way, grew from 8,000 to 16,000 by the time I left) but, in the course of that growth to make sure we were fully prepared with leaders who understood how to lead others, to understand business strategy, and to learn how to motivate and manage human capital as well managing the company’s capital.  While I was there I spent the first several years working on issues, such as leadership training, the hire to retire aspects of learning for all employees, as well as succession planning, and something dear to my heart, diversity.

SF:  You weren’t trained in HR. You came at this game through line positions in banking. How did you get into this field?

AE: I started out of school going into an investment banking training program and then worked in corporate finance. But there was something about that trading floor that really attracted me. It was alive and a perfect place for an extrovert to go and learn how business gets done. And I loved to sell. That was always part of my DNA. I worked my way up from repo, which is sort of the overnight, least sexy part of the trading floor – Re-Purchase Agreements. As I moved up the curve, and as my career progressed and I was promoted, I found myself increasingly alone as a woman on the trading floor. In August 2001 I was literally tapped on the shoulder by then President Joe Gregory who said, “Anne, men run in packs and women don’t. I need you to go out and create your pack.” Creating my pack has become a mantra throughout the course of my career – bringing groups of people together to encourage, inspire, and support one another. And it doesn’t have to be like-groups of people. It doesn’t have to be women for women or African Americans for other African Americans. It’s really about getting senior leadership to understand the nature of nurturing, sponsoring, and mentoring talent. That was really the beginning of my journey of moving from the trading floor to become, ultimately, the first Chief Diversity officer at Lehman, and learning how to you make sure that human capital strategy is in tune with what the business strategy is day-to-day on the floor, and how to really reach out and engage with mostly senior-level men who don’t naturally look at HR as an important issue.

SF: What was the greatest challenge in making that connection clear and compelling to the people that were decision makers?

AE: First, it’s related to the business challenge: to do a great job, we need great people. And you need great people to be highly engaged in order to bring their very best.   And you need people to stick around. It’s quite a competitive labor market, and when you have terrific people, your competitors find out very quickly. When you have a great performer and they leave to go to a competitor, that really strikes a nerve with senior leaders. The other piece is how do you get them to truly engage in change.  That is often through empathy.

 

While at Lehman and Bloomberg, one of the other things I noticed was that a lot of senior male leaders marry women they meet in the work force. And often, because they’re earning enough and have one of them to stay home, often the wives will leave the workforce. And when the kids grow up, they to tend to languish.  These are women who are highly educated, had terrific career trajectories, but had the choice and ability to spend time at home. But when they decided they wanted to go back, there were no avenues. They were not a legitimate pool from which companies recruited. The idea was how do you create those on-ramps and create an enthusiasm by senior male leaders to take a chance on someone who’s not been working for two years versus paying a premium for someone who has? Empathy was something that has often worked when thinking about how to change your organization.

SF: Can you give me an example of how you did that when you say ‘using empathy’? Can you recall an instance where you actually did that?

AE:  While at Bloomberg we spent a lot of time developing a curriculum. We have individual contributors, team leaders, and managers.  When I first arrived, when someone was promoted to team leader it wasn’t aspirational, it was like, “was I not a good contributor? Why am I having to manage other people?”  But over time, we made it an aspiration. The way you would get them to want to be leaders is to show them the impact that they have on others by relating it to the impact their boss may have had on them. When they think about “what’s a good boss?” “what’s a bad boss?” “how do I feel with a good boss?” “how do I feel with a bad boss?” it often has them think about what are the behaviors that I exhibit each day that will have an impact on my people. And it was often through that type of “relate it to yourself before you can then be able to be effective with others” that would help people understand why they would need to go through leadership training, why they would use new models of managing other people, and, frankly, changing the way work works. If people need to take time off, they need to think about their own lives before they can relate it to others.

SF: So, how did that play into what you had to do to get senior male leadership to understand the diversity challenge facing Lehman when you were first given this charge by Joe Gregory to create your own pack?

AE: When we would go to campuses to recruit, 58% of all undergrads were female. If you are recruiting a class that’s 90% male then you’ve actually lowered the standard because you haven’t taken equal parts of the intelligence that exists. Often we say, “you’re pulling an all-male class or an all-white class, how much talent have you left on the table?” You often have to appeal to the fact that, one, diversity in thought and perspective actually better solves problems, and two, to get that diversity of thought and perspective you can’t have a class coming out of school that is not diverse. You need to get them to really want to appeal to difference to bring them on board.

SF: How did you get them to be more open to see why it was important to invest in programs that were going to enrich and broaden the talent pool?

AE: First, you expose them to philanthropy and engage them with organizations like Prep for Prep in New York City where you see this amazingly talented group of African American students having opportunities to go private schools, get special tutoring, and access to training and experiences that ultimately put them in some of the best schools in the country. Seeing this, executives are much more open to looking at talent more broadly.

SF: Giving people opportunities that they may not have had otherwise helps them get a greater sense of emotional understanding. I guess that’s the way to characterize the sense of empathy.

AE: Absolutely, and we talk to them about what are some of the best ideas generated within teams. We try to highlight and understand that when you bring in multiple perspectives ultimately that will better solve problems.

SF: There is probably a lot you cannot say about the fall of Lehman. But I’m wondering if there is something you could tell our listeners about what was the biggest takeaway for you in terms of the fall of that great firm? How it went down. What did you take from that as a kind of life or leadership lesson?

AE: It was similar to Bloomberg in that it had an incredibly well defined and beloved culture. People loved being part of the organization. They genuinely believed in the mission. They genuinely believed in the leadership.  In 2001 we lost our buildings on September 11. And there was always this sense of being an underdog, and if we worked hard enough, if we fought hard enough, and we stayed together it would work. People genuinely believed that it would not happen to us. Being part of that culture, I was absolutely devastated along with the rest of folks that this had happened. One of my great learning’s was I believed so much in the company that I sacrificed many important times in my life for the company.  I had young children and worked late nights and weekends, giving up important events.   I realized that something that is here today and gone tomorrow was something I actually sacrificed very important aspects of my family life for that will never come back. That was how much I believed in a corporate entity. I ultimately learned, as trite as it may sound, that family trumps. Family decisions should sometimes, more often than I allowed them to, trump some of the work-life decisions that I made during that time.

SF: Now let’s get back to the Bloomberg story. So, you start there. Linda Wolf invites you to take responsibility for the leadership track. How did you become head of HR? And that lesson you learned at the fall of Lehman, how did that inform your own leadership act at Bloomberg?

AE: When I arrived at Bloomberg, it was a tough re-start.  It was a completely different culture, and I was an outsider coming in at a relatively senior level. Bloomberg had always grown organically over time, and we were in a time of great growth where we were going out and acquiring talent, both junior and senior.  Again, my point on empathy is as your designing programs to onboard senior leaders, you have to apply your own experiences of what you would’ve liked when you first came onboard. My focus was on building a culture of leadership. I think what I learned at Lehman, which I applied at Bloomberg, was in order to do that it always has to be in tune with what the business strategies are. And at Bloomberg, we have five different businesses: R&D, media, sales, data acquisition, corporate. And each one had very unique needs that you had to incorporate into whatever leadership training agenda you put in place. A training program for a journalist might be a bit different than the way you might approach the R&D folks. And that’s something that I really made very signature to my tenure; build an HR organization that was in tune with business strategy.

SF:  Looking back what do you think was your most significant accomplishment at Bloomberg?

AE: My most significant accomplishment was the establishment and roll out of a leadership program for our most senior leaders in which we were able to establish, at a time again of great growth, one common message about who we were as a company, what was expected of them as leaders, and have them all sing off the same song sheet, both new as well as long-tenured employees. This Global Leaders Forum was sponsored and led by the top leaders of our company. And to get them together to engage in the content and delivery (we did about 13 programs over the course of two years) was really a group effort. What I enjoyed most about that program was that all of our leaders ultimately went through individual coaching and I got to know many of them quite well before I became the Chief Human Resources Officer.

SF: Which I’m sure was crucial for your success in that role. Melila is joining us from Toronto. Welcome to the show, Melila. What is your question?

Melila: Hi, it’s very interesting that you are talking about corporate culture because in Canada we’re very multi-cultural and I suppose diversity for us is beyond women.  What I’m wondering is how do you start to build a corporate culture which recognizes and embraces the diversity but at the same time be able to unify the company and the culture so that you all start to speak on behalf of one organization? And start to have one corporate life experience?

AE: Great question. I have worked at two global organizations. At Bloomberg we are in over a hundred and ninety countries. What is so critical to the success of the company is making sure you are attracting, developing, and advancing local talent, and that not all of the decisions are coming out of the home office. And to do that you have to make sure that you understand local markets, that you’ve developed a recruiting strategy that brings in the right talent. But once they’re in the door, and I mentioned this earlier, creating the right onboarding experiences is critical. Hopefully, through the interview process you’ve designed the questions and the right type of corporate fit that you’re looking for. But once they’re in the door, it’s really helping them onboard and learn the corporate culture. At the same time, make sure leaders understand how to be inclusive in the way they manage them day-to-day.

Melila: In terms of the onboarding, is that a process that is owned by HR or is it a combined process between HR, the direct supervisor, and the communications team?

AE: I believe HR should create the infrastructure and the frameworks, but engage leaders in the process. For example, onboarding is not just day one where they sign papers and get some information about the company. It’s really about managers checking in with individuals, day 30, day 90, day 180. And also bringing together new hires over the course of the year so they can form networks, and be able to listen to each other, and talk about their common experiences. That piece of it absolutely needs to be led by both the managers of those individuals and some of the senior line managers. And to your earlier point about how do you build a corporate culture that embraces difference, you need to bring all those folks together and constantly expose them, as a group, to senior leaders and have senior leaders engage with them.

SF: But that takes so much time Anne. Who has time for all of that, if I can ask the devil’s advocate question?

AE: First of all, it’s very expensive to acquire talent, but it’s more expensive to lose talent. So, if you look at the economics, a typical rule of thumb is that it costs 1.5 times the compensation of a new employee. And we would often look at the cost of recruiting, which is significant as well.  Invest a few hours a year checking in and doing what we used to call a “stay interview” to see how the employee’s doing to get them to stay. You can ask them, “How are things going? What are you experiencing? What about our culture? How can I best support you?” Those small gestures by either your direct manager or senior leader in your group can really yield great results. I think often what you find is some managers will tend to connect, sponsor, and mentor folks that are more like them.   We need to embrace all new joiners to the company and make sure they get equal access to that stay opportunity.

SF: Melila, thanks for that wonderful question. I want to find out why you left this extremely cool job, and what you have been doing since you’ve left. How did you come to that decision?

AE: It was truly one of the hardest decisions I ever made in my life. My career was never more exciting. I had a great opportunity to work with senior leaders and Mike [Bloomberg] himself. He is an incredible visionary and leader. But it was also a crossroads in my life.  I recently celebrated a big birthday.   More importantly I have spent the majority of my HR career in the last fifteen years creating policies and practices to help individuals navigate work/life issues. So, for example, at Bloomberg created the first flexible leave programs. We were working on creating different types of long-term leave programs – maternity leave, paternity leave —  trying to make it accessible to all employees. We call them leaves of absence, and do not have differentiated leaves. So, if you were a gay parent and adopted a child, you were going to get one period of time. And if you were a female and were giving birth you would get another period of time. What I really wanted to make sure was that all employees had equal options and equal time. Bloomberg is always on the cutting edge of most policies and incredibly generous, but there were outdated approaches. The very last thing I got approved before I left was an updated modern approach to leaves, which essentially put our leave policy on the cutting edge in terms of length of time away and support that we provide.   We did primary caregiver and secondary caregiver, so that makes it gender neutral and it also makes it neutral across whether you’re a hetero- or homosexual couple.  It benchmarked incredibly well against those with whom we were competing for talent.

 

This passion for creating options for people led me to think what about me? I was going through a point in my life where certain things were going on that I would never get back.  For example I brought up two children and my daughter is 24 and lives in London. She has already flown the coup. And I have a son who was a rising senior in high school and I always said to my family — my husband and my mom, who is one of my great confidants – that when Noah’s in his junior year I want to know what it’s like to be a stay-at-home mom. I pushed through 28 years in my career in a very fast paced, high powered, high pressured environment working 12, 14, 16 hours a day because I wanted to succeed. I wanted to get to that next level. I wanted to do the best job possible. As I said earlier about Lehman, since I was being paid to do that job it often trumped family decisions. But I knew that if I waited until my son went to college, and all of a sudden I had the time and money to take time off, what was it worth? I knew it was a very important time in any high school kid’s life when they start to look at colleges, when they start to work on applications, and I didn’t have any of that time.

 

Often, when I went on a college tour, something would happen at work, and I’d spend time sitting in the car, while my husband walked around campus with my son. Or on a weekend, we were going to work on his list that he had to give to his guidance counselor and I was in the office and I didn’t have time.  I also have elderly parents. I’m part of the sandwich generation.  My dad has Alzheimer’s and is 81.  You feel a different kind of obligation not only to support the parent with Alzheimer’s but really more to support my mother who is taking care of my dad. And they need support to make difficult decisions they may not be seeing objectively. And there is my husband.  He and I had equally intense careers, and he has been an incredible supporter of mine throughout it all. And often when he would pick me up from work, and I’d get in the car, I was the one who spilled the beans first.  I’d talk about decisions I had to make, problems, or politics I was dealing with at work. And we haven’t spent a lot of time focusing on his career. Also, for my marriage it was a very important thing for me to spend more time focusing on him. I really came to this point where I had to make this decision: I can continue to keep my head down and plow through it like I’ve done at every other stage of my career, or am I going to exercise the option that I put in place for everybody else.

 

And I have to tell you, Stew, I shocked everybody. No one knew that I was going through this sense of personal pain. No one really knew the toll it was taking on me personally in terms of lack of sleep, and the inability to do what I really wanted to do.  I spent two weeks on vacation – my first vacation in fifteen or twenty years and during that two weeks I felt a sense of freedom. This was in December and January of 2014 going into 2015. I was in Uruguay, South America.   Far away. No cell phone reception. And it was during that time that I decided that I need more of this time. But I needed to sit on that thought. I needed to think it through. I needed several months before ultimately approaching my boss to say that I needed to take some time off. And there was a great discussion about should we change my job, would I be interested in doing something else, but I really felt that I needed a genuine break, time to focus on family, to experience for myself what it meant to be a stay-at-home mom after being a professional mom for my whole life. I resigned in early March. My last day was May first. I stayed on to help with an orderly transition. I’ve stayed in close touch with most members of my team, but I really took the summer off and did the things I set out to do.

SF: So, was this understood to be a sabbatical where you would return/might return/might not return? What’s the mutual understanding if you can talk about that?

AE: Sure, I can. Bloomberg had a no re-hire policy.  It’s quite public and Mike [Bloomberg] writes about it in “Bloomberg by Bloomberg.” Over the years many people who were incredible performers had to leave for personal or professional reasons, but ultimately realized that they might want to come back. So we have hired back several key people. When the announcement went out that I was going to be leaving Bloomberg to pursue family pursuits, first of all, there were lots of snickers like “oh, sure you’re going to take care of your family,” or I was being fired or something more sinister. I knew it was the euphemism often used, but it was the truth for me. But I was so honored and pleased when it was written “Anne will be returning at some point.” So while I didn’t go on a formal sabbatical because we don’t have sabbaticals at Bloomberg, there was absolutely an agreement and opportunity that should I want to return that I could go back and talk about what potential opportunities exist, which I haven’t yet done.

SF: So, you’re now in this interim period. Noah, your younger child is now a senior.  So, you’ve got a year?

AE:  That’s correct. We did the visits over the summer, we worked on his list, he’s worked on his essay. And I think he’s in a terrific place where he genuinely knows the direction he wants to go in. I’ve spent a great deal of time with my mom. We’re working on getting care at home. We’re looking at what long-term care looks like, looking at homes. I’m going to D.C. next week to do that with her. I was actually most surprised about the space I’ve made for myself, and my own personal nurturing. I love to entertain. I love to cook. So, I spent a great deal of time working on that this summer. And I’ve also done a great deal of research. Because the question is: Do I want to go back to doing what I did, or is this an opportunity to pivot, change direction? I did a great deal of research on “great women” or “high-powered women” that have made career changes. I’ve been studying that quite hard, Stew.

SF: So, what have you taken away from your study?

AE: There are lots of people that have worked in the White House, or state department, or in investment banking, or in media that came up with an idea, and took some time off, and then went in completely different direction.  Someone like a Martha Stewart, she worked in the state department. Or Ina Garten, who’s the Barefoot Contessa, who worked in the White House and now has an incredible food network brand and global following. There are entertainers who have built multi-billion dollar businesses. Jessica Alba, she’s a billionaire. So, there are great examples that have been inspiring to me.   I have a notebook, which is in front of me here, which has the ideas that I’m thinking about. But also, I’m thinking about whether I want the portfolio career, my own entrepreneurial venture, or do I want to go back to the corporate world. And that’s sort of the crossroads I’m finding myself in now, and I’m looking to January 2016 to make that decision.

SF: Wow!   That’s only a few months away.  You’re going to have to come back to tell us what you ultimately decided and why. As you think about the next phase of your journey of discovery, as you referred to it on the break, what’s going to be paramount in your thinking because there are some competing interests here? You can’t just do everything. How do you come to understand what’s really most important to you now and where you want to invest your precious moments and energy in your life?

AE: One of the things I’ve always made a core principle as I decide what to do is: can I make an impact? Am I empowered to make an impact?  When Joe Gregory tapped me on the shoulder and said men run in packs, women don’t, he put money behind it. I had a pool of compensation that I could reward for engaging. He put his money where his mouth was. When I was at Bloomberg, I was working with senior leadership. They completely put the right resources behind us. So, whatever I do has to have the right resourcing for me to have the kind of impact that I want.  That’s a core principle. Impact can be measured in dollars or political capital.  One of the other aspects I’m exploring is the whole notion of ‘affiliative capital,’ ‘affiliative power.’   The extent that you’re working for someone as amazing and world-renowned as a Mike Bloomberg, that’s an incredible affiliative capital to be able to have in order to get things done. The question is whatever I do next, do I need affiliative capital or does my own capital carry itself. I’ve always been part of a corporate system, and I’ve always had that benefit.  I would say the third criteria that I’m setting is:  I do want to have more freedom. So, whether it’s a portfolio approach, perhaps consulting, or whether it’s going back to corporate, it’s going to need to have more flexibility than I’ve been able to have in previous roles.

SF: Which is what we know everybody wants: greater freedom to pursue the things that matter in ways that enable them to have the kind of impact that they want to have. That’s what the show is about and what all of my work is about: to create opportunities for people to be supported to pursue the lives they want to live. Of course that happens at the level of social policy, corporate practice, and empowering and skilling up of individuals to claim that power.  As you think now about your kids and their future, and of the millennials generally, what did you learn in your experiences most recently at Bloomberg? What did you learn about how the rising generation sees the whole issue of work and life? And what is the most pressing concern for business with respect to addressing those needs and interests?

AE: I think whether you’re a millennial or a baby boomer, what has changed all of our lives is technology and the ability to work 24/7. You’re reachable 24/7 pretty much anywhere in the world, except where you can’t get reception. I think that has blurred work and life. I think the millennials are doing a much better job at navigating that and being able to leverage that to get their work done.   But on the other hand, I think they’re much more intent on making sure that they have a distinction between their work and life. And that whatever they are working on has meaning. And one of the things I was incredibly proud of while working at Bloomberg was the fact that we were able to work so closely with the Bloomberg Foundation, which is one of the most high-impact foundations in the world, and engage particularly our millennials in a lot of the volunteerism. I think bringing that meaning to the office and allowing employees to, for example, clean beaches, or clean schools, or work on a myriad of projects, that was incredibly meaningful to the next generation. It’s blurring the lines because they can come to work and then go work on the beach, or when they go to the beach and they may be working on a proposal. They’re able to integrate it, but we have to make sure that we are very much more intentional in providing them meaning as it relates to work.

SF: Absolutely, we did a study comparing the class of 1992 to the class of 2012 at Wharton, and one of the major findings of that study was how much more the current generation values having meaningful impact through their works, especially women, but men too. The growth in that value as expressed by women is really powerful and it makes perfect sense that a company like Bloomberg would invest heavily to create opportunities for people to have a greater sense of meaning through their work, and not just through volunteer projects, but the everyday. So, were there ways that you did this at Bloomberg For other business leaders listening in, what advice would you have for them to create a greater sense of meaning and purpose for millennials, to fully engage them?

AE: It goes back to our opening conversation about corporate culture, and I think that it’s really important for any company to define what is the ‘there there’. What are we ultimately accomplishing?  At a place like Bloomberg, which provides incredible transparency to global markets, which ultimately feeds economies and affects everyone, it was something everybody believed in and understood. People understood what Bloomberg did, whether it was Bloomberg media bringing information and breaking news, or whether it was allowing you to get data and analytic overlays that help you make better decisions. People believed in that mission. But the other thing that I thought was just incredible about working at Bloomberg was the fact that a large percentage of every dollar was going to philanthropy. It’s a privately held company, and people knew the profits we were making were for a higher purpose. A very large percentage, a majority of the profits, were going to fund the Foundation and the Foundation was going to re-distribute that to really important projects, which by the way were highly measurable.

SF: That’s a part of the Bloomberg world that not many people know all that much about, so I’m glad that you pointed that out. Before we sign off, Anne, let me ask you as you advise younger people coming out of school as they think about their careers based on what you’ve seen in the financial services world and tech and media world, what is the most important thing for young people to know as they’re launching their careers?

AE: I think the most important thing to know is that every magic carpet ride is going to experience some turbulence. You really need to do what you love, what you believe in, and work for a company that will help you understand the ultimate purpose of what you do every day.  And understand that a career is long-term. There will be good days and bad days, but ultimately being focused on the higher purpose is such an important thing for all of us to do. Otherwise, it becomes a drudge day in and day out.

I want to say one last thing, Stew. When I graduated from SAIS with my masters in International Affairs, I wanted to go into the government because I wanted to do good in the world. But the best piece of advice I ever received was go to the private sector, understand how it works, accumulate your own power, your own wealth, and with that then you can affect real change.   Then go back to the public sector. So, I think really understanding ultimately what you want to do, you need to have your own influence and your own power to be able to make that happen.

About the Author

Ali Ahmed Ali Ahmedis an undergraduate senior majoring in Biological Basis of Behavior and minoring in Cinema Studies.

Posted on October 14, 2015 by
Filed Under: Career Paths, Meaningful Work, On-Ramping/Re-Launching, Women and Work | Leave a Comment

Working Your Way Back to Work — Karen Rubin

Contributor: Jacob Adler

Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday at 7 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

Karen is the Managing Director for Talking Talent North America, where she and her colleagues have coached over 14,000 women and their managers at companies including Deutsche Bank, McKinsey, and many others across the globe. In her work a certified coach Karen is helping Fortune 500 companies to develop the female talent pipeline and bring more women to the top.  She spoke with Stew Friedman about why she’s committed herself to helping women at all different stages in their career succeed in the workplace, and the programs she is helping to establish that enable women and their managers to successfully manage the maternity transition and the child-raising years.

The following are edited excerpts of their conversation and the full podcast.

Stewart Friedman: What do you think about the Netflix parental leave deal?

Karen Rubin: karen rubinI think it’s an exciting announcement and certainly a step in the right direction. It’s really wonderful to see some U. S. companies offering more generous benefits for the parent transition. With that said, I think that the danger of this type of policy is that a company might say, “OK, now we’re done. We’re offering a year of paid leave, so we don’t need to do anything else.” And not everybody is going to feel comfortable taking that leave. Everybody wants it, but the concern is if an individual actually takes it, what will the perception be? Will they be perceived as somebody who is no longer committed to their career, and what if somebody else takes two months? Is that person on track for a promotion in leadership? So it puts a company into a gray area.

SF: There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to manage the expectations and stigma.

KR: Absolutely. Management really has to be behind it. There needs to be a cultural acceptance of taking that type of leave for it to really work in practice. Otherwise, it’s a carrot that’s dangled that nobody can actually take advantage of.

SF: Right, so it has to be used, and that’s what we know to be a problem with unlimited vacation policies. The problem isn’t that people take too much time, it’s that they take too little for the very same reason.

KR: It’s the work martyr syndrome, where in some cases it’s better to just have a defined period of time. But with that said, I am all for companies offering more generous maternity leaves. As you probably know, the U.S. lags behind just about every developed country in the world.

SF: Yes, a topic we’ve reviewed many times on this show.

KR: So it’s good that everybody is starting to pay attention to it. The tech sector in particular is one where it’s very difficult for women to stay engaged. There’s a lot of dropout, and very low numbers in terms of women making it into senior leadership. So these tech companies, I applaud their effort, but it needs to be supplemented by more support.

SF: You can see just today, Adobe announced that they’re going to be doubling the amount of time that they’re devoting to maternity leave following the announcements by Netflix and then Microsoft. These announcements, they’re steps in the right direction, and they do have ripple effects as they create competitive pressures on other companies who are now trying to keep up in order to be able to win the war for talent.

KR: Absolutely, and when Google found that when they increased their maternity leave from 12 to 18 weeks, they saw a 50% increase in retention of women going through their maternity transitions, that was certainly helpful.

SF: Let’s get to the work you do with your company. You worked for 16+ years at companies including DirecTV and Showtime Networks, then you took a career break to stay at home full-time with your three girls who are now teenagers. During that time, you trained and became a certified coach at one of the top coaching programs in the country. What was the catalyst that inspired you to make this career shift?

KR: When I left the corporate arena, and I was fortunate that I had the opportunity to be home with my kids, but after a certain period of time, I was really itching to get back to work.

SF: So when you say you were fortunate, you mean you had the financial resources?

KR: I had choices available to me. Not everybody has that. But I had invested years in my career, I had gotten an MBA, I loved working, and I looked around and I wasn’t sure what I should do next. But I also knew that when I exited from that corporate arena, and between my second and third child, I knew that if I had had the benefit of a coach during that time, I absolutely would have stayed.

SF: Do you regret not having stayed, Karen? You’re saying that looking back, you’d rather have stayed?

KR: No, no, no. Absolutely not. I love the time that I had at home with my girls and I am fortunate that I landed on my feet and I was able to get back into the workforce. But I also know a lot of women don’t. About 40% of women who leave the workforce to stay at home with their kids never make it back, and often they want to, they just can’t find a way back in. So I loved that I had the time with my girls and that I was able to go back, but that’s why this work is so meaningful to me. I know that there are a lot of women out there who love their careers, they also love their families, and they’re just looking for a way to make it work.

SF: What drove you to take this up as your primary work?

KR: I had so many smart, educated friends who were sort of unhappy being full-time, stay-at-home moms, and this is not a judgment in any way. It’s a wonderful thing to do for many people, but I know a lot of women who wished they could get back to work and couldn’t figure it out. I know there are companies like iRelaunch that help women get back to work, but I thought, “what could companies do to hold on to their women?” [Friedman’s interview with iRelaunch founder, Carol Fishman Cohen.]And that’s what Talking Talent specializes in. So I was able to connect with this wonderful company that works with organizations to help them figure out how to coach employees and managers throughout this really important inflection point in your life so that if you want to continue with your career that you can.

SF: What do you do? How can you help?

KR: We work with both the women as well as their managers. I say women but we also work with men who are becoming parents. It’s another group that really needs support. But we help them figure out how they should make the announcement, how do they transition their work, what do they want, what type of parent do they want to be, what role models can they find within their companies, how connected do they want to be while they’re out on leave? We help them think through all of the important issues along the way. How do you reenter, how do you make sure that your key stakeholders know what you want so that false assumptions aren’t made?

SF: It’s so important to communicate and find out from the people around you what’s going to make this a win for them. So you help people, coach people through that process and that’s naturally going to result in better outcomes. I want to hear more about this, but we’ve got Jason calling from Chicago, who has a question about what we’re talking about here. Jason, welcome to Work and Life. What’s your question?

Jason: I’m a recent father of twins and today was actually the first time my wife went back to work, something that was hard for her. She works for a large corporation, a large retail store based in Chicago. She went back today, obviously that’s hard for her, she would like to stay home but where we live, we can’t afford it. How do we go about finding a stay-at-home job where salaries and benefits can match that corporate world?

KR: I’m sorry, that’s not really my area of expertise, helping people find stay-at-home jobs, so I don’t really have too much to offer.

SF: Stay on the line and we’ll provide some resources.

SF: Karen, let’s get back to what you were saying about how you work with people who are making this transition. It’s critical to know what your goals are, to be able to find out what people around you, what they expect. What else do you do that makes a difference?

KR: This brings up a really interesting point. The guilt that many working mothers feel is a big topic of conversation in the coaching. So often, women feel they can’t have a successful career and also be the type of parent that they want to be, and that leads to sometimes, they’re working so hard at home and working so hard at work to be the perfect professional and the perfect mother and ultimately, that leads to burnout. What we often will think about or help our clients consider is what is really important to them, what might they be able to let go of, what might they delegate, because you can’t give 100% in both place without burning out at some point.

SF: What are the keys to reducing that guilt? How do you get past that, because I’m sure that’s something you hear about a lot and what helps, and what really makes a difference in having people feel better about the choices they are making?

KR: Well, one thing is to consider what’s most important to you as a parent. So if it’s being available for a pickup or a bath or appointments with the pediatrician, you figure out what are those things and make sure that you are available for those things. But there are probably lots of things that you do because you think you should, but that you may not enjoy and you could really delegate to somebody else.

SF: So for example?

KR: For example, there are people who do drop-offs to childcare that they could hire that out, they could have somebody else do that, they could figure out another way. It’s not necessarily the best time with your child, or you could figure out perhaps a different childcare arrangement where it makes your life a little bit easier and it makes it more sustainable. Another area in the workplace and thinking about are you constantly involved with office chores?  Sometimes women get delegated planning things, mentoring, things that are good in a small quantity but over time can really lead to exhaustion and burnout. So it’s trying to figure out what is most important, where are your strengths, where do you shine, what lights you up, and really letting go of some of the things that don’t.

SF: And perhaps helping other people to take up those responsibilities in ways that would be good for them, right? How else do you help people in terms of how they get to you. How does someone in an organization, small, medium, or large, know that they need help with making the transition to parenthood, because it’s not something that anybody ever told me about when I was young, and sounds like you didn’t get that support either and you’re way younger than I am. This is something that’s new, right?

KR: It is fairly new, in particular in the United States it’s a new concept, so I would check with your HR group, find out if this is a benefit that’s offered to you through work, usually that’s how organizations provide it to their employees. If you can get it through your organization, that’s really a wonderful way. You can also look at the Talking Talent website for some tips. The other thing that’s really important is managers.  Sometimes managers think, “I’ve had lots of women become parents, I know what I’m doing.” But that relationship between the employee and the manager really predicts how successful that transition is going to be, so I would encourage managers to learn all you can about what conversations you should have with your employee. How would you present this to your team so that it’s a positive situation?

SF: So let’s take the employee who works in an environment that hasn’t been focused on the question of how to help you become a better parent – most businesses. So if you’re 27, you’ve just had your first child, you want to be the best parent you could possibly be, but you also want to continue to advance in your career, how do you work with your colleagues, your supervisor, when that’s not a normal thing to talk about? How do you coach people to do that?

KR: That’s a good question. It’s really about being clear and communicating what you see for yourself in your future. So if you want to continue on that same career trajectory that you had before, you want to make sure that everybody knows that that’s what you want. Yes, you are 100% committed still, so that they don’t make assumptions. Sometimes after a woman has a child, it will be assumed that she won’t want a high-visibility project, she wouldn’t want a promotion, so she may be overlooked.

SF: It’s an unconscious bias that exists for young mothers, so you have to overcome that both from the perspective of the men and others in positions of power, but from the perspective of the young mother who wants to create some change.  What should she do?

KR: She should definitely have a conversation with her manager. She should be talking to mentors, sponsors, all key stakeholders, letting them know what she wants.  Not everybody wants to continue along that same career path. Sometimes people want to stay at the same level for a while. Maybe they want to make a lateral move, and that’s okay, too. What’s important is to make sure that people know when you are ready to start on that promotion track, that you’re having those conversations, that you’re letting people know what you want.

SF: I could see how it could be kind of frightening, though, for some people to raise those issues, especially in an environment that hasn’t traditionally been open to having conversations like that. What are the kinds of fears that people have, and how do you help people overcome them?

KR: One big fear from the manager’s perspective is that they’re going to say the wrong thing and they’re so afraid of saying the wrong thing that sometimes they don’t say anything at all. From the manager perspective, you really want to ask, “What do you want?  Where do you see yourself?  How can we be supportive here?” If you’re the employee and you’re thinking, “Wow, I really don’t want to travel so much, I maybe want a flexible work arrangement,” then you need to think of how can you align what you want with the business needs so that when you’re crafting a proposal for something like that, you’re not just saying this would be good for me, but this is how I’m going to make it work for everybody.

SF: So it’s going to be a different solution for different people because some young parents want to take a lot of time off, they want to be super involved in their children’s lives. Others, perhaps, less so, and everything in between. There’s no one-size-fits-all, is there?

KR: There’s not, and you want to look around and see what’s working for other people and maybe cobble together different elements that you’re seeing. If you talk to 10 parents, they might be making it work in 10 different ways, so you really need to look at all the role models available to you and not make assumptions.  What I see happening with women, especially if they’re in a heavily-male-dominated industry or a type of work that’s very time-consuming, is that they’ll say, “I don’t see anybody doing this job in a way that I want to do, therefore, I’m going to leave right now.” That’s not necessarily the best way to approach it. You might want to look at different ways that people are doing things and maybe you need to become the role model.

SF: That requires courage.  Again, how do you help people overcome what must inhibit many people from speaking honestly with people who might say, “ No”  or “That’s a bad idea.”  How do you help people to put that out there in a way that is seen not as selfish but really as intended to make a positive impact on the business.

KR: Sometimes it does feel for some that it’s a gutsy move to be able to come out and say what you want, and we encourage the employees to do it, we give them the tools for having that conversation, and ideally, we’re also working with their manager so that the manager understands the perspective of that employee, what it must be like for them. How can they engage in that conversation, if somebody provides them with a proposal for a flexible work arrangement, how do you evaluate that? If you have to say no, what might that mean for others who want to request it? Or if you’re not sure it’s going to work, could you consider a trial. The beauty of coaching about this is it’s not that we’re prescriptive and saying, “Just do these five things and it’s all going to work out.” It’s helping people understand what’s important to them and what their fears might be, but also knowing when you can make it work, you can have the career that you want and the family that you want, you have a beautiful life.

SF: What’s the most important thing you want our listeners to know about this topic and the work that you do?

KR: I think the most important thing is that it can work, and that for women who are out there who are feeling exhausted and discouraged that it’s important to look around, see what others are doing, just to know that there are ways to be a great mother and a great professional and that you can do both and that we can make this work.

SF: You have three daughters, Karen. 20 years from now, if I were to be talking to the three of them sitting around in the studio, what do you think they’re going to be telling me about their lives and careers?

KR: I think they will be glad that their mom worked and that she went back to work and that she was a role model to them. They see how happy I am being back to work, so I think that even though life is crazier and clothes aren’t folded beautifully and sometimes we run out of milk that it’s okay.

For more information visit http://us.talking-talent.com/ and follow on Twitter @talkingtalent @KarenRubin1.

About the Author

Jacob Adler , jacob adlerW’18,  is a sophomore at Wharton and a contributor at The Daily Pennsylvanian, numberFire, andFake Teams.

Posted on October 6, 2015 by
Filed Under: Career Paths, Experiment with Change, Flex Work/Project Work, On-Ramping/Re-Launching | Leave a Comment

Valuable Tips to Relaunch Your Career — Carol Fishman Cohen

Contributor: Shreya Zaveri

Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday at 7 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

On Work and Life Stew Friedman spoke with Harvard Business School graduate Carol Fishman Cohen. Cohen is CEO and co-founder of iRelaunch, a comprehensive resource for career reentry strategies, and co-author of career reentry strategy book Back on the Career Track.

The following are edited excerpts of their conversation.

Stew Friedman: Carol, you returned to work at Bain Capital after an 11-year maternity leave. What were the hardest things about getting back into your career?

Carol Fishman Cohen: Carol Fishman cohenThe hard parts fell into three categories. First, I skipped an essential step while I was away. I didn’t think through what I wanted to do, and whether my interests and skills had changed. I thought that because I was in finance, I needed to go back to the same role, and it wasn’t until I was well into it that I realized it wasn’t what I wanted to do anymore. I could have avoided that with a career assessment pre re-entry.

Second, it was hard to build up confidence again and think of myself in terms of my working identity as opposed to the diminished sense of self that happened over time the longer I was on my career break. The longer that you’re on career break, the more you separate yourself from your career identity. To feel good about yourself as a professional is a process. It involves updating, sometimes academically if you’re in a STEM or other technical field, reconnecting with your networks from the past and getting comfortable telling your story.

SF: What are your strategies for coping with that?

CFC: I wrote a book called Back on the Career Track, and one of the career reentry strategies is a career assessment tool called a Job Building Blocks Worksheet — a framework for looking at prior significant work and volunteer experiences, identifying which of those components you love and are best at, and then using them to build a new career path.  Another strategy is to connect with your alma mater and see if they have alumni career services that can help with a career assessment – I know Wharton has a fantastic department!

Two tips for confidence building: when you get back in touch with your networks from the past, it’s important to remember that they have a ‘frozen-in-time’ image of you. Even if you have a diminished sense of self by being away, they don’t, so it’s sometimes a great confidence booster! LinkedIn is a great gift for re-launchers trying to find past contacts.

SF: What are some best practices in using LinkedIn for past contacts?

CFC: It’s low key and an easy way to connect, so they’re likely to accept your connection request. You want to tell them that you’ve been out of the workforce and are looking to re-launch, and are in a structured career assessment process. Make sure it’s clear that you are in information gathering mode, and it is not opportunistic – you’re not asking for a job. Ask for fifteen or twenty minutes to talk about changes in the field or their own career path. Inevitably, they will bring up more people to talk to.

As I said before, you have to get comfortable telling your story. Have these conversations with your non-judgmental friends and family first and ask for feedback. You will feel and sound better over time, which will build confidence. They’re essentially interview rehearsals.

SF: How do you coach people to talk about motherhood? Is it diminished because it’s not really relevant to business, or emphasized because of how much they’ve learned and changed?

CFC: It’s important not to make assumptions about your audience. You don’t know if the person interviewing you has been a parent who hasn’t taken a career break and may not think it’s a huge accomplishment at all, or they might even be resentful. You don’t want to talk about your ‘mom skills’ as part of the interview – only the skills that pertain to the jobs you’re applying to. When the interviewer inevitably asks about the six year gap in the resume, you want to acknowledge it – don’t apologize – and move on to why you’re the best person for the job. Draw attention to meaningful volunteer work and freelance work you’ve done in your time off if it is relevant, and treat it on your resume the same as paid work. Regardless of whether you had experiences during your career break relevant to your career goals, reference anecdotes from your pre-career break work experience that are pertinent to the job opportunity.

To learn more about Carol Fishman Cohen, visit her website www.iRelaunch.com , or follow her on Twitter @iRelaunch .

Join Work and Life next Tuesday at 7 pm on Sirius XM Channel 111.  Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.

About the author

Shreya Zaveri Shreya Zaveriis a junior in the Wharton School studying Management and Marketing and OPIM with an International Relations minor. She also serves as a vice president for the Work-Life Integration Project Student Advisory Board.

Posted on April 21, 2015 by
Filed Under: Flex Work/Project Work, On-Ramping/Re-Launching, Opting-Out, Women and Work | Leave a Comment

Professional Women: Opt-Out Or Take The Road Less Traveled? — Pamela Stone

Contributor: Sathvik Ramanan

Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday at 7 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

On Work and Life, Stew Friedman spoke with Dr. Pamela Stone, Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY and a visiting scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She is an expert on women in the workplace and has written widely on such topics as the gender wage gap and pay equity. She is also the author of Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. Stew spoke with her about her studies on women in the labor force.

The following are edited excerpts of their conversation.

Stew Friedman: In 2007 you wrote Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home and more recently, you, along with some of my colleagues at the Harvard Business School, have found that women are not actually opting out of work to take care of kids. They’re changing jobs. So what’s the story?

Pamela Stone: Pamela StoneThe whole “opting out” story has always been overblown. People thought that it is happening at a much greater scale than was actually taking place. When I was starting to study it, it wasn’t that I was interested in the subject because women were opting out in droves. It was really because those who were opting out were a key group of women—those who are extremely well-trained and groomed for leadership—who were leaking out of the pipeline to leadership. Opting Out was never about a huge trend. The trend was way overblown by the media.

SF: Why do you think that was?

PS: Most likely because it confirms a stereotype. Part of it is that when women take a traditional path—in other words, returning to motherhood, as opposed to trying to combine work and motherhood—that confirms traditional notions of womanhood. I think the media fixates on this group of women who came of age during the feminist revolution, and who supposedly are the standard bearers for its accomplishments, but who then seem to be turning their back on it.  It confirms that women really don’t want to have it all.  There’s a lot of interesting cultural commentary going on there. But the phenomenon is counterintuitive, in a way, and that’s what got me interested in studying this group of women. I, as a suburban, working mom, knew a lot of stay-at-home moms and found that they had these incredible backgrounds. I was surprised and intrigued as to what led them to take such a different path than they had initially set out on. I think I was less surprised than some might have been by the numbers we saw in the Harvard Business School survey, the 10%.

SF: Can you tell our listeners about that 10%?

PS: We looked at the women [Harvard Business School grads] and asked them if they had ever taken significant time out of the labor force. Some said yes, but in the cross sections it appeared that not that many women had. It was a relatively small percentage of women who were full-time out of the labor force taking care of home and family as their primary activity; that’s the 10% number.

SF: So that 10% refers to all study respondents across generations?

PS: Yes exactly, at the time of the survey.  You should also recognize that the 10% is a cross-sectional measure as opposed to a life-span measure.  When you ask women if they have ever taken time out of the labor force for a period of six months or longer, you do see a higher number. So among the Gen X’s [those born between the 1960s and 1980s], about a quarter of the women reported at some point taking six months or more out of the labor force. And when you look at the Baby Boomers, who are 50+, there was a higher percentage who reported having taken some time out of the labor force. You can better understand that 10% number by knowing that this is a group with fairly high labor force participation to begin with because they’re highly educated.  What we see happening instead is that women are not entirely dropping out of the labor force in droves, but rather they’re often times making accommodations in their jobs or switching jobs to deal with work and family.

SF: Did you notice any particular patterns or trends about how those adjustments are being made, and whether they’re different for people of different age groups?

PS: This is one of the questions that remain. The study that we did was a survey of largely Harvard MBAs. We meant it to be a diagnostic benchmark, a starting point. The second phase of the study is going to try to understand the gender gap that we discovered. We’d like to learn more about the sources of that gap and the micro-decision making that both women and men make. Right now, we don’t have as much of that as we’d like.

SF: You’ve been studying this topic for some time now, and you’ve seen some changes in how these issues are playing out in our society. What has been the most striking change in the couple of decades that you’ve been studying? What’s changed the most in your view?

PS: In terms of the causes of the gender and pay gaps, there has been much greater attention paid to the family nexus. I think the earlier studies of inequality were very much workplace focused, and they didn’t really understand the interlocking systems of work and family and how they both in themselves generate inequality. The recent focus on understanding the motherhood penalty is a good example of this.

SF: Define the motherhood penalty for our listeners.

PS: It’s the penalty that, other things being equal, is exacted in terms of pay and promotions when a woman is a mother as opposed to not being a mother. And then there’s a fatherhood bonus on the flip side of that. It’s a really interesting dynamic in which the traditional breadwinner model is rewarded; in the workplace, men are rewarded for fatherhood and women are penalized for motherhood. That remains to this day, and this is the kind of phenomenon that shows clearly that there is not a firewall between work and family. These decisions are carried out in the workplace with an eye towards people’s parental status at home.

To learn more about Pamela Stone and her work, visit here. Click here to learn more about her book, Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home.

Join Work and Life next Tuesday at 7 pm on Sirius XM Channel 111.  Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.

About the Author

Sathvik Ramanan Sathvik Ramananis an undergraduate freshman in the Vagelos Program in the Life Sciences and Management at the University of Pennsylvania.

Posted on March 23, 2015 by
Filed Under: Flex Work/Project Work, On-Ramping/Re-Launching, Opting-Out, Research, Women and Work | Leave a Comment

Make Workplace Flexibility Work For You – Allison O’Kelly

Contributor: Morgan Motzel

Work and Life is a two-hour radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday from 7 pm to 9 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

This week on Work and Life, Stew Friedman spoke with Allison Karl O’Kelly, Founder and CEO of MomCorps, about the growing consciousness of the value created by workplace flexibility arrangements. O’Kelly discussed how engaging your networks, managing stakeholder expectations, and having honest personal conversations can bring about work-life satisfaction for individuals in new and unexpected ways.

The following are edited excerpts of Friedman’s conversation with O’Kelly:

Stew Friedman: The conversation about workplace flexibility has changed these days. We’re operating in a different landscape now where there’s more fertile ground for innovation, and where MomCorps, as a staffing agency, can push its client firms to adjust their employment policies and become more flexible.

Allison O'KellyAllison Karl O’Kelly: Yes. I think that companies now, for the most part, want to make flexibility work. This is especially true when you’re talking about the Human Resources department of many organizations. They understand the importance of flexibility. Now it’s about understanding how to make flexible arrangements work.  I think that once the mindset is there, it’s a lot easier to help companies implement strategies to make it work.

SF: How do you get that initial mindset shift? What are your methods for making that happen for an employer?

AOK: As far as the mindset shift is concerned, I see that most people have that already. We don’t spend a lot of time trying to convince people why work flexibility is good. What we do spend a lot of time doing is trying to just get companies to understand the quality of candidates for a given role and to grasp why they can get a better candidate if they’re willing to provide some flexibility to him or her. We often talk about flexibility as being another form of currency. Sometimes it can actually be a way to save money – whether that’s not paying for full-time work that can be done part-time or not paying for office space. We’re certainly not asking companies to hire someone flexible who is not the right person for the organization, but hopefully they can quickly understand that if they give up a little bit on the flexibility piece, they are going to get an amazing candidate that they otherwise might not be able to get.

SF: They can maybe even get a better work method out of it too, in the experiment of trying a new way to get things done.

AOK: That’s also important. We hear over and over again about folks who work on a part-time basis and how amazingly productive they are. I personally think that’s because when people are treated like adults and they’re given that level of flexibility they’re just so much more loyal to their employers. They really want to perform well and do a good job for them.

SF: I’ve found that in order to make any kind of alternative work arrangement work, it has to be not only something that is good for you, but also beneficial for your employer, and even more, for your family and your community. I like people to think of creating what I call “four-way wins” among these four domains of their lives. I believe thinking that way really helps you negotiate effectively because you’re thinking from the point of view of the people around you and not just your own needs. Is that an idea that resonates with your approach?

AOK: Absolutely. We talk about that a lot when we are giving advice, not only just to our candidates, but also when we’re simply talking or writing on the subject – it really is so important that it’s not just about you. Certainly, if you’re going to ask for a flexible work arrangement, in your head it is about you, but you also need to figure out why the employer should be good with what you’re suggesting. There could be so many reasons for that. Cost savings is always a good one, but especially if you’ve been at a company for a long time, retention is also very important.

For example, maybe there are opportunities for you to bring somebody else on, and you can train that person so that the company ends up spending the same money they’re spending now but for two people. They’re not going to have that work otherwise. That’s why it is so essential to figure out what is most important to your employer. Perhaps it’s really important to them that you are at a particular meeting every Friday, and so you will make sure that you’re at each of those meetings. That, then, becomes part of your deal. Ultimately, I think you need to find a way for the employer to feel comfortable with your idea and feel as though the company is getting something valuable out of this arrangement, rather than simply doing you a favor.

SF: That’s a critical theme we’re going to come back to again and again throughout the Work and Life show. It’s really essential because what many employers fear, of course, is that when people ask for alternative work arrangements that they, as the employer, are going to lose something. What they have to be shown is that they’re actually going to gain something. It sounds like you do a lot at MomCorps to try to make that happen.

AOK: Absolutely. I agree that this idea is critical. Gone are the days when your employer would say, “Let’s just do this because I really like Allison, and she’s a nice person.” We don’t have the money or the time for that these days. First of all, you have to be somebody who is very valuable to the organization, and, second of all, whether you are already there or not, you need to prove why you are valuable to the organization and why allowing you to have an arrangement that might be different from what the general employee base has is actually going to be good for them as the employer and not get in the way of doing business. As we know, at the end of the day it is business, and they need to make sure that they are able to meet their outlined goals and objectives.

O’Kelly zeroes in on how organizations and employees can create mutual value by having honest conversations in open and trusting environments. Have you ever been a part of a workplace conversation with colleagues or managers in which you realized that your seemingly conflicting interests could both be realized through a creative solution? Join us in the comments below with your thoughts and experiences.

To learn more about O’Kelly’s work, visit https://www.momcorps.com.

Tune in to Work and Life next Tuesday, April 22 at 7 PM Eastern on Sirius XM Channel 111 for conversations with Doug Conant, Chairman of Kellogg Executive Leadership Institute, and former CEO and President of Campbell Soup, and Brigid Schulte, Washington Post reporter and author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has Time Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.

 About the Author

Morgan MotzelMorgan Motzel is an undergraduate junior in the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at Penn focusing on Management and Latin America.

Posted on April 17, 2014 by
Filed Under: CEOs, Entrepreneurs, Flex Work/Project Work, On-Ramping/Re-Launching, Women and Work | Leave a Comment