I've blogged before about the challenges facing the engineering industry as it tries to create a more diverse workforce, and we know that women are more reluctant to enter the profession and quicker to leave it. Previous studies suggest that one of the key reasons for women's dissatisfaction with their jobs is that they are frustrated with their career progression, feeling that the are not being as well paid, as quickly promoted or as valued, as they deserve.
We wanted to find out a bit more about what was going on here, so interviewed 50 women working in one global engineering firm based in the UK, to find out about their career development experiences. We asked them how it felt to be working in a male-dominated environment, what impact they felt that their gender had on their career development, and how they accounted for the gender pay gap in their organisation.
Before I describe the key findings, I need first to introduce the Intelligent Career Framework. This was developed by Arthur, Claman and Fillippi back in 1995, and offers advice on how to navigate your career. According to this framework, you can really enhance your chances of career success through Knowing How, Knowing Whom and Knowing Why. Knowing How is about your actual work-related skills - do you have what it takes to do the job well? Knowing Whom is all about your networks - do you know people who can advise and inform you, and who will put career enhancing opportunities your way? Finally Knowing Why is all about motivation - being clear about your career goals and your professional identity and having the drive to work hard. High levels of all three Knowings combine to give an individual the best chance of career success.
And trawling through our women's interviews, it became clear that for each of the three Knowings, women were disadvantaged.
Knowing How: This one is about having the right skills to do the job, and whilst the women we spoke to all were highly skilled and competent, they found that their skills were not give the same value as their male counterparts'. The participants talked about the assumptions which they saw all over the place that showed that women had a lower status than men in the organisation. Women's achievements were devalued (she only got that promotion because she was flirting with the boss / they wanted to promote a woman); feminine characteristics were devalued (empathy, emotions and sensitivity were looked down on); and women were assumed to be less capable than their male peers (women were asked to do lower level tasks than their male colleagues). The examples given were often quite subtle, but the message was clear: although women were just as capable as their male peers, their skills and abilities were always considered to be a bit inferior.
Knowing Whom: This one is about social capital, and when it came to developing useful networks, we found that men seemed to have two advantages over women. The first was that the men seemed to be a bit more comfortable putting themselves forward. They tended to talk more at meetings, brag about their achievements a bit more and ask for promotions and pay rises more often, so they generally did a better job of making themselves known. The second advantage was to do with friendships. The women talked about how much easier it is to make same-sex friendships, and they could see that the men were more likely to share common interests and just felt more comfortable with each other than they did with women. There was a lot of talk about the banter in the office, which cemented the men's friendships, but risked sounding flirtatious when it was seen between men and women. The men weren't trying to exclude the women, it was just that they more naturally gravitated to other men, and in such a male-dominated organisation, this meant that they had plenty of opportunity to build good relationships with a large number of influential colleagues.
Knowing Why: This one is about motivation, and only started to be problematic for women once they because mothers. At the heart of the problem are two ideologies - two ideas or templates, of an 'ideal'. The ideal mother (according to our current Western culture) is one who is always available for and devoted to her children. The ideal worker (according to this organisation) is one who is always available for and devoted to the organisation. You can immediately see then how this puts mothers in an impossible situation: they simply can't be the ideal mother and the ideal worker: something has to give. The women we spoke to explained that they made the choice to leave work on time to pick up their children, they accepted calls from the school when their children were ill, and they sometimes choose to work part time. This all meant that the organisation got the message that they were less than 100% committed to their organisation, and so were less keen to put career enhancing opportunities their way.
So with lower value accorded to their abilities, less chance of developing useful networks, and conflicting motivations for mothers, the women were disadvantaged on all three aspects of the Intelligent Career Framework. No wonder they found negotiating their careers an uphill struggle.
The framework was intended as a tool to help people to work out how to navigate their own careers, and assumes that it's down to the individuals to put the effort in, and that people are in control of their own career destinies. This study suggests that the problems are far more entrenched than that. Think about the example of conflicting ideologies: where do these ideologies come from? Of course workers don't need to be 100% devoted to their organisation to make an excellent professional contribution. It is quite possible to do an excellent job at work, but still feel that your children come first; but as soon as you make your dual loyalties apparent to your employer, they assume that your commitment to work has plummeted to zero. And there are many different ways to be a good mother - who is to say that the idea of total devotion is the right one? But these ideologies are deeply entrenched, and embedded within individuals, organisations and the whole of society. It's just not as easy as suggesting that these women should Lean In a bit more.
So, what can be done?
One obvious solution is to make sure that the culture reflects the policies. In the organisation we were looking at, there are many good policies in place to support career development, to ensure that selection for promotion is fair, and to allow for flexible working and shared parental leave. In practice though, the culture did not support the policies. In reality, the systems for promotion were opaque, so the senior men could promote their (male) friends without anyone noticing; the family friendly policies sound great on paper, but in practice, women were penalised for taking advantage of them, and men certainly don't feel that they are encouraged to take paternity leave or work part time. A culture shift is not easy to manage, but it would certainly make a difference.
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