Equality — flipping the coin
Equality at work is not only a women’s issue. Men are struggling with it too.
“Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world”, says the UN. This cannot be more accurate. We have taken many steps forward, but I still see many years of work ahead before we can claim that gender equality is not just a policy on paper.
An indicator of gender inequality in the workplace- ‘Gender pay gap’ is an issue most organizations are trying to deal with. Several high-profile class-action lawsuits have made pay equity a hot topic in executive boardrooms across the world. When it comes to solving the problem, the opinions are highly divergent. Many men think that the pay gap is “fake news” and is only a political agenda. They say the difference in pay exists because of different choices that men and women make in choosing their education, careers and that they bear children and thus work part-time. When all of these are factored out, a controlled pay gap can be calculated, all these adjustments reduce the pay gap dramatically. However, the myth debunkers are ignoring the reason that leads to career choice, gender bias in promotion, gender bias in childcare and the reason why women choose to work part-time. When analyzed carefully, we see that working part-time is not always a clear feminine choice.
Controlled/adjusted pay gap is approx. 95 cents to a dollar and uncontrolled/unadjusted pay gap is approx. 82 cents to a dollar. Unadjusted or adjusted, there is a gap. 5 cents might seem small but calculated over many years and number of working women, it sums up to a considerable amount. This gap is much bigger for women of colour who are more susceptible to greater losses in lifetime earning. In an industry like healthcare where the majority of workforce is female, we would think that this disparity does not exist. Astonishingly, a 2019 survey from the WHO, conducted in 104 countries, confirmed that an average gender pay gap of around 28% exists in the healthcare workforce. Once the occupation and working hours are accounted for, the gender pay gap is 11% with women in part-time work being the main cause.
The real question is: is the pay gap only a women’s issue? or do men also need a savior a helping hand to say the forbidden? Let’s look at gender inequality from a different perspective.
It was found that men and women aged 18 to 32 have egalitarian attitudes about gender roles, that is both across education and income levels. But when faced with a lack of family-friendly policies, most fell back on traditional roles. Young men want equal relationships but find them hard to pull off in the real world. It becomes especially difficult as work has become more demanding with round-the-clock hours and unpredictable on-call availability. 24 percent of the millennial men without children are expected to shoulder most of the childcare responsibilities. Of those with children, only 8 percent did. “They say, ‘I didn’t realize how much of a ding it would be on my career,”.
Science has advanced a bit further in this matter than the corporate world. Half of the parents are fathers, yet 99% of the research on parenting focuses on mothers. We might have been falsely believing that children mainly need mothers at the start of their lives. It has been proven that hormone levels and brain activity in new fathers may change when they spend time with their children, helping them adapt to parenthood in a way that has been overlooked until now. The increase in the oxytocin levels in new mothers and fathers are similar during skin to skin contact. Studies also showed that primary-caregiving fathers exhibit high amygdala (part of the brain responsible for emotional responses) activation similar to mothers. In simple words, after childbirth if you are a primary caregiver anatomy makes no difference in men and women.
Are fathers secondary caregivers? This should be a question that every individual family should have the option to answer for themselves. Basing primary or secondary caregiving merely on gender is first step in the wrong direction.
In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg set a new tone from the top by taking two months of parental leave. In 2017 Derek Rotondo an employee of JP Morgan Chase wanted to be more involved in bringing up his second baby and asked to receive the “primary caregiver” status which would allow him to take 16 weeks of paid leave rather than two weeks. This was denied. He had to go through additional hoops to show his wife had gone back to work. A woman in Derek’s circumstances would not have to face this.
Some companies are already a bit further than that. Few men in big companies have started taking up to 6 months of parental leave. Also, in many European countries, parental leave policies are very family-friendly, where the leave can be divided equally between fathers and mothers. However, a change in the policies without a change in the mindset of individuals and companies is not helpful. Most European men still do not take advantage of the policy thus the gap still exists. The reason is not the interest, rather lack of support from the employer.
Ca. 20 % of the wage gap can be attributed to the “start of a family” otherwise known as motherhood/family penalty. Women’s earnings decline sharply after childbirth with no comparable drop for men (see chart). Even though the job participation gap seems to be recovering in the long run, the wage gap does not recover.
Organizations, where men have started taking 6 months (still rare) of parental leave, are very proud of it, and for the right reasons. It is worth applauding. The problem is, children don’t exactly stop demanding parental care after 6 months. When fathers return to work after 6 months, they face higher pressure/guilt to work longer hours than their colleagues.
It is not easy for men. The tug of war between the old social pressure of being the “breadwinner” and the recent need to follow the “new reality” puts men under tremendous stress. On further examination, it was found that married men with children work the highest number of hours, thus acquire more experience as years pass by, and the job market pays more if the worker has more experience. They also of course get promoted and can step up the corporate ladder. As women are already earning less and household can not be deprioritized by both partners, they go back home ‘on time’ or work part-time to take care of the children, mostly the latter. It is not a real choice rather an obvious compulsion. Due to more time spent at work, fathers progress in their careers and in their salary levels and become the favoured gender for jobs. This leads to a bigger pay gap and keeps the vicious circle alive. After their children start to attend school, the mothers who do return to full time work, pay a heavy price for the time that they chose to spend on their families. This results in a lack of women at higher levels and in the boardroom. Needless to say, this problem becomes greater if they have more children.
Despite the dramatic shifts in household structures i.e. dual-earner family model, workplaces are still made for so-called “ideal worker”. The ideal worker, in theory, is the employee who works long hours, answers every work email or call no matter at what time of day, travels for work, and professes not only dedication but love for the job. Mostly men fit into this category. The norm is as old as the 20th century. A century has passed but not much has changed in the expectations of an “ideal organization”. The ideal worker norm can hurt women’s careers but men who try to get out of this system pay a much higher penalty. After women come back from parental leave, they are expected to work part-time, or employers are more accepting of them leaving ‘on time’ to take care of the family. Fathers however face harsher throwbacks for working part-time or even asking for a better work-life balance, to be involved in the childcare responsibilities.
A recent UK study done by Deloitte and daddilife shows that over a third of millennial fathers struggle with their mental health when balancing their responsibilities as parents and workers. In this report 37% of the dads report regular tension from colleagues and 45% from their partners and leaving work ‘on time’ is the biggest single occasion of tension. A third of dads are actively looking for a new job highlighting flexibility as a key reason. Having a healthy work-/life relationship is important for everyone’s wellbeing and employers have a key role to play here. The role of line managers and HR are key in starting to change this picture and drive genuine equality at work for parents.
What should we do?
- Approx. 10 years of flexible working time (including maternity leave parental leave, part-time, and work-life balance) should be planned for people between the ages of 30 and 40 regardless of their gender. This will ensure that all genders are looked at with the same glasses. It becomes an age issue that is inevitable and natural.
- Work-life balance should be a necessity regardless of age and gender. It is not a luxury.
- The pay gap is mostly hidden behind a lack of transparency. Working on making the pay scales transparent will lead to a more open environment. A recent research report from PayScale found that when all compensable factors are controlled, pay transparency closes the gender wage gap completely. As per the report “It is important to understand that pay transparency does not necessarily mean publishing all salary data for everyone to see (although some organizations do so). Pay equity also does not mean that all individuals will receive the same pay, even for workers who occupy similar roles. Pay equity is about fairness, and fairness takes into account differences between people that are non-discriminatory, such as years of experience, education, special skills, and location”
- Rethink what companies need from their employees and how to avoid the classic notion of “ideal worker “. Many fathers believe that more training is needed for line managers around dads in the workplace specifically.
The pandemic has forced companies to see differently and has changed our work culture. The managers have learned that it is not necessary to sit together to manage a team. Many men have learned that household is not as little work as it seemed until now. COVID-19 highlighted the conflict between the old “ideal worker” and millennials dads who see good fathers as those who are involved in daily childcare and not just in breadwinning.
“Be so strong that you can be gentle, so educated that you can be humble, so fierce that you can be compassionate, so passionate that you can be rational and so disciplined that you can be free”
