Top leaders of a global consulting firm longed to add more women to its partner ranks, if women would just put in the hours necessary to compete. But mothers would always prioritize their children’s needs over those of clients, they reasoned. There was probably nothing they could do to change that.
Even so, the executives brought the issue to Harvard Business School Professor Robin J. Ely. Eighteen months and more than 100 employee interviews later, Ely’s research team reached a conclusion that challenged steadfast beliefs about the forces underpinning gender inequality, held not only by this firm but by most companies today.
Yes, women were struggling to be fully present at home and work, but so were men. An always-on culture and gender-role expectations were to blame, not motherhood. And men were mourning the loss of their family time to client demands as much as women.
“The firm’s long-work-hours culture was detrimental to both women and men, but women paid a higher price,” says the article, Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work-family Narrative as a Social Defense against the 24/7 Work Culture, published in Administrative Science Quarterly.
“The underlying motivation for working all these hours is not actually to produce high-quality work. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that it’s going to undermine the quality of the work.”
Confronting deeply held beliefs has been part of Ely’s work as head of the HBS Gender Initiative and cohost of the seventh Gender and Work Symposium, which starts Thursday. The two-day event, themed “The Courage of Our Convictions,” will bring together scholars and activists from across North America to discuss evolving perspectives about gender in organizations.
“It has been a place where I think people have felt heard and safe,” says Ely, who is also the Diane Doerge Professor of Business Administration, about the symposium. “It supports having some difficult conversations.”
Caregivers and breadwinners
Many companies are going through their own soul-searching as they try to hold on to their most educated and valuable talent in a competitive labor market. The loss of women managers—and potential future leaders—has been particularly vexing for executives. Many of them cling to the belief that women’s struggle to balance their home and work obligations limits their advancement. In reality, the issue is far more complex.
Despite years of social change, the label “bad mother” still looms large for women who struggle with guilt and sense judgment if they’re late to pick up their child from day care. Fathers face their own painful choice between family and work, though society’s expectation for men to be breadwinners supports spending long hours at the office. Women, in contrast, face career penalties such as loss of promotion for using corporate accommodations that help them balance different roles.
Companies hold on to the “hegemonic narrative” that work-life conflict is a women’s issue because it allows them to maintain the organizational status quo, say Ely and her coauthors, Florida State University Professor Irene Padavic and Erin M. Reid, associate professor at McMaster University. Confronting the more pervasive problem of employees’ stress, anxiety, and burnout would raise existential questions for companies that pride themselves in serving clients at any hour.
This is especially true for professional services firms in management consulting, law, and finance, the research says. At these companies, top partners might try to retain a multimillion-dollar customer with the same hyper-detailed analysis and speed-of-light response that helped them close the deal. In practice, Ely notes, such cultures result in overpromising, overdelivering, and—consequently—overworking.
“The underlying motivation for working all these hours is not actually to produce high-quality work,” Ely says. “In fact, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that it’s going to undermine the quality of the work.”
A chemical reaction
When Ely’s team suggested to the consulting firm that its employees worked an unnecessary number of hours, its executives rejected their findings.
“They said ‘Well, maybe you didn’t talk to the right men,’” says Ely, whose team interviewed 33 women consultants and 74 men consultants from the firm’s four largest US offices, as well as four senior leaders in human resources.
In fact, it was a story from one man—a partner at the firm—that first caught the researchers’ attention and suggested that they were not studying a “women’s problem” but a deeper cultural phenomenon. During his interview, he discussed the profound bond he felt with his newborn daughter as he carried her from the hospital’s delivery room to the nursery during the first minutes of her life. He recalled falling so “chemically, deeply in love” with his daughter that he wondered how he could leave her to go back to work.
“At that point, we realized that we had something interesting to say,” Ely says. “But we had to figure out a way to identify these unconscious dynamics, and that isn’t really done much in the mainstream academic literature in my field.”
The team developed a system to identify and categorize moments when an interviewee tried to avoid a distressing feeling by hesitating, stumbling, or changing the topic, for example. The interviews revealed that men across the firm were wrestling with profound feelings of loss as they climbed the ranks.
A scope for sanity
Despite evidence of universal misery, none of the companies—largely professional services firms—that Ely has observed in her career have shifted the paradigm of overwork. However, some individual senior managers who handle their clients’ anxieties with more skill and confidence do tend to set more reasonable expectations for their teams. They know how to narrow the scope of a project to exactly what’s needed and avoid unnecessary effort, she says.
In the meantime, Ely fears many companies will continue to offer accommodations and benefits that often undermine a woman’s advancement and derail her career progress, while doing nothing to address the excessive work that’s hurting women and men alike.
“As soon as one firm fixes this issue, it will become something that every firm in an industry will need to address,” Ely says. “I think it can be done. Do I think it actually will be done or when? I don’t know.”
About the Author
Danielle Kost is senior editor of Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.
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