Doing this second-shift labor for free only creates one more burden on women that, ironically, makes it harder for them to advance in their careers.
In
1989, feminist Arlie Russell Hochschild argued that working women go
home to work a “second shift,” performing the majority of the
labor involved in caring for their homes and children. That’s not
the only extra shift working
women are doing. Some are also being asked to do a second, unpaid
shift at work, where they’re putting in extra time to help boost
the careers of other women. This kind of labor — such as mentoring
or serving on committees designed to improve corporate policies
toward women — is essential to helping women advance, which
ultimately redounds to the benefit of their employers. So it should
come with compensation.
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Reading : Business
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One
way senior-level women are needed to boost the careers of
junior-level women is by serving as mentors. Women in C-suites were
more likely to have had a mentor at any stage in their careers, a
2017 survey by consulting firm Egon Zehnder found, suggesting that
it’s critical to attaining leadership positions. Although studies
of the role gender plays in mentoring relationships have yielded
mixed results, there is evidence that women do better when their
mentors are other women, because they can see them as role models.
But because women hold just 24 percent of senior positions globally,
according to the nonprofit Catalyst, each one essentially must mentor
more than one woman in order for women and men to ultimately achieve
parity in leadership positions.
This
puts a significant burden on the women who are being called upon to
do all of this unpaid mentoring. As Bloomberg Technology anchor Emily
Chang reported in her 2018 book “Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’
Club of Silicon Valley,” when Sequoia, an elite Silicon Valley
venture capital firm, launched a mentorship program for women, one
woman who was asked to join the program as a mentor “said she felt
as if Sequoia was asking her to do free work, while the firm took all
the credit."
Women
are also often called upon to contribute to the advancement of other
women by helping set policy and recruit for their organizations. Like
Sequoia’s mentorship program, such initiatives are often
implemented by companies seeking to improve their reputations after
they’ve faced criticism for their treatment of women or lack of
gender diversity. For example, in her recently published book
“Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts,”
Jill Abramson noted that after allegations surfaced of a “sexist
culture and toleration of harassment” at Vice Media, the company
“predictably appointed a group of female elders to study the
culture and recommend changes.” Similarly, Chang noted that Google
— which has also been criticized for its lack of gender
diversity — instituted a policy that all candidates for
technical jobs must be interviewed by a woman. “Some women felt
that participating in so many interviews hurt their performance
overall,” Chang wrote. “The more time they spent doing
interviews, the less time they spent writing code, which is what
reviews and raises were based on.”
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