(illustration by Adam McCauley)
Despite the half century of progress women have made toward attaining positions of power and authority in the workplace, the glass ceiling persists. The share of women in the executive suite has actually declined slightly in the last 20 years, and women remain woefully underrepresented in the partnership ranks of white-collar firms.
To help address this problem of female-employee advancement, a global professional services firm approached Robin J. Ely, Diane Doerge Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and colleagues. But in a remarkable turn, the firm resisted the researchers’ findings and canceled the project. The team of researchers, which included Irene Padavic at Florida State University and Erin M Reid, currently at McMaster University, used the experience to further their investigation and ultimately formulated a novel explanation for the persistence of the firm’s gender inequality.
Although men made up 63 percent of the firm’s junior associates, 90 percent of the firm’s partners were male. Firm executives and employees repeatedly cited what the researchers label the “work-family narrative.” According to this account, the family commitments of female employees conflict with the demands of the job, which inevitably hold back their advancement.
But what the researchers found during their investigation, Padavic says, “led us to suspect that the work-family narrative was part of a social defense”—that is, a myth that helped maintain the status quo. “We then looked more closely at how men and women employees turned to psychological defensive processes … to distance themselves from painful realizations about the family costs of working such long hours.”
They interviewed more than 100 firm employees, of both genders and at all levels, over 18 months. They asked employees about their perceptions of what it took to be successful at the firm, challenges specific to women, and personal accounts of their experience of leadership.
To analyze the interview responses, the authors developed a coding scheme that recognized not only what interviewees said—or conspicuously did not say—and how they said it, but also their coherence and contradictions. Verbal stumbles, obvious avoidance of the topic, deflections, equivocations, and the like were considered tells that prompted the researchers to interpret the subject’s emotional dynamics and possibly follow up. The researchers were looking for patterns across the “emotional landscape” of employees’ conflicts regarding work and family.
Researchers ultimately sought to determine whether the firm’s solidly entrenched work-family narrative functioned as a social defense. “Women are … the project manager in the home,” one partner said. “It is hard for them to spend the necessary time, energy, and effort to be viewed here as a senior leader.”
Aliya Hamid Rao, assistant professor of sociology at Singapore Management University, says, “What is innovative here is the theoretical lens of the systems psychodynamic approach, which shows that organizations have a social defense which encourages actively denying actual organizational problems, with gendered consequences.”
Both genders faced similar turnover rates at the firm and shared a disdain for the demands of the firm’s 24/7 work culture on family life. Two-thirds of the male employees admitted to experiencing considerable distress and frustration at having to sacrifice family life for work, compared with a little more than half of the women. But the genders did not fare equally at work. “While men who remained seemed to suffer at least as much as women from work-family conflict, they didn’t suffer as high a career cost,” Padavic says. Although the firm had instituted accommodation policies, such as flexible hours, to help women, the women who took advantage of them failed to move up—falling victim to a “flexibility stigma.”
The firm’s leadership ultimately rejected the researchers’ proposal that long work hours, rather than the preferred explanation of work-family conflicts, were at the root of women’s slow advancement. The rejection itself offered the researchers additional data. “By the time it happened, we were already aware that firm leaders were not on board, so it was not a surprise,” Padavic says. “What was significant was that it fit with other data—their unwavering commitment to the work-family explanation and the fact that they had misread their turnover data—and these led us to suspect that the work-family narrative was part of a social defense.”
The barriers women face at work are unlikely to fall anytime soon. “Attributing women’s stalled advancement to work-family issues is far easier than confronting the more difficult problem that the organization of work itself may need to be changed,” Rao says.
The social defenses at the organizational level and deep-seated beliefs about women’s and men’s roles at the cultural level are powerful forces, Padavic says. “Yet, we see hope in the fact that despite the social defense that deflects attention from the 24/7 work culture, men and women are still left with feelings of discontent that could lead them to question the tradeoff and create change in their own lives. The more common such questioning becomes, perhaps employers will be forced to consider changing their expectations.”
Read more stories by Marilyn Harris.