Confiscate the Gender Advantage
It is disturbing to see the attention being paid to the “mommy track,” the catch phrase for the career route of working mothers described in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. The catch phrase was never used by the article’s author, consultant Felice N. Schwartz, but her discussion of “career-primary women” and “career-and-family women” does reinforce gender stereotyping. It distracts attention from the real guts of the woman-and-work problem--a work environment dominated by male values and performance standards that no longer apply.
The suggestion that there be a mommy track implies that work and home don’t mix; that in order to succeed, women, but not men, must sacrifice marriage and family. It assumes that those who wish to integrate work and family are by choice condemned to life in the slow lane.
Rather than focusing on the mommy track, we should ask ourselves whether we can afford a work environment where performance is evaluated using gender-based criteria. Women at work experience much more than lack of a family support system. In Sweden, for example, 90% of all women work, and both men and women have access to generous parental leave, child care, flex-time and job-sharing programs. Nonetheless, women remain in lower and middle management, suggesting that something more than a family support system is needed in order for women to advance. When asked to explain what continues to hold them back, Swedish women report what American women report--that men feel uncomfortable with women as peers.
It’s not men’s fault that they are confused and uncomfortable working with women as peers. Like women, they have been socialized to believe that to be a professional is to be a male. Peggy McIntosh, associate director of Wellesley College’s Center for Research on Women, aptly notes that “men carry with them a package of invisible, unearned assets that are best described as a weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, code books, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank checks.” Subconsciously, men feel women are trying to take their knapsacks away, and they’re not sure whether or not they’ll survive without them.
Women on the other hand, members of a subculture in a work environment where male values dominate, know that in order to succeed they have to assimilate. So they adopt male attitudes and behaviors and in some cases, male-like dress. Then they begin to find themselves in a Catch-22. Acting like males, they are viewed as not feminine. Acting like women, they are viewed as nonprofessional. Thus assimilation has become a dirty word to many working women. And while I suspect the mommy track idea was intended to alleviate this assimilation problem, in reality it adds to the stereotyping that is at the core of the women-and-work problem.
We learn early in life that there is a inherent conflict between home and work for women, but not for men. Little girls grow up seeing males as chief operating officers, generals and Supreme Court justices. They assume the role of a male is to command and control; that to be in control means acting like men. Little boys, on the other hand, grow up seeing women as providers of service and support. They are comfortable with women as long as they are in jobs consistent with that image; discomfort occurs when they see them in positions of power.
Fortunately, the future ain’t what it used to be. The “woman issue” is becoming an “organizational effectiveness” issue. Not because social equity has become corporate policy, but because there is a growing realization that our economic survival depends on using human resources wisely. What is needed today is not a mommy track to take us down the road to increased gender stereotyping, but an effort to remove the knapsacks of unearned privilege from those who have them.
Changing the work environment will be difficult. Knapsacks, like guns, give those who own them a feeling of security and they won’t give them up easily. Luckily, as in the effort to ban guns, there are leaders with vision willing to experiment with change. Large companies such as Merck & Co., Digital Equipment, Avon, Johnson & Johnson and DuPont have instituted policies and reward systems that value the “different way of knowing” that women bring to work. This also is seen in small new start-up companies, where traditions of gender stereotyping are absent.
There is a tendency to look for easy answers. That’s why focusing too much attention on the mommy track is dangerous. Rather than helping women address their problems, it would lead to a new type of “knapsack” privilege for women with no family responsibilities. What we want to do is shed knapsack privileges for everyone. This will only happen when people in power, who are mostly white males, acknowledge that their economic survival depends on shedding their knapsacks of invisible privilege.
