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ОглавлениеMaking Workplaces Work for Women
Two of the greatest barriers to women’s corporate success are too few mentors and too little flexibility. This is the product of workplaces that were designed by men for other men, with men still largely at the helm. But common workplace structures don’t work for many women (nor an increasing number of men). These workplace structures also don’t help a company’s bottom line.
In today’s competitive environment, Wharton business school researchers are finding that mentors are more important than ever for both employees and organizations. Yet women still have a harder time securing senior mentors than men. KPMG surveyed over 3,000 professional and college-aged women, and a large majority said they didn’t feel confident finding a mentor or approaching senior managers. As a result, women are twenty-four percent less likely than men to get advice from senior leaders. The barriers are often greater for women of color, with sixty-two percent reporting that the lack of an influential mentor holds them back. This concern is well-supported by research finding that people with mentors are indeed more likely to get promoted.
Leadership experts W. Brad Johnson and David Smith have researched why male mentors are in short supply for women in business. They’ve found that many men are uncomfortable mentoring women because it’s an unfamiliar role. Some men are worried that they may make a mistake or say something that’s perceived as sexist. Some are concerned that others may read something inappropriate into the relationship. Some are anxious that mentoring women will reduce their status in the workplace or trigger disapproval from other men. Add up all these concerns, and it’s no wonder that when Catalyst surveyed men about their biggest barrier to supporting gender equality, seventy-four percent said “fear.”
Unfortunately, at the same that #MeToo has exposed a pervasive culture of sexual harassment, the reckoning has also increased men’s fears about mentoring female colleagues. The percentage of male managers who report feeling uncomfortable mentoring women has more than tripled from five to sixteen percent in the wake of #MeToo. That means that one out of every six male managers is hesitant to mentor a woman. The number of male managers who are hesitant to work alone with a woman has more than doubled. A stunning sixty-four percent of men in vice president positions and above are reluctant to meet alone with a junior woman.
Given these anxieties, it’s not surprising that women are having a harder time than men securing influential mentors. Women also get less value out of the mentoring relationships that they have. To allay their anxieties when mentoring women, men sometimes fall into gender stereotype traps. Men are often overprotective instead of giving honest feedback and pushing their female mentees to take risks. This makes it harder for women to get growth opportunities and reach leadership positions.
No matter how hard it may be for men to mentor women, it’s even harder for women leaders when the responsibility falls on them, particularly when performing the critical role of internal promotion. When a senior woman publicly sponsors junior women colleagues at her company, her performance evaluations take a hit. In contrast, when a senior man publicly promotes a female colleague, his performance evaluations go up. That’s because women who mentor women are often seen as playing favorites, while men who mentor women are viewed as diversity champions. As frustrating as this double standard is, it should give men an added responsibility to sponsor women in their firms. Men who mentor women benefit personally as well. Male mentors build their interpersonal skills, expand their knowledge, and create more diverse networks, which makes them better leaders.
As important as mentoring is for achieving workplace equality, flexibility is even more critical. When women are asked whether they’d rather have a raise, a promotion, an extra week’s vacation, or more flexibility in their day, the top response is more flexibility. In a study of over 1,500 white collar professionals, ninety-five percent of women said they needed some form of flexibility, but only thirty-four percent said they had access to the flexible work options that they needed.
Lack of flexibility isn’t just one of the top reasons that women leave jobs, it’s also a top reason why women leave the workforce altogether. In one survey, seventy percent of women who had left the workforce said they would still be working if they had more flexible work schedules. Another survey of career-oriented stay-at-home moms revealed that fifty-five percent would prefer to be working, but they needed more family-friendly workplace policies. That’s an enormous loss of talent, innovation, and human capital. On the other hand, when employers commit to flexibility—including flexible schedules, reduced-hour or part-time options, telecommuting, or job-sharing arrangements—women are far more likely to stay and advance.
An increasing number of men are also seeking workplace flexibility, which provides even more incentive for employers to innovate. Employees who lack flexible work options are twice as likely to be dissatisfied with their jobs and move to other companies. The number of professional employees who quit their jobs because they lacked flexibility nearly doubled from 2014 to 2017, at which point nearly a third of those who quit their jobs cited lack of flexibility as the reason. This means that employers are paying enormous sums to hire and train new employees, not to mention the indirect costs from loss of continuity, reduced productivity, and decreased morale.
In addition to day-to-day flexibility, many women also leave the workforce because of inadequate maternity and family leave policies. Almost one in four working women in the US return to work within two weeks after giving birth. That’s because out of 193 countries in the world, the US is one of only a handful that doesn’t have a national law requiring maternity or paternity leave—an accolade that we share with Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and a few other South Pacific island nations. Over half of nations worldwide require at least fourteen weeks of paid maternity leave, and over forty percent require eighteen weeks or more. Over forty percent of countries also mandate some amount of paid leave for fathers. But because the US has no national paid family leave law, it’s up to company leaders to take charge.
Currently, only thirty-five percent of US companies offer paid maternity leave, and only twenty-nine percent offer paid paternity leave. At the same time, half of employees report that if they had the choice, they’d pick more parental leave time over a pay raise. When women do have access to paid maternity leave, however, they’re often afraid to use it. This is particularly the case in the male-dominated tech industry, where fifty-two percent of women said they returned early from maternity leave out of fear that spending time with their newborns was hurting their careers.
Men undoubtedly can relate to these concerns. Like women, most men don’t have access to paid family leave. For men who do, most report even greater pressure than women not to use their time off because they’ll be viewed as uncommitted to their jobs. When men do take family leave, they’re often treated more harshly than women. In a large poll of employees who had access to parental leave benefits, fifty-four percent said that men are judged more negatively than women for taking the same amount of parental leave. One in three men reported that their jobs would be in jeopardy if they took their family leave time. As a result, men who have access to paternity leave typically use only a third of the time that’s available. While sixty-six percent of women take all of their available parental leave, only thirty-six percent of men do the same.
Expanding paternity leave isn’t just something that more men are seeking, it’s also vital for advancing women’s equality. When men take paternity leave, it reduces the stigma on all employees for being involved parents. Research also suggests that having dads involved with newborns reduces stress, depression, and illness for new moms. Men who take paternity leave also tend to share childcare more equally, which allows women more capacity to take Sheryl Sandberg’s advice and “lean in” to their careers. In Iceland, where the majority of fathers take parental leave when they have children, companies have the smallest gender pay gap in the world.
So men have a critical role in making workplaces work for women. As in other areas, dads of daughters are leading the way. Large companies with male CEOs who have daughters tend to invest more in work/life employee benefits than companies lead by other men. Finance professors Henrik Cronqvist and Frank Yu discovered this while studying corporate social responsibility ratings at about four hundred large companies in the US. CSR ratings quantify a firm’s investment in employees and the community. The ratings measure, among other things, whether a firm provides childcare benefits, flexible hours, and employee health programs.
The study found that companies run by a male CEO who has at least one daughter have CSR ratings that average 9.1 percent higher than the median rating for similar-sized firms. The biggest effect on a firm’s CSR rating comes from a male CEO’s first-born daughter, although later-born daughters also increase a firm’s CSR rating incrementally. When a firm changes its CEO from a man who has one or more daughters to a man without daughters, the firm’s CSR rating tends to quickly drop.
Imagine what dads of daughters could do for workplace flexibility and mentoring if they prioritized them at their workplaces. What if dads experimented with alternative work arrangements and set up formal mentoring programs to ensure that women don’t fall through the cracks? What if dads publicly set concrete goals and regularly measured their progress? What if dads took all their paternity leave and encouraged other men to do the same? Four dads of daughters in Silicon Valley’s tech industry have taken up this challenge to become role models for how to get started.
The Silicon Valley Coaches
When Richard Dickson became the Chair of Fenwick & West LLP, a Silicon Valley technology and life sciences law firm, his two daughters, Jordan and Alex, were seven and five years old. Even during elementary school, Jordan and Alex weren’t just athletic, competitive, and opinionated. They were also budding feminists. Jordan could often be spotted in a “Girls Rule” tank-top, while Alex’s favorite purple t-shirt displayed the Shakespeare quote: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” While saying grace before a meal at their grandparents’ house, they once changed the word “amen” to “awomen,” just to be fair. The phrase, “girl power,” is invoked frequently around Richard’s house, and his daughters aren’t afraid to speak up and question his authority. Jordan and Alex have grown up truly believing that girls can do and become anything they want.
So when Richard stepped into his law firm’s leadership role, he felt an obligation—and a fair amount of pressure—to meet his daughters’ expectations about gender equality. “Your daughters are part of your identity,” says Richard, “so the increased importance of a world that’s fair and equal to them is something that has an impact.”
Advancing women’s equality in a corporate and technology-focused Silicon Valley law firm is no easy task. Nationwide, only eighteen percent of law firm equity partners are women, even though women have made up about half of all law students for the past twenty-five years. The numbers are even lower for women in corporate law, which is the largest part of Fenwick’s practice. The gender pay gap in the legal profession is also staggering. The median compensation for partners at the two hundred largest law firms is about twenty percent less for women than men, even in the equity ranks. Women are also scarce in leadership positions at the technology, life sciences, and other Silicon Valley companies that make up most of Fenwick’s client base. Women fill less than twenty-five percent of general counsel positions at Fortune 500 companies, and only seventeen percent of venture-backed start-ups have a woman founder—a percentage that hasn’t changed since 2012.
Fortunately, Richard could build on a strong foundation set by the firm’s prior Chair, Gordon Davidson, who’s also the dad of a daughter. Business professor Isabel Metz studies diversity management and she’s found that companies with the greatest gender diversity are ones with multiple generations of leaders who are committed to the cause. “We are talking here about cultural change, and we all know that cultural change doesn’t happen in a few months or a year,” she explains. “It takes one passionate leader, followed by another, that persistently has this issue in the spotlight, and it will have a snowball effect.”
This effect is picking up speed at Fenwick & West because of the two dedicated dads of daughters who have led the firm back-to-back over the last several decades. Gordy joined the firm in the 1970s after getting bitten by Silicon Valley’s start-up bug. With Stanford degrees in law, electrical engineering, and computer systems, Gordy quickly established himself as a leader in technology law. His clients range from start-ups to Fortune 1000 companies. He’s worked on over fifty public offerings and lead more than a hundred mergers and acquisitions valued at more than $75 billion. Because of his visionary leadership, he was elected as the firm’s Chair in 1995. Serving in that role for the next eighteen years, Gordy grew the firm from about 150 to 325 attorneys, and he nearly tripled the firm’s revenue.
Despite his firm’s financial success and his status as Silicon Valley’s legal guru, Gordy dedicated himself to advancing women attorneys before that path had been forged by others in the male-dominated legal profession. Gordy recruited his firm’s first woman attorney and mentored her throughout her career. He later helped craft a part-time schedule for her and was an outspoken advocate for electing her to become the firm’s first reduced-hour partner. In 2001, Gordy was among the first to sign up for the San Francisco Bar Association’s “No Glass Ceiling” initiative, which committed his firm to specific goals for increasing women partners.
In becoming an early Silicon Valley advocate for gender diversity, Gordy was nudged along the way by his high-achieving daughter, Laurie. While Gordy was leading his firm, his daughter finished high school, graduated from college, and began a teaching career. While watching her journey, Gordy became motivated to dig deeper into the barriers and biases that were pushing women out of the legal profession.
Gordy’s firm was having a hard time retaining women attorneys, particularly women with children. So in 2006, he convened a task force to examine how law firm billable-hour requirements and scheduling practices affected women attorneys. Law firms demand notoriously long hours, in part because clients are typically billed based on the number of hours an attorney spends on a client’s work, instead of based on projects or outcomes. So more attorney work hours means higher law firm profits. It also means that attorney salaries and promotions typically depend on the number of hours an attorney clocks. Gordy suspected that this was part of the retention issue for lawyer moms, so his firm hosted a forum to discuss how to keep women attorneys after they have kids.
Based on what he learned, Gordy established a formal part-time program that’s open to all attorneys. Most importantly, attorneys who work part-time may still become partners, which was a groundbreaking shift from most firms’ second-class mommy-tracks. Of the last thirty attorneys who’ve been elected to Fenwick’s partnership, eight have been working reduced-hour schedules, which includes six women. Although the policies were triggered by the desire to retain women, they’ve also benefitted men who are seeking work/family balance.
Gordy stepped down as Fenwick’s Chair in 2013, and the partners chose Richard to take his place. While helping raise two young daughters, Richard had built a successful practice advising high-tech, internet, telecommunications, software, and semiconductor companies. After leading many Silicon Valley start-ups through venture capital financing, mergers and acquisitions, and initial public offerings, Richard became the head of Fenwick’s start-up group and the leader of the corporate department before replacing Gordy as the firm’s Chair.
Richard built on Gordy’s work by focusing on advancing women into leadership roles. As a dad of daughters, Richard saw this focus as both a moral responsibility and a business opportunity. Watching his daughters grow their talents reminded him that his firm is a talent organization. Law firms are service providers, and their assets are their people. So recruiting, keeping, and promoting the most talented individuals has been Richard’s highest leadership goal. Having daughters made him more attuned to the importance of gender diversity for achieving that goal. “Our greatest opportunity is the retention and promotion of women because they’re half of the talent pool,” says Richard, “but that’s something that the legal industry has not been very good at recognizing.”
Richard became convinced that effective mentorship was the key for having more women attorneys rise to the partnership ranks. But mentorship takes skill, commitment, and most of all, empathy. Richard’s capacity to be more empathetic was perhaps his most important gift from his daughters. “My daughters have made me more of a softie,” he admits, “but in a good way.” Richard believes that empathy is one of the most important leadership skills. “It’s the ability to take the perspective of others and to put yourself in the shoes of different people who have different experiences,” he explains.
The empathy that Richard gained from being the dad of daughters helped him see that his firm’s informal mentoring process wasn’t working for many women as well as it was for most men. He noticed that most male associates easily found mentors because the partners were mostly men with whom they could easily relate. But talented female associates were often falling through the mentorship cracks, which made it harder for them to achieve their full potential at his firm.
Starting as the leader of the corporate department, Richard created a mentorship program to support women’s development. He identified the partners who were the most skilled at mentoring and the best positioned to provide valuable work experiences. He then asked all of the associates to submit requests for partners they might prefer as mentors. That was particularly useful for many women who faced greater barriers to seeking support directly from powerful male leaders. Richard then set about thoughtfully pairing the most effective male mentors with aspiring women associates. He also asked the partners to become proactive rather than reactive. In particular, he asked the male mentors to identify challenging, high-profile opportunities for their women mentees to hone their skills.
Richard also made sure that mentoring and diversity contributions are considered every year when setting each partner’s pay. “It should be a badge of honor for men to sponsor women,” says Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and that’s definitely becoming the case at Fenwick & West. One of the things that Richard is most proud of as the firm’s Chair is that women corporate associates often request him as their mentor.
Research supports Richard’s belief that strong mentoring is key to retaining women. Women who have valuable relationships with male mentors are more loyal to their organizations, in part because male mentoring creates a feeling of inclusion, which is in short supply for women in male-dominated industries. This is something that most men don’t realize. At the same time that eighty-two percent of women report feeling excluded at work, ninety-two percent of men report that they don’t exclude women at their jobs.
In addition to mentoring, Richard has also tackled some of the structural barriers to women’s success. “We need to experiment,” he says, and he’s willing to challenge conventions when needed. He helped design his firm’s first job-sharing arrangement, where two attorneys each worked part-time and shared the same clients, office, and email inbox. His goal was to support reduced-hour work in practice areas where full-time client demands had made part-time legal work challenging. His firm has also encouraged clients to switch from billable-hour fees to fixed fees, which lowers the pressure on attorneys to log extremely high working hours. “Billable hours have become less of a factor for partners over the years,” says Richard, “and that has been very beneficial to the goal of recruiting and retaining women, not to mention the job satisfaction of many men.”
Although Gordy and Richard know that more work is needed before the legal profession offers an inclusive work environment for women, they’ve established their firm as a leader. Fenwick & West has been ranked among the country’s top ten law firms for diversity by The American Lawyer and Law360, and it’s been recognized for ten years as one of the Best Places to Work by the Silicon Valley Business Journal and the San Francisco Business Times. In 2016, the Euromoney Legal Media Group Americas Women in Business Law Awards recognized Fenwick as the best national firm for women in business law in North America. The following year, Silicon Valley’s legal newspaper, The Recorder, honored five women from Fenwick—more than any other firm—on its prestigious list of Women Leaders in Tech Law.
In 2016, Gordy was honored for his work expanding women’s opportunities in the legal profession by receiving the first annual “Bill Campbell (Man Who Gets It) Award” from Watermark, a Bay Area group of women executives and entrepreneurs. Watermark CEO Marlene Williamson launched the award because she knows that women will break down leadership barriers more quickly with the buy-in of men.
The award is named after Bill Campbell—who’s known as “Coach” throughout the Silicon Valley—because of Bill’s long-time support of women. Like Richard, Bill is a proud dad of two daughters, Margaret and Kate. Bill began his career as the CEO of Go Corporation, the spectacularly well-funded Silicon Valley start-up that sought to mainstream pen-based computing. Bill later became the CEO of Intuit and served on Apple’s board of directors.
Bill’s most important role, however, has been as Silicon Valley’s behind-the-scenes advocate for women. Throughout his career, Bill quietly dedicated himself to mentoring, supporting, and opening doors for many of the first female executives and entrepreneurs in the tech industry. “Bill was focused on diversity, especially gender diversity, before it was cool and even in the news,” says Shellye Archambeau, one of Bill’s mentees who became the CEO of MetricStream.
Other women who proudly count themselves as Bill’s mentees include Caroline Donahue, the former CMO of Intuit; Donna Dubinsky, the former CEO of Palm and co-founder of Numenta; and Juliet de Baubigny, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. “There is no doubt the opportunities he gave me vaulted me in my career,” says Donna. “It gave me a seat at the table in a fundamental way.”
Shellye wholeheartedly agrees. “He was definitely a strong figure in my career,” she says. “We have a talent shortage in tech and we are not leveraging fifty percent of the population the way we should. But Bill has enabled more women’s talent to be not just tapped, but given the opportunity to demonstrate the full talent that they have.”
Mari Baker, a former Intuit Vice President, was on maternity leave in 1995 when Bill picked her for the VP role. She doubted whether she could do the job with a new infant, but Bill made the position work. Bill had a rule that all company meetings must take place between ten a.m. and five p.m., in part because he wanted to spend time with his own kids. Diane Greene also credits Bill for recruiting her to the Intuit board of directors and convincing her not to leave the tech industry when the challenges became overwhelming. “He made us feel empowered,” she says. As a result, Bill’s mentees often dedicate themselves to mentoring other women. “He’s given women the sense that they belong,” says Diane, “and then they go out and give other women the sense that they belong.”
It was Bill’s idea to launch a women’s entrepreneurship conference, which is how he teamed up with Watermark. So it was fitting for Watermark to name its “Man Who Gets It” award after Bill. Fenwick’s Gordy Davidson was honored to be the award’s first recipient. “I have tried to be a vocal leader in recruiting and promoting women, with the simple argument that, otherwise, we will miss at least half of the talent that is available,” says Gordy. “All women need is the mentorship and the opportunity to demonstrate their talents.” He hopes to continue Bill’s legacy in the Silicon Valley for years to come. Bill passed away at age seventy-five in 2016, but he left behind two proud daughters, many successful women executives and entrepreneurs, two inspired leaders of Fenwick & West, and a more gender-inclusive tech industry.
Another tech leader who also figured out the value of gender inclusive workplaces early in his career is Adam Bain, the former COO of Twitter. Adam became inspired when thinking about his own daughter’s future. “I look forward to the day when both my daughter and my son can enter the workforce in an environment where women have just as much opportunity as their male counterparts,” says Adam.
To make his workplace a place where he’d want his daughter to work, Adam partnered Twitter with the United Nations HeForShe IMPACT Initiative. IMPACT commits corporate executives to publicly report their progress on gender diversity. Adam pledged to increase the number of women in tech positions at Twitter to sixteen percent and raise the total number of women to thirty-five percent by 2016. Adam was particularly focused on increasing women in leadership roles, where he set a 2016 goal of twenty-five percent. “When you think about the future, you often think about your kids,” Adam explained. “My first two bosses in business were both incredibly inspiring and powerful female executives and I learned everything from them. I want both my daughter and my son to have the same experience that I did, which is to have the opportunity to have female managers and mentors who inspire them to do things they never thought possible.”
To achieve his goals, Adam made several policy changes at Twitter, including giving women up to twenty weeks of fully-paid maternity leave. Twitter also provides mentors and hosts roundtables for new moms and moms-to-be to learn how the company can support women’s re-entry after having a baby. That led to other changes, like providing medical grade pumps in the company’s nursing rooms and reimbursing women for supplies and shipping costs to send breast milk home when they’re travelling for work. Twitter also gives its employees free premium memberships to Care.com, which helps employees find quality childcare.
Adam had done his research, so he knew that these investments would not only be good for women, but also good for Twitter. “The science here is pretty simple,” says Adam. “When you look at the various business studies that look at company performance and inclusion numbers, it’s just a fact, it’s not even a theory, that companies that are more mindful around inclusion perform better.” In thinking ahead to the corporate world he hopes will exist for our next generation of girls, Adam jokingly tweeted to the Twitter recruiting office that his daughter “will be graduating from college [fourteen years] from now with a computer science/math double major.” He asked them to “please keep an eye out” for her application.
How Dads Can Get Started
For dads of daughters who are in positions of corporate power, mentoring women colleagues can be an important and rewarding contribution to advancing women’s equality. Just like other goals that you’ve set and achieved in your professional life, you don’t have to go this one alone. There are excellent resources available for honing your mentoring skills.
A great first stop is Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women by W. Brad Johnson and David Smith. Brad and David are professors in the Department of Leadership, Ethics, and Law at the United States Naval Academy. They’re also dads of daughters, so they understand both the motivation and the anxieties that may come with mentoring women. Their book shares a wealth of advice about how men can become successful, effective, and empathetic mentors for women.
One thing that Brad and David have discovered is that when men (including themselves) mentor women, they often reduce their anxieties by falling into so-called “man-scripts.” They describe these man-scripts as “roles men have long been conditioned to play in stereotypical male-to-female relationships.” While these roles can make the mentoring relationship more comfortable for men, they can also enable gender bias to undermine success.
One of the most common man-scripts is the “protective father.” This is when a man replicates a father-daughter relationship when mentoring female colleagues. While this can ease men’s discomfort about mentoring women, it often makes men unwilling to give negative feedback or push women to challenge themselves. Women often regret that male mentors aren’t as tough or honest with them as they are with men, so they don’t know how to improve, take risks, and grow. “A man who falls back on a father script with a woman at work believes in his heart of hearts that he’s being helpful and he’s being protective and shielding her,” explains Brad. “But the problem is he’s not allowing her to experience the same challenges and opportunities that a male mentee would get. He’s not allowing her to go out and make mistakes and fail and to build up that immunity as she learns to overcome challenges.” Acting like a father at work can also be patronizing, which undermines women’s autonomy.
So while Brad and David definitely believe that dads should be motivated by their daughters to mentor women at work, they shouldn’t act like dads when taking on a mentoring role. They should be inspired by their father-daughter relationship, but they shouldn’t replicate it on the job. Brad knows from personal experience that this can be tricky, so he recommends that men talk about it openly with the women they mentor. When Brad is mentoring a woman, he tells her, “Look, occasionally, you’re going to see me acting like a dad and I don’t intend to do that, when I do it, will you promise to bring it to my attention and tell me to stop it?’”
Athena Rising offers men many other tips for improving mentoring skills. Perhaps the most important is to spend less time talking and more time listening, which is what mentees want most. What makes male mentors most effective for women, says David, is “listening with a purpose as opposed to thinking about what it is I’m going to tell you next.” Additional advice is available from Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.org, which recently launched the #MentorHer campaign, which helps build men’s mentoring skills. Research has found, for example, that women are more likely than men to get very vague feedback that they can’t implement, so the #MentorHer campaign teaches men to give women precise, skills-specific feedback.
All of these mentoring tips work better if your firm has a formal mentoring program, which is something you can help establish if it doesn’t already exist. Formal mentoring programs reduce the social barriers for women to find mentors in the first place. They can also reduce men’s concerns about the relationship being misperceived. Establishing a common set of specific goals for the relationship also paves the way for greater success. Catalyst has found that this groundwork pays particular dividends for women, who receive about 50 percent more promotions when they have formal mentoring programs than when they find mentors on their own. But whether your firm has a formal mentoring program or not, the most important thing is to get started. “Powerful male mentors don’t wait,” explain Brad and David. “They purposefully identify promising women in their organization and reach out, initiating interaction and support without being asked.”
Increasing flexibility at your workplace can be more challenging because it often requires both formal policies and cultural shifts in attitude. An excellent place for dads to start is by reading Josh Levs’s book, All In: How Our Work-First Culture Fails Dads, Families, and Businesses—And How We Can Fix It Together. Josh is a journalist who wrote All In after his employer, Time Warner, denied him fair parental leave when he had his third child. While the company gave moms ten weeks of paid leave after giving birth, it gave dads like Josh only two. Josh was forced to file a discrimination complaint when Time Warner wouldn’t reconsider, and he ultimately got the policy changed. Parents around the country supported Josh throughout the ordeal, knowing that shared parental leave not only supports involved fathers, but is also essential to advancing women’s equality.
Since then, Josh has become an advocate for parental leave laws and workplace flexibility that offer both women and men a healthier work/family balance. Josh’s book builds a compelling case for why paid parental leave—for both moms and dads—supports healthier kids, stronger families, and more successful companies. Share Josh’s book with your male colleagues to start a conversation about the importance of work/family balance. Men’s voices are often under the radar when it comes to paid family leave and workplace flexibility. “Dads can change that,” says Josh, “by joining the public conversations on gender issues, sharing experiences, and amplifying the arguments women have been making. Women can help by making sure men are welcomed into these conversations with open arms and minds.”
The stories of dedicated dads in Josh’s book will also support fathers in taking perhaps the most important personal step to advance women’s equality: proudly and visibly using your paternity leave if you have it available. Speak up in support of paid paternity leave. Applaud other men for seeking and using it. And never leave your parental leave benefits on the table. “Women have done a great job of speaking out about this,” says Josh. “It’s time for men to join in—in a big way.”
If you do, Alexis Ohanian is one dad who will support you all the way. Alexis is the co-founder of Reddit and Initialized Capital, and he’s also tennis superstar Serena Williams’s husband. Alexis became an outspoken advocate for paid paternity leave after he used Reddit’s sixteen weeks of paid leave to care for his daughter Olympia. Alexis acknowledges the reality of “career fear”—the concerns men have about stigma, retaliation, and career deceleration if they use their paternity leave. But he encourages dads to take their leave anyway because the payoffs for their families far exceed the costs. While he’s advocating for a federal paid family leave law, he wants you to know that he’s got your back. “[L]et me be your air cover,” says Alexis. “I took my full sixteen weeks and I’m still ambitious and care about my career. Talk to your bosses and tell them I sent you.”
On the policy side, company leaders can begin by filling out the Workplace Flexibility Scorecard created by New Agency Partners. The Scorecard is part of a Flexible Workplaces HR Toolkit, which is available for free online. The Scorecard helps leaders understand their current practices and existing level of commitment to workplace flexibility. Leaders can use the Toolkit’s sample policies, procedures, and employee guidebooks to set up flextime, part-time, telecommuting, or compressed workweek options. The Champions of Change initiative also offers an online Flexible Workplaces Toolkit to help leaders establish and monitor flextime practices. For large companies, leaders might also team up with Werk, which offers an analytics software program to assess the specific flexibility needs and solutions in your workplace. The Werk platform helps companies create customized flexible work policies and measure their impact.
Because so many women leave the workplace after having kids, company leaders should also offer better support for women who are exiting and re-entering their jobs from maternity leave. Strong support comes from clear communication and thorough preparation. One of the best resources to provide that support is Lori Mihalich-Levin’s Mindful Return initiative. Lori is an attorney, a mom of two kids, and the author of Back to Work after Baby: How to Plan and Navigate a Mindful Return from Maternity Leave. Lori advises companies and offers online courses for both women and men who take parental leave. The course includes a “Leave Template” that allows employees to communicate their plans with their workplace teams before leaving. The course also assists women with the daunting logistics of returning to work, including plans for nursing and childcare, while helping men address the “career fear” that’s often associated with taking leave.
When dads of daughters—or other men—become advocates for workplace flexibility or mentors for women, it’s not just women who gain. Men benefit, too. So do businesses. The same study that found that only thirty-four percent of women had access to the workplace flexibility they needed found that fifty-one percent of men needed more flexibility as well. Flexibility gains for women are gains for everyone seeking a healthier work/life balance. Learning from mentoring relationships also goes in both directions. As Brad Johnson and David Smith explain, “[d]eliberately and skillfully mentoring women is an opportunity for us to open our minds, listen, and become better employees, colleagues, and men.”
