Creating a workplace that fits
One recent Saturday night, a friend explained that her husband wouldn’t be joining us for dinner because he had a business engagement. The dozen or so partners at his distinguished Silicon Valley venture capital firm were throwing a party to celebrate a particularly lucrative investment.
“Wives aren’t invited,’ my friend said.
“Don’t you mean spouses?’
“They’re all men,’ she said.
“There isn’t a single female partner?’
“Oh, God, no. It’s like a boys’ club.’
I huffed around like a peeved schoolgirl for the next several hours. No women? At all? I soon discovered you are only slightly more likely to find a woman occupying a corner office of a Silicon Valley venture capital firm than you are to find one occupying a corner locker of a National Football League team. I asked around. There is a very good reason, I was told.
It is the reason repeated so often over so many years in so many different contexts it has become accepted wisdom: Women choose not to hold top executive positions. As a spate of recent magazine stories has patiently explained, professional women who are also mothers are increasingly “opting out’ of the corporate climb. Too many demands. Too much stress.
Equal opportunity arrived, the argument seems to go, but women waved it away to play Candyland and drive carpool.
Here is the real story: The needs of the workforce outgrew the structure of the workplace. Women now understand that fitting into the workplace should never have been the goal of feminism. The goal should have been, as it is now, to create a workplace worth fitting into, one that recognizes that workers have lives and obligations.
California will take a step in that direction on July 1.
On that Thursday, California will become the first state in the United States to offer workers six weeks of paid family leave. The federal government already allows for unpaid family leave, but the law is useless for most people. How can they afford to live without a paycheck for a week, much less a month or more?
The California benefit is funded through paycheck deductions under the State Disability Insurance, amounting to a maximum of $55 per person this year and $63 next year. In return, workers can receive about 55 percent of their pay while on leave to a maximum weekly benefit of $728, increasing to $840 in 2005.
The challenge is to turn our offices and factories into places where parents — mothers, especially — are not expected to choose between their jobs and their families, which is not a choice at all. It is like asking someone to choose between shelter and food — then blaming her for the consequences of her “choice.’
The truth is most working mothers don’t have the luxury of opting out. Unlike the women profiled in those magazine articles, most don’t have husbands who make enough money on their own to live in decent neighborhoods with decent schools. These women work because their families need the paycheck.
Society — and business — lose out when talented, hard-working women feel forced to stay in low-level jobs to maintain some semblance of balance in their lives.
We live in a society that has produced Condoleeza Rice and Sandra Day O’Connor and Carly Fiorina. But don’t be fooled. Here in the dawn of the 21st century, women fill just 22 percent of America’s top executive positions — and 97 percent of the secretarial and administrative assistant spots, according to U.S. Department of Commerce statistics.
For all the progress of feminism, the workplace has yet to mature into a place that reflects the lives we lead today. The doors to the corporate clubhouse might not say “Girls Keep Out!’ But try passing through with a baby in a Snugli.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is joanryan@sfchronicle.com.