Taking discrimination to task

May 26th, 2010 by Ville Miettinen

As most thoughtful, young men will tell you, life is full of challenging mysteries. Along with “why am I here?” and “who am I?” one of the most important unanswered questions in their lives is likely to be “where are all the girls?”

While the context of this question may hopefully change as young men get older, the question itself unfortunately still remains pertinent. Even today, although women account for over half of university students, and in some countries half of paid employees, when it comes to rich lists and executive positions there are proportionally fewer women than at my fifteenth birthday party.

Much has been written on the reasons for this (I mean the absence of women from higher executive positions, rather than that birthday party of mine where the invites went missing). Given that I’m hardly Germaine Greer, I won’t be attempting to fix this inequality with one brief blog post. At the risk of oversimplifying the issue I will simply offer an obvious explanation for this disparity: it’s those darned, inconvenient babies. Well, that might be a little glib. But it’s at least one of the reasons, and conveniently the one I want to discuss.

Despite improving paternity leave arrangements in many countries, it is generally moms that take most time away from work to raise babies. This time away from the office obviously translates to less experience for women compared to men, but may cause a series of other losses as well: a loss of momentum, clients, opportunities and also perhaps confidence. As if that isn’t bad enough, the possibility of ongoing time away from work is probably part of the reason for ongoing discrimination against mothers. But does it have to be this way?

We have written previously about the changing nature of work from being defined by hours and places to being defined by tasks and results. This will enable a worker’s talents and contributions to be more clearly recognized and also mean that a career is less of a linear progression from the mailroom to CEO. Advancement will be based on desire, merit and achievement – not just how many continuous hours, weeks, years you managed to look busy at your desk.

For certain careers, it won’t matter if a person is working from home, or nursing a baby, or of a particular gender or ethnicity. The only consideration will be performance of the tasks. Even mothers in roles which still require traditional office-based employment will have significantly greater opportunities to pursue new opportunities while raising the kids, which may in turn forge an easier path back into the workforce. Discrimination is not going to disappear overnight, but with some luck the changing nature of work may level the playing field a good deal.

Of course, even if these changes do occur, they are unlikely to feature prominently in the mind of our stereotypical young man. They might, however explain why his mother is in a good mood, or influence the career choices his sister makes. If he is particularly profound, however, he might realize that changes to the concept of work that encourage women to have children may explain his very existence.

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