The researchers, Catherine Tinsley, a professor of management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and faculty director of GU’s Women’s Leadership Institute, and Kate Purmal, an Institute senior industry fellow, wrote: “Our data suggests corporate boards have been finding a creative way out of this chicken-and-egg dilemma. Specifically, they seem to have relaxed the prior-CEO-experience requirement for women and are using prior corporate board service as a proxy qualification.”
The ads encouraging us to buy gifts and greeting cards suggest that what dads mostly do is use tools, grill meat, enjoy sports and cars, and relax (with a beer or a mixed drink). These images and sentiments are confining, and we imagine discouraging, to some dads. Moreover, they don’t celebrate the paternal activities that really matter to kids and families.
Tinsley and her co-authors describe how other studies also document this phenomenon in hiring, pay, and promotion decisions. Using ten times as many firms as an older study of Fortune 500 firms from 1990 to 1999, they conclude that “gender matching can be a mechanism by which people can attend to gender and not increase gender parity on corporate boards.”
Women’s aversion to competition explains about a 10th of the gender pay gap among high-ability professionals, a recent study of young MBAs found, not only because women opt for less-aggressive fields but because men may do better when negotiating bonuses.
employers to employees, resulting in what the Harvard Business Review dubs a “candidate-driven” economy. That means if you’re a young professional unhappy with what you’re doing, you’re in a better position than ever to make a move. But it’s not always obvious what a bad job looks like if you haven’t been in the workforce very long, said Catherine Tinsley, a Georgetown University management professor who researches workplace dynamics. Women, especially, are known to stay in work environments that aren’t conducive to career advancement, she said, because they are more conservative about taking job risks. Women are so aware of seeming annoying in a negotiation that some won’t negotiate at all, she said.
The Gender Pay Gap: A Call for Evidence-Based Change Initiatives. Huffington Post (November 16, 2015)
“How many more reports do we need?” I asked myself as I read through the latest one documenting (again) the gap in gender parity in organizations. This particular report, “Women in the Workforce”, featured a nice visual of how women are underrepresented at every level within organizations. And, of course, at higher organizational levels women comprise an even smaller percentage of the workforce than at lower organizational levels. Sigh…. I imagine two general responses: yawns from those for whom this conversation about gender equity has become tired and stale and frustration from those companies and executives who have been trying, for years, to achieve some sustainable change. I have a suggestion–let’s approach our intervention efforts to solve the equity problem with as much rigor and skepticism as we apply to our efforts to document the problem. What I am calling for here is “evidence-based change interventions.”
“Last year UN Women created the “He for She” campaign as a way of engaging men and boys to “stand up in addressing the inequalities and discrimination faced by women and girls.” I submit that males are already deeply embedded in issues of gender inequality, although they may not immediately recognize it. When it comes to parenting, society still has pretty rigid social roles about who should be doing what–and it is constraining all of us,” by Catherine Tinsley.
“We’ve all seen the headlines about how much money people spend on Mother’s Day — the National Retail Federation ranks it just behind the winter holidays (Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanza) in terms of gift spending. The idea of Mother’s Day is that we reward the selflessness of our mothers once a year, acknowledging how they often dedicate themselves to their family and household. Although I wholeheartedly endorse the appreciation of moms (and dads), the “give a card and gift to honor Mom once a year” mentality seems like a bit of a raw deal to me. More importantly, the traditional notion of Mother’s Day does not capture the reality of today’s mothers in many ways,” by Catherine Tinsley.