Gender Equity: Clarity of Vision and Progress

Dear Quorum Community,

It is such an honor to share with you a fascinating piece written for the Quorum Initiative community by Joan Ruff, Board Chair of AARP, about gender economics. We are so grateful for her perspectives on where the market is today and what we need to focus on for the future.

In this time of enormous challenge and ‘unforgiving inequalities’ as Joan describes it, our role as leaders who shape and drive change is so critical. The current snail’s pace of change is unacceptable for our diverse communities and unacceptable for women. More capital must flow to women so we have the resources to help make serious change happen for all. Thanks to women’s amazing levels of resiliency and ingenuity, I am confident we will come out of this disruption stronger. It’s our decade and equity and parity are in our sightline.

All the best and be well, Meg

Gender Equity: Clarity of Vision and Progress

For all the destruction and chaos set loose by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has also been a window into vistas and truths long obscured. It is even a window into new possibilities.

In India’s northern state of Punjab, with the lockdown vastly decreasing pollution, the Himalayan mountain range has now come into glorious view for the first time in decades.

Here in the United States and around the world, COVID-19 has brought greater clarity in another way as well: unveiling unforgiving inequalities on lines of race and gender so long established that they have been ingrained in the landscape.

COVID-19 has taken an especially brutal toll on the African American and Latino communities.

It has had a profound effect on women.

On the frontlines of the pandemic, we find essential workers who are primarily women, members of minority groups, and immigrants. Every day they are putting themselves at greater risk of exposure to COVID-19. For the most part, they receive low pay, they don’t have paid leave, and they can’t afford a disruption in their pay.

They and others on the front lines are forced to choose whether to go to work and risk infection—potentially infecting their family—or stay home and quickly run out of money.

Their situations test the clarity of our vision and the depths of our compassion.

Do disparities facing women come to the forefront during COVID-19 or will we allow these issues to be sidelined?

Women’s rate of unemployment is nearly three percent higher than the rate for men in the latest statistics. This is a time to think anew about equity, to get beyond stereotypes of gender, race, ethnicity and age.

The new window created by the pandemic also offers a broader view into the gender inequality we find in every zip code.

With millions of Americans who used to go to the office now confined to their homes—either because they lost their jobs or they are teleworking—the distribution of family responsibilities for parenting or caregiving is thrown into bold relief at the very time we cannot rely to the degree we are accustomed to on our usual social support.

The adaptations necessitated by the pandemic should give us a greater appreciation of flexible work arrangements, for people in every industry, no matter where they are in the organizational hierarchy.

Many men, working from home, are now seeing more clearly what is involved with schoolwork and childcare.

It’s time to undermine some longstanding, confining assumptions about who does what. The unequal distribution of family responsibilities continues to slow or stop the climb of so many women at every step of the corporate ladder.

In the new work environment that has come upon us so suddenly, we have the opportunity to rethink how we work, how we collaborate, and how we engage with each other. We have the opportunity to effect lasting, positive, long overdue change.

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) points out that “hiring managers are less likely to hire mothers compared to women who don’t have kids” and when employers tender a job offer, mothers are offered a lower salary. Men suffer no such disadvantage.

The AAUW notes that a Census Bureau study reported the earnings gap between opposite-sex couples doubled in the time beginning two years before the birth of a first child and one year after the birth, with the gap continuing to grow until the child turns 10, and never fully disappearing.

That’s the “Motherhood Penalty.” Mothers make 70 cents for every dollar paid to fathers. Then there is the “Caregiver Penalty.”

Sixty percent of America’s unpaid family caregivers are women. While there are millions of men who take on this crucial, unsung role for family members, women disproportionately assume this labor of love and devotion that so often comes with unanticipated financial and emotional stress.

Nearly half the women who fill this role leave the workforce because they feel they have to. When they do, they lose an average of over $300,000 in lifetime wages and benefits. According to research from the Institute for Women’s Policy, 43% of women workers had at least one year with no earnings, nearly twice the rate of men.

With men and women both at home to telework, maybe the uneven burden of family responsibilities will become more evident and more even.

We are thankfully long past the point seared in my memory from decades ago when I had just started practicing law and a partner at the firm asked me, “Should I introduce you as a lady lawyer or a woman lawyer?”

“How about as a lawyer?” I said.

We have left “Leave it to Beaver” territory with its automatic assumption of a two-parent heterosexual family in which the man brings home the money and the woman takes care of home and the kids, all the while being perfectly dressed, wearing heels and pearls. We’ve left that territory, but we still have a long way to go.

On the minus side, according to the AAUW, women working full-time earn 82 percent of what men earn, with the pay gap widest for women in the peak earning years of 55-64. At the current snail’s pace of progress, it will take until 2093 to reach pay equity.

In a report issued a few years ago, AARP’s Public Policy Institute noted “There is no single cause for the gender wage gap. Discrimination, lower earnings in occupations performed mainly by women or in the sectors of industry in which women primarily work, women’s greater likelihood than men to reduce their time in paid work because of family care responsibilities, and women’s choice of type of career preparation or higher education majors all play a role. However, discrimination and occupational and sector segregation are the biggest contributors to the gap.”(italics added)

At AARP, we know stereotypes are unfair and unproductive—and so often unspoken.

We also know that stereotypes, whether subtle or blatant, silent or spoken, are applied to age as well as gender.

Sometimes they are applied to age and gender at the same time.

Several studies on biases have shown that when fictitious resumes, differing only in age and sex, are shown to employers and, even to students, men are deemed to be more qualified than women and the younger more capable than the older.

In vigorous defense of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, AARP Foundation attorneys file amicus briefs and represent individuals and classes in significant cases involving age discrimination in hiring, promotion, training, layoffs, health and welfare benefits, and pension benefits and rights.

While their efforts have made a notable difference, gender and age discrimination remain pervasive.

In tech, finance, and other parts of the business world, we are still beset by a “bro culture” that should give way to a “co-culture”, as in coed, cooperative, co-creating.

When we look at the distribution of venture capital, we can find a modest reason for hope within a disturbing picture.

Pitch Book reports that venture capital investment in all-female founding teams reached a record $3.3 billion last year. They also pointed out that figure represents just under three percent of the total capital invested in US startups.

Whatever semblance of normal we reach post-pandemic, let’s not return to the status quo where women are so often marginalized in the venture capital arena.

There is no one reason for the lopsided distribution of venture capital, but part of the answer is that women are still largely outside the network where these deals are done. Another factor lies in our culture, where girls and women too often see ceilings on their dreams.

Girls are still, in so many cases, discouraged from entering the STEM fields because some people think they are not “wired” for it.

Then there are positive signs.

Record numbers of women are running for office and being elected across the country, a development that can have a healthy effect on equal opportunity across the board—and in the boardroom. More women are in leadership positions in major organizations.

We are making substantial progress when it comes to women on boards, which can be a catalyst for greater equity in other parts of the corporate world.

The nonprofit 2020 Women on Boards reported that 24 of the 25 companies with the largest public offerings in 2019 have at least one woman on their board. While that may not seem remarkable, in the three previous years about half of the companies with the largest public offerings had an all-male board.

The group 2020 Women on Boards notes that much of the momentum has come from a 2018 California law requiring every public company to have at least one female director, as well as from “mounting pressure from financial firms.” The group points out that the California law has been followed by similar proposals in Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts.

In January, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, which was the largest underwriter of public offerings in 2019, announced that starting on July 1 the bank would not take a company public unless “there’s at least one diverse board candidate, with a focus on women.” In 2021, Goldman Sachs will raise that requirement to two.

“We might miss some business,” he said, “but in the long run, this I think is the best advice for companies that want to drive premium returns for their shareholders over time.”

In 2018, the chief executive of BlackRock hit a similar chord, writing in his annual letter to CEOs that “boards with a diverse mix of genders, ethnicities, career experiences, and ways of thinking have, as a result, a more diverse and aware mind-set.”

More women on boards can set in motion or accelerate a virtuous circle, generating more women in top positions in the organizations, pay equity, and more women to act as mentors.

As numerous studies have shown, companies with more women leaders in all roles outperform those that are less diverse.

That’s a lesson we know first-hand at AARP, where our CEO is a woman, Jo Ann Jenkins, most of the members of our executive team are women, where I serve as Board Chair and most of our Board Directors are women.

With a strong contingent of women in leadership roles, we are carrying forward the legacy of the remarkable woman who founded AARP over 60 years ago, Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus.

Dr. Andrus was the first woman to serve as principal of a major urban high school in California. After a distinguished career as an educator, she pulled off an extraordinary second act.

It started one day when she was checking up on a former teacher and found the woman in such dire financial straits that she was living in a converted chicken coop. This incident from the late 1940’s can seem remote—until we think about the privation and desperation of so many Americans today, particularly in light of the pandemic.

Determined to provide some measure of financial security for retired teachers, Dr. Andrus created a retired teachers association for California. She expanded it to a nationwide group for retired teachers, to an organization for all retired persons, and finally to a nationwide group dedicated to dignity and opportunity for all as we age—what is now AARP with our 38 million members age 50 and above.

How was it that a woman born in the 1880’s was able to rise above the stereotypes that held so many women down? How was it she was able not only to envision but also to achieve dramatic social change?

One factor was having a real-life role model. When she grew up, many girls found their role models in fictional heroines.

Ethel Percy Andrus looked to someone real for inspiration—the late philanthropist Peter Cooper, who founded a New York City college, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, with free night classes for people of all backgrounds.

Today, thanks in part to the paths laid out by Ethel Percy Andrus and so many other women leaders, young women in the corporate world and other spheres can look to real life heroines and female mentors for inspiration and guidance.

When a glass ceiling breaks, it can shatter. After Madeleine Albright broke the 200-plus year male monopoly on the Office of Secretary of State, two of the three people holding that position immediately after her were women.

Secretary Albright, speaking at a celebratory luncheon for an all-decade WNBA team, put the case for mentorship and guidance this way, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Whether or not we choose to express it so colorfully or theologically, she makes a crucial point.

As we climb the ladder, let’s remember we were all entry level at one time. From the lowest-paid ranks of the service industry to the C suite, it is one indivisible struggle to make sure we are judged by our competence, our contributions, and our character, not by our chromosomes.

Just as people in India can now see the Himalayas more than a hundred miles away, people in the US should be able to see the gaping inequities right in front of us.

At this time when so many Americans have lost their lives to a terrible virus, when so many others have lost their livelihoods, let’s reflect on our common humanity, on the value of every life, and what each of us can achieve liberated from discrimination and stereotypes that diminish us all.

Consider the role you might play in ensuring women are treated equally and are integral to the decision-making structure. Know your worth, map your personal strengths, and play the long game.

Let’s give everyone the opportunity to see and reach the top of the mountain. As we make the climb ourselves, let’s reach out and help other women along the way. Whenever and wherever one woman succeeds, we all do.