Apr. 20, 2019 "Are we doing enough to balance female- dominated jobs?": Today I found this article by Jared Lindzon in the Globe and Mail:
There are many initiatives aimed at encouraging women to enter male- dominated fields such as technology, engineering and finance, yet we hear very little about balancing professions that skew heavily female.
According to Statistics Canada, female health-care and social-assistance employees outnumbered their male colleagues nearly 41⁄ to one.
The agency also 2 found that 84 per cent of elementary and kindergarten teachers and 96 per cent of early childhood educators in 2016 were female.
Furthermore, while Statistics Canada doesn’t track gender balance in the human-resources profession, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that more than 70 per cent of the industry was female in 2018.
The agency also 2 found that 84 per cent of elementary and kindergarten teachers and 96 per cent of early childhood educators in 2016 were female.
With so much emphasis on the value of bringing more women into professions such as engineering, why is there no discussion about balancing vocations dominated by women, such as HR? Does it stand to reason that those fields would benefit similarly, given greater gender balance?
“I personally have not heard of a push or concern for wanting to attract more males to the HR field,” said Beverly Somers, the principal consultant at New Brunswick-based SMART Human Resource Solutions Inc. “I’d say businesses in general are conscious of the balance of gender, but the HR field hasn’t been singled out specifically as needing to be more balanced .”
Ms. Somers says calls for gender balance in human resources have been few and far between because the abundance of female employees helps balance the overall work force of companies. “It seamlessly adds to the balance of gender in the corporate world by naturally allowing for more females to move into management and executive level positions,” she said.
Ms. Somers adds that the industry may gradually move toward a greater balance, due to some changes in the role of human-resources professionals. While the industry was once heavily focused on people-management and relationship building, it is evolving to require different skills. Consequently, more men may be attracted.
“The HR function is believed to be primarily focused on relationship development and engagement, and therefore seems to appeal more to women,” she said. “The role and perception of HR is actually changing, and so, too, may the gender ratio. Future HR professionals will need to demonstrate strong technical and analytical skills and business acumen .”
Meantime, the education field shows no sign of mitigating the heavily skewed ratio of women to men.
“Our current work force in B.C. is roughly 80 to 85 percent female, and that percentage is increasing, because the teachers education programs in the province have an even higher proportion of women,” said Glen Hansman, president of the BC Teachers’ Federation.
While Mr. Hansman is adamant that the quality of education provided by teachers is the same no matter a teacher’s gender, he feels it is important for students to interact with adults that are more representative of the population.
He also fears that the fewer male teachers there are in a school, the less likely it is for male students to consider pursuing teaching – further perpetuating the divide.
He also fears that the fewer male teachers there are in a school, the less likely it is for male students to consider pursuing teaching – further perpetuating the divide.
“Representation matters, and we’re going to continue to have this phenomenon in education where the work force is markedly different in terms of demographics to the student population because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.
Despite these concerns, however, Mr. Hansman says he is not aware of any organized effort aimed at further balancing the gender gap.
“In B.C., there’s no systemwide conversation, let alone a strategy being tried to attract more men into the teacher-education programs and into the workforce ,” he said.
That conversation is taking place in the Canadian nursing industry, and it may even be having an impact, but progress has been slow. In 2001, about 5 per cent of nurses were male, compared with about 8 percent in 2017, according to the Canadian Nurses Association.
“There’s lots of talk happening now about how do we improve the situation in terms of getting more men interested as well as creating good learning environments to support men, and changing the way people look at participation in the profession,” explained Peter Kellett, a University of Lethbridge assistant professor whose research focuses on the gender divide in nursing.
For example, the American Assembly of Men in Nursing (AAMN) launched a campaign aimed at increasing male enrolment in nursing to 20 per cent by the year 2020, but reaching that goal seems unlikely, Mr. Kellett says. Among failed efforts to encourage more male participation, he points to a 2013 Oregon Centre for Nursing campaign, titled “Are you man enough to be a nurse?”
“You will certainly see, in any literature or recruitment materials, that there’s a lot more representation of men in images, and more diversity in general,” he said.
Mr. Kellett says progress will be minimal until the industry addresses root causes of gender imbalance. They range from the lack of visibility of male nurses in the media, to the industry’s failure to present the career as a viable option to young men in high school, to long-standing stereotypes.
“So many people, when they hear the word ‘nurse,’ they just think of the woman in a white uniform,” he said.
He adds that it’s no coincidence these strategies are similar to those currently being employed in male-dominated industries looking to increase female participation.
The difference? In tech, engineering and finance, the amount of new initiatives, investments and efforts aimed at balancing the gender divide is far greater.
"Here's a switch: A study on how men are faring in the workplace?": Today I found this article by Harvey Schachter in the Globe and Mail:
The past few decades have seen an avalanche of reports on women in the workplace, trying to piece together how to achieve gender equality. Recently, a team of Deloitte consultants decided to take a different tack: They looked at men, who are rarely studied, to understand how they are faring, again in the quest of gender equality.
The central focus of their research was 16 professional men from the Greater Toronto Area, spanning a range of family and marital statuses, sexual orientations and ethnic backgrounds. They were interviewed but also, just as importantly, shadowed in the workplace and at home to capture a fuller picture.
The central focus of their research was 16 professional men from the Greater Toronto Area, spanning a range of family and marital statuses, sexual orientations and ethnic backgrounds. They were interviewed but also, just as importantly, shadowed in the workplace and at home to capture a fuller picture.
I have written that workplace culture tends to reflect masculinity, given both the workplace and world tends to be dominated by male leaders and a patriarchal culture. But the report – The Design of Everyday Men – offers a broader, more nuanced perspective, of men struggling with both masculinity and corporate culture. Sometimes those two critical elements of their lives are in opposition, creating tension, and sometimes they act in unison, again with negative impact.
Carolyn Lawrence, the inclusion leader for Deloitte Canada and Deloitte Global, who co-authored the report with Eric Arthrell, gives one example when she says, “men want to expand their gender roles. They still feel they have to be the breadwinner and hold to that role but they are being asked to show up at home as well.
They are trying to carry both roles and are struggling.” Indeed, the report notes that other research found that in dual-earner households with children under 18, 60 per cent of men reported work-family conflict compared with 47 per cent of women. So men are far from aloof from this struggle that is often viewed as primarily faced by women.
The essential element of corporate culture they fumble with is the need to be always available. That increasingly seems the crucial component for advancement – more important than skills and competence – and is a barrier to being a devoted family man. “This is not how the participants in the study want to work in the future,” Ms. Lawrence stresses.
And the study suggests that high potentials, on the quick track to the top, may be quietly suffering the most.
At the core of masculinity, she says, is the need for status – men are biologically and culturally more inclined to seek status than women. And that status can come through leadership at work.
As a result, the researchers found that men are “never secure,” constantly needing to prove themselves and concerned with what other people think.
Interestingly, research has shown that status-seeking behaviours can be antisocial, such as aggression, or pro-social, such as generosity.
In one study, status was viewed as coming from being more generous and the result was that men with higher levels of testosterone became more generous. So we need to be alert to how behaviours are rewarded in the workplace.
“If you rewarded behaviours that reflected the whole person then leaders would be whole people,” Ms. Lawrence observes.
As a result, the researchers found that men are “never secure,” constantly needing to prove themselves and concerned with what other people think.
Interestingly, research has shown that status-seeking behaviours can be antisocial, such as aggression, or pro-social, such as generosity.
In one study, status was viewed as coming from being more generous and the result was that men with higher levels of testosterone became more generous. So we need to be alert to how behaviours are rewarded in the workplace.
“If you rewarded behaviours that reflected the whole person then leaders would be whole people,” Ms. Lawrence observes.
The report sets out four themes that characterize the experiences of men in the workplace. Men place enormous pressure on themselves to handle work and family responsibilities as individuals. They believe “it’s all up to me.”
Second, men are afraid of failure, which leads them to overcompensate with hypercompetitive behaviour to mask their insecurity and earn professional success.
Third, men feel they can’t turn to anyone: Personal relationships and interactions with others might alleviate pressure but men have difficulty building such connections.
Finally, men are afraid to step outside the norm on their own and so they look to their leaders and peers for behaviour that might offer alternative, acceptable approaches to their work than “always on.”
That leads to five actions they recommend you take as a leader to counter these pressures of corporate culture and masculinity:
- Start all meetings with a thoughtful personal story. It can be 30 seconds, but tell stories that show you’re more than just a business leader and, indeed, are a vulnerable human being.
- Put your own imperfection on display – show that you make mistakes too and that you’re also trying to learn and grow.
- Have one-on-one conversations with people that go beyond workplace formalities so you can find out who they are as human beings and help them.
- Check in on people who seem like they need it the least. They may be the most insecure, but are adept at hiding it.
- Take vacation and parental leave – "fully completely,” as the Tragically Hip put it. Don’t send e-mails from afar. You don’t need to prove yourself; you need to liberate others to not always be on.
Ms. Lawrence feels the last will be the hardest step. But all involve challenges. At the same time, they are practical and tangible. It’s important to try them and help men loosen the grip on them of masculinity and the always-on corporate culture.
Cannonballs
- Does your workplace – and do you as a manager – value employees being always-on over competence?
- Is always-on the new measure of competence?
- That’s a scary thought for the future of your organization, let alone the people working there.
- How would you draw a leader (https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Draw-yourself-a-leader?gko=64fd2)? Eric McNulty, associate director of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard University, asks what’s in the sketch you are contemplating.
- Is it a lone figure?
- A group?
- Is the leader at the centre or on top?
- What’s the height difference between the leader and the followers?
- Are you prepared for the next economic downturn (https://hbr.org/2019/04/companies-need-to-prepare-for-the-next-economic-downturn)?
- It will come, and some companies gain advantages in such situations, a team from Boston Consulting Group notes, and one factor being that they acted early. Another: They attended to short-term problems but took a long-term perspective.
My opinion: I like the article written by Harvey Schachter. It was mainly aimed at men in the workplace, and I'm a woman, but I did like reading it. I like to know how men think and operate in the workplace.
I have been posting a lot about women in the workplace, and maybe men may read it and learn how women think and operate in the workplace.
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