是什么阻碍了女性的晋升之路?

发布于 2021-09-08 08:19

小佛爷说

为什么女性在组织中比例仍然严重不足，多数人的答案是一个不幸却无法避免的“真相”：高管职位需要长时间加班，女性对家庭的投入让她们心有余而力不足，因此牺牲了职业发展。我们将这种解释称为“工作/家庭论”。但是，大家相信这种解释并不意味着它是真实的，本文的研究严重质疑这种说法。

女性并非因为在家庭和工作方面顾此失彼，才影响了职业发展，男性也面临同样问题，但仍然可以获得晋升。女性发展受阻的原因与男性不同，女性往往被鼓励调整工作内容，例如改为兼职，或转至公司对内岗位，最终导致职业滑坡。

在面对超负荷工作的问题时，她们发现自己进退维谷：如果接受家庭的召唤，调整自己的工作，就会破坏工作身份，但如果拒绝调整，成就自己的职场期待，就会破坏好母亲身份。因此，她们要么成为他人眼中业绩不佳的员工，要么成为不太优秀的母亲，或者两者都是。这种两难情况无法改变超负荷工作文化，企业将女性发展停滞的责任转嫁，性别不平等也得不到改善。言论始终集中在女性需要去解决工作/家庭的问题，一直如此。

研究性别问题的学者针对这些发现，有了越来越一致的观点：女性难以在职场取得发展的原因并非难以平衡工作和家庭，而是当代企业文化普遍的超负荷工作问题。

Women weren’t held back because of trouble balancing the competing demands of work and family—men, too, suffered from the balance problem and nevertheless advanced. Women were held back because, unlike men, they were encouraged to take accommodations, such as going part-time and shifting to internally facing roles, which derailed their careers. The real culprit was a general culture of overwork that hurt both men and women and locked gender inequality in place.

When faced with the long-hours problem, they find themselves on the horns of a dilemma: If they respond to the pull of family by taking accommodations, they undermine their status at work, but if they refuse accommodations in favor of their professional ambitions, they undermine their status as good mothers. Thus they are positioned to be seen as subpar performers or subpar mothers—or both. This dilemma leaves the culture of overwork intact, allows firms to deflect responsibility for women’s stalled advancement, and locks gender inequality in place. Women are the ones who have a work/family problem to sort out, the story goes, and that’s just the way it is.

Our findings align with a growing consensus among gender scholars: What holds women back at work is not some unique challenge of balancing the demands of work and family but rather a general problem of overwork that prevails in contemporary corporate culture.

Women and men alike suffer as a result. But women pay higher professional costs. If we want to solve this problem, we must reconsider what we’re willing to allow the workplace to demand of all employees. Such a reconsideration is possible. As individual families and employees push back against overwork, they will pave the way for others to follow. And as more research shows the business advantage of reasonable hours, some employers will come to question the wisdom of grueling schedules. If and when those forces gain traction, neither women nor men will feel the need to sacrifice the home or the work domain, demand for change will swell, and women may begin to achieve workplace equality with men.