On Women's Equality Day, Work Equity Is Still Elusive

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Aug. 26 is Women's Equality Day, the anniversary of the day in 1920 that the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted, giving women the right to vote. The anniversary has been observed since 1971, following the nationwide Women's Strike for Equality in New York City the previous year that involved 50,000 women gathering on Fifth Avenue.

Other days throughout the year recognize women's achievements, such as International Women's Day on March 8, or draw attention to income discrepancies between men and women, like Equal Pay Day on April 2.

Despite making up about half of the labor force and the majority of the college-educated workforce, women have not achieved complete equality when measured in pay equity, representation in leadership roles and seats on boards of directors.

"Women's Equality Day is a reminder of how far we've come, but we are far from true gender equality worldwide," said Georgene Huang, cofounder and CEO of Fairygodboss, a career site for women.

"Women want to see more women in leadership positions and in positions of power to effect change. We want to be paid equally for equal work, and, most importantly, we want to be treated the same and awarded the same opportunities as our male peers," she said.

Change is slow, despite the many mentoring and sponsorship programs in U.S. businesses, noted Subha V. Barry, president of Working Mother Media, in research the organization released on women in corporate America.

SHRM Online has collected the following articles about the workplace gender gap from its archives and other trusted news sources.

True Gender Equity at Work Is Still a Distant Reality

Women these days can be CEOs, entrepreneurs, board directors, doctors, engineers and truck drivers, yet true gender equity at work—in terms of leadership, pay and promotion—is still a maybe-someday ideal. Nearly 80 percent of global organizations do not formally prioritize the advancement of women, despite research showing that doing so is good for a company's bottom line. That's according to a new survey of 2,300 executives worldwide by IBM's Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics.
(CNN)

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Study: Idaho, Utah and Texas Among Worst States for Women's Equality

Maine, Hawaii and Nevada, in respective order, took the top three slots in a new WalletHub study on women's equality. Idaho, Utah and Texas came in at the bottom of the rankings. The financial site came up with its list by comparing states on 17 key metrics ranging from the percentage of female business execs to the educational attainment gap between men and women.
(San Antonio Current)

Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got 'Greedy.'

American women of working age are the most educated ever, yet it's the most educated women who face the biggest gender gaps in seniority and pay. At the top of their fields, they represent just 5 percent of big company chief executives and a quarter of the top 10 percent of earners in the U.S. There are many causes of the gap, like discrimination and a lack of family-friendly policies. But recently, mounting evidence has led economists and sociologists to converge on a major driver—one that ostensibly has nothing to do with gender.
(The New York Times)

U.S. Companies Are Working to Fix Pay-Equity Issues

Sixty percent of U.S. organizations are working to resolve pay inequities based on gender, race or other demographic factors, and most organizations that are not yet taking action are considering doing so. Larger companies are more likely to be taking action than smaller businesses, according to a new survey, which found that among employers engaged in managing pay equity issues, most are focusing on pay equity analysis, remediation strategies and pay equity adjustments and identifying and resolving root causes of pay inequities.
(SHRM Online)

All S&P 500 Companies Now Have Women on Boards

There are no longer male-only boards of directors among Standard & Poor's 500 companies. Dallas-based Copart Inc. became the last of those companies to add a woman to the fold with the appointment of Diane Morefield, chief financial officer at CyrusOne Inc. There has been a push for board diversity in recent years. Last year, California became the first state to pass a law requiring publicly traded companies headquartered there to have at least one woman on their boards by the end of 2019. By the end of July 2021, boards with five members would need to add at least two women to their boards and boards with six or more members must add at least three women.
(SHRM Online)

As Gender Diversity on Boards Improves, There's Still a Gap at the Top

While the uptick in the number of women holding board seats between 2012 and 2019 is an improvement, it is nowhere near to reaching gender parity, especially when it comes to multicultural women.
(Diversity Best Practices)

Men play a pivotal role in creating workplaces where male and female employees can succeed, according to Catalyst. The New York City-based global nonprofit helps organizations advance women in the workplace, and it encourages employers to engage men as champions and build inclusive cultures. Many men would take more action to make their workplace inclusive if they knew what to do, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.
(SHRM Online)

To Improve Gender Equality, Help Men Take Parental Leave

Employers serious about building gender equality in their organizations may offer paternity leave to new fathers in addition to maternity leave for new mothers. Further, they should help men take paternity leave as often as women take maternity leave, new research indicates. The 2018 Global Parental Leave report, released in September by HR consultancy Mercer, shows that in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, at least 23 percent of men could be taking paid paternal leave but are not. The report draws on responses from almost 1,000 employers.
(SHRM Online)

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4 Financial Management Mistakes Your Business Must Avoid

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A dwindling cashflow is a common cause of business failure. Small and large financial gaffes cannot only strip away at your finances, but they could potentially place your company in jeopardy, as you might struggle to pay your overheads each month.

If you want to enjoy a healthy annual profit margin and long-term success in your industry, you must take control of your cashflow. Here are four financial management mistakes your business must avoid.

1. No Emergency Fund
An emergency fund could help to keep your business afloat during a difficult time in your industry or when you received an unexpected bill. To ensure your company is never faced with financial hardship, aim to save a minimum of three months’ worth of corporate expenses, which could ensure your company’s survival should an issue arise.

2. Unnecessary Business Expenses

Many business owners believe they need to make large expenses to separate their brand from their rivals. As a result, they might pay a significant sum for the latest technologies, office equipment, or staff salaries.

It is, however, a smarter approach to adopt a more frugal mindset. For example, invest in second-hand products, haggle with suppliers, and find an affordable lease for your office or building space.

Never spend a penny more than you need to, even when your company is generating a superb return on its investment. By running a lean business, you’ll have more money available to overcome a financial obstacle.

3. Avoiding Insurance

The right insurance policy could help your business to make a swift recovery following onsite damage or compensation claims. Yet, many companies make the mistake of not choosing the right coverage to suit their specific needs.

There a wide range of options to suit different companies’ needs, such as business insurance, cyber and data risk insurance, and employers’ liability insurance. It is, therefore, important to consider the potential risks your organisation might face and to find an insurance policy to match.

If you fail to invest in the right insurance policy, your business could be liable for a considerable amount of money, should a client make a claim against you. For example, if you regularly provide professional advice and services to clients, you should learn more about professional indemnity insurance as well as public liability insurance. Reputable providers such as Hiscox can instantly provide coverage of up to £10 million with both professional indemnity insurance and public liability insurance so that your company aren’t caught out, with flexible policies tailored to your needs.

4. Failing to Budget

Many businesses are guilty of failing to budget each month, but it could be critical to your company’s success and survival. It ultimately helps a business owner to maintain a tight control of their finances, as they will know exactly how much money they will need to spend each month and where it is going.

Without a budget in place, you could fail to account for your tax obligations, insurance premiums, office expenses and more. If you spend too much, you may then need to apply for a business loan or run up debt on your credit card if you urgently need cash to pay for a debt repayment or corporate expense.

How Women Can Escape the Likability Trap

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Powerful women know how to flip feminine stereotypes to their advantage.

Author: By Joan C. Williams
Ms. Williams, a professor of law, is a co-author of “What Works for Women at Work.”

There has been a lot of talk recently in the political arena about the likability trap for women: Women who behave in authoritative ways risk being disliked as insufferable prima donnas, pedantic schoolmarms or witchy women.

What you haven’t heard about much is the way successful women overcome this form of gender bias. I have interviewed about 200 women over the years in my research on gender and the workplace, and they all employ a similar set of strategies for escaping the likability trap. One former chief executive described hers this way: “I’m warm Ms. Mother 95 percent of the time, so that the 5 percent of the time when I need to be tough, I can be.” She embraced a stereotype that typically holds women back — the office mom — but flipped it around, using its momentum to propel herself forward. I call it gender judo.

Why do women need to do this? Even as women have moved into traditionally male domains, feminine mandates remain. More than 40 years of research by social scientists have shown that Americans define the good woman as helpful, modest and nice. In other words, as focused on her family and community, rather than working in her own self-interest. Meanwhile, the ideal man is defined as direct, assertive, competitive and ambitious.

This version of masculinity maps perfectly onto what we expect from leaders, in business and politics. Women in leadership need to display these “masculine” qualities, but when they do they risk being seen as bad women, and also as bad people. So savvy women learn that they must often do a masculine thing (which establishes their competence) in a feminine way (to defuse backlash).

In their study of female entrepreneurs, the social scientists Matthew Lee and Laura Huang found that venture capitalists were more likely to fund companies led by women if those companies were presented as having a social impact. This provides a “cover” that helps women overcome the perceived mismatch between the stereotypes of the good, community-focused woman and the hard-driving entrepreneur.

Other research finds that women make a similar finesse while negotiating. Women who negotiate as hard as men do tend to be disliked as overly demanding. So they use “softeners” in conversation. (“It wasn’t clear to me whether this salary offer represents the top of the pay range.”) When Sheryl Sandberg negotiated for what no doubt was an outlandishly high compensation package at Facebook, she told Mark Zuckerberg: “Of course you realize that you’re hiring me to run your deal teams, so you want me to be a good negotiator. This is the only time you and I will ever be on opposite sides of the table.” She turned a salary negotiation (competitive and ambitious) into a touching testimony of team loyalty.

Isn’t this all a bit revolting? Here’s what works for men negotiating for a higher salary: I have another offer, and I need you to match it. Why should women have to do something different?

They shouldn’t.

When women embrace feminine stereotypes like the office mom, they reinforce both the descriptive stereotype that women are naturally nurturing and communal, and the prescriptive stereotype that they should be. But sometimes what women need to do to survive and thrive in the world is exactly the opposite of what they need to do to change it.

For women who want to master this strategy, the first step is to behave as assertively as comes naturally and see what happens. If you find your effectiveness jeopardized because you being yourself triggers dislike, then you need to decide whether overcoming the backlash is worth the sacrifice.If it is, try doing something masculine in a feminine way. Think of femininity as a tool kit, and choose something that feels authentic to you. But don’t choose deference. One study found that women who used a submissive conversational style, apologizing and hedging, just undercut themselves.

The most common anti-backlash strategy I found in the women I interviewed was to mix authoritativeness and warmth. “I got feedback I was intimidating, so I would make sure that I got to know people, and before a meeting I would share something personal to make myself more approachable,” one woman, who is now a chief executive, told me.

Some women use metaphors to recode behavior that is coded as masculine. A woman responsible for winning new clients at a major consulting firm, where rainmakers were called “hunters,” told me she rejected that label. “I always said: ‘No, no, no, I’m a gardener. I grow things,’” she told me. Just another dame who loves to nurture.

Another tried-and-true move is what anthropologists call gender display. “For me, it’s pink lipstick,” one woman told me. She is the lone female member of the board of a public company.

In the most sophisticated form of this strategy, powerful women create an entirely new narrative, softening their hard-driving personas by highlighting that they are also communal, selflessmothers. A brilliant recent example is M.J. Hegar’s 2018 congressional campaign video. In it, a battered door — all that’s left of the helicopter she was shot down in while on an Air Force rescue mission — is tucked behind her dining table, where she sits contentedly with her family.

This is all a lot of hard work, and it’s work that men don’t have to do. Men, to be successful, just need to master and display masculine-coded traits; women, to be successful, need to master both those and some version of feminine-coded traits that do not undercut their perceived competence or authenticity. That’s a lot trickier.

What’s the solution? Organizations have to be vigilant about challenging the biases that force women to do this in the first place. The workplace is often structured in ways that reward behavior that’s considered socially appropriate in white men but socially inappropriate in women and people of color. This provides an invisible escalator for white men.

The goal is not to empower women to be as emotionally tone deaf and grabby as men are sometimes encouraged to be. Instead, we should work to make sure that both men and women are rewarded for displaying empathy or a willingness to put the common good above self-interest. These qualities have long been undervalued in work and in political life because they have been coded as feminine, and the world needs much more of them.

Interactive maps help explain what opportunity zones mean for the Houston area

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Author: HEATHER LEIGHTON


Since being added to the tax code in December 2017, opportunity zones have been a complicated development that organizations, investors and community activists are trying to solve.

Fundamentally, an opportunity zone is an economically-distressed community where new investments, under certain conditions, may be eligible for preferential tax treatment, according to the IRS. But because this policy is a new one, there are a lot of mysteries that need to be clarified.

To unpack the complications of the new addition to the tax code, Kinder Institute for Urban Research's Houston Community Data Connections team has created an interactive storymap to break down the goals of Opportunity Zones in metro Houston. The map explains the locations of Houston-area opportunity zones, their demographics, how Opportunity Funds and Opportunity Zones work, and how the tax incentives for investment pays investors back.

"Opportunity zones are a huge topic of conversation but also a big black box right now," said Bill Fulton, director of the Kinder Institute. "Investors everywhere are trying to figure out how to leverage the opportunity, while at the same time community activists are (1) hopeful that opportunity zones will bring new investment that will benefit their community, and (2) fearful that opportunity zone investments will not be sensitive to neighborhood needs and concerns. We hope the opportunity zone storymap will be used by community folks who want to understand the opportunity zone process and investors who want to understand more about neighborhoods."

Within Texas' 145 counties, there have been 628 designated opportunity zones and Harris County has the most in the state at 105. A total of 147 opportunity zones, which are all low-income neighborhoods, sit inside Houston's nine-county area. To qualify as an opportunity zone, areas must be nominated by the state, and that nomination has to be certified by the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, according to the IRS.

According to the American Community Survey 2013-2017 5-year estimates, the poverty rate in opportunity zones within Harris County (30.8 percent) is much higher than the county average (16.8 percent). Harris County's opportunity zones also have a higher unemployment rate (11 percent) compared to the county average (6.4 percent). Home values, rents, homeownership rates and educational attainment are all lower in opportunity zones than Harris County at large.

"We're hoping the map gives a general sense of how the program works, and where the opportunity zones are in metro Houston," said Jie Wu, director of research management at the Kinder Institute. "The map will also give basic information about the designated neighborhoods. The map has information on demographics, socioeconomic status and housing such as population by age group, poverty rate, unemployment rate, educational attainment, median household income, median home value, median gross rent, homeownership rate, renter’s cost burden and vacancy rate."

The newly-released storymap is the first part of a project tackling the explanation of what opportunity zones mean for Houston. With an estimated release in October, Part II will talk more about the historical demographics of opportunity zones in Houston and the potential neighborhood changes due to an influx of investment in those areas, according to Wu and her team.

How CFOs Can Unlock innovation

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Author: Ken Gabriel, Draper Labs

The most important thing CFOs and other leaders can do is give people the right resources and remove the obstacles that allow them to innovate.

A company’s success — or indeed its very survival — increasingly depends on its ability to drive change and innovate at pace. Yet most organizations aren’t equipped to do this. At one extreme, organizations micro-manage innovation with rigid processes and metrics. At the other extreme, companies treat innovation as an art, operating with the philosophy that creativity shouldn’t be constrained.

Either approach ultimately yields the same result: diminished or non-existent returns on R&D – an intolerable result for any finance director. But CFOs and finance directors have among the most powerful roles in breaking this cycle of no return by applying and advocating for an approach I call “disciplined innovation.”

Disciplined innovation increases the likelihood of achieving breakthroughs because it creates the right conditions for innovation to flourish. It has three key components, starting with a determination to achieve a bold new capability — think engineering the lightbulb instead of designing a better candle. Many innovations are a 2.0, and while there are a time and place for incremental innovations, new breakthrough capabilities are today’s game-changers.

Second, innovation requires fixed timeframes and budgets. Smart financial constraints and deadlines don’t impede creativity, they impel creativity by creating a sense of urgency and focus. The third element is where the CFO plays a vital role: operating with independence. This means creating measured freedom from business-as-usual rules, especially when it comes to reporting, hiring, and contracting. This is key to making breakthroughs happen.

Before I sound too sacrilegious, I’m not saying all rules need to be relaxed. Standard operating procedures like procurement have well-intentioned safeguards against risk. But when you consider all the elements that must align to bring a new invention to life — from talent to market opportunity to capital — it’s imperative for businesses to move fast and be able to strike at the right time. Waiting several months for a competitive bidding process to award a contract just isn’t an option.

CFOs have an immense lever to empower and encourage innovation by understanding which rules to relax and how to relax them. Some of the best finance directors I’ve worked with have taken some of the following key steps that paved the way for big breakthroughs. And in the process went from people who said “no,” to saying “this is what we can do.”

Streamline financial control and reporting. Innovation isn’t a linear process and new discoveries often mean that money allocated for one workstream needs to shift to another. I’ve seen so much time wasted in multiple meetings justifying this shift to multiple stakeholders. As long as the project stays within scope, additional reporting or controls on expenditures detracts from the mission at hand. Relaxing some of those reporting constraints is a relatively simple step a CFO can take that can empower an organization to be far more agile while still guarding against risk.

CFOs have an immense lever to empower and encourage innovation by understanding which rules to relax and how to relax them.

Take a new approach to talent. Convention has us think about hiring people for the long-term. But innovators often want to come in to effect change on an exciting project and move on, either to another organization or another project. So, instead of thinking about a long-term salary and benefits, finance and HR can work together to attract top technical talent with a sign-on bonus and incentivize them via a performance or exit bonus when they achieve the project’s goal. It’s also critical to be open to subcontracting to be able to move at pace. Waiting several weeks for a search to hire a specific expertise in-house can kill innovation when a subcontractor can get a job done within a week.

Take a fresh look at contracts. Acting at speed requires a greater degree of outside partnering, bounded by shorter, simpler, and mutually fair contracts that can be executed quickly. For example, at Draper, lengthier contracts needed for defense work just aren’t practical for private-sector projects. So, we created a shorter development services agreement, which has a more flexible approach to intellectual propertyownership and indemnification while still protecting against risk. This is vital because if a project has a two-year deadline, waiting nine months to lock in a contract is going to doom the project to failure.

Incubate and insulate. Freedom from business-as-usual rules sometimes requires creating specific innovation activities within a company. One way we do this at Draper is through our internal research and development program, which is where teams compete to get funding for game-changing innovation projects. Each project lasts for a discrete timeframe and has a fixed budget. They operate with independence. The finance team and I check in with the group every six months to review progress and offer guidance.

The most important thing leaders can do is give people the right resources and remove the obstacles that allow them to innovate. As you assess business-as-usual rules within your organization, perhaps one guiding question can help: Is this a governance issue, or simply the way we’ve always done things? If it’s the latter, you’re likely looking at an area you can unlock to increase the pace of innovation for your business and further differentiate your products, services, and company.

Ken Gabriel is President and CEO of Draper Labs, an MIT spin-off engineering solutions company, famed for developing the Apollo guidance computer and continuing its tradition of cutting-edge innovations in numerous fields, including precision medicine. Before joining Draper, Gabriel co-founded the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group at Google; prior to this, he was Deputy and Acting Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the U.S. Department of Defense.


contributor, Draper Labs, innovation, R&D

PROJECTIONS YEAR OVER YEAR GROWTH FOR HOUSTON

“Houston’s economy will grow 5.4 percent this year and 4.4 percent in ’20, according to the latest forecast by The Perryman Group. As a result, Houston should add $27.4 billion to its gross regional product this year and another $23.9 billion next year. Real personal income, employment, population, and retail sales also show healthy gains. Inflation remains subdued. 

Every sector of Houston’s economy will grow and add jobs, based on the forecast. The largest employment gains are expected to occur in services (35,174), construction (8,017) and manufacturing (5,310). The largest output gains will be in mining, manufacturing and services.” Source: The Perryman Group.