Inter-generational exchanges are often a profound source of exhilarating joy and shared goals.
For the older, you get to listen to the lives and questions of the younger. They inevitably bring your own memories and experiences into context. They can either remind you of you at their age, or astonish you with how much has changed since you were where they are now. I’ve had a bit of both this week.
How Much Has Changed & How Much Has Stayed the Same
I’m a regular reader of Kevin MacGuire’s blog, The New Fatherhood. Last week, we had a long chat about a column he wrote about being in the middle of life, and how confusing and emotional a place it can be. Especially as he’s stepped off the accepted and expected Q2 ladder of upwardly mobile, linear Silicon Valley corporate career fast track. After a decade as an engineer at Google, he opted to prioritise parenthood. He moved to Barcelona a few years back and started writing (and soon coaching) instead. As he nears 40, he’s designing work around life and family rather than the reverse. A former boss who gave him a hard time about this choice confessed at a recent reunion that he’d probably made the right call. He himself was newly divorced and regretful.
Does all this sound eerily familiar? It likely will if you’re female. This has been the choice and struggle of all the women I’ve grown up with, coached and lobbied for in companies for the past two decades. How to conciliate career and family. Despite appearances, it’s actually gotten a bit easier over the decades. Read Harvard economist Claudia Goldin’s book Career & Family: Women’s Century Long Journey Towards Equity for a 100-year overview of women’s ongoing struggle to care with work – and share it with their partners.
Gender-Neutralising Parenting, Phase 1
The big revolution of (and for) the next generation has been gender-neutralising parenting. Countries, shocked at their fast-tumbling fertility rates, have increasingly adopted shared parental leave. Companies (at least enlightened ones), have introduced it too. The next challenge is that while managers have grudgingly accepted that women have babies and need some degree of flexibility, male leaders often still struggle with accepting that young men have them too. And as committed co-parenters, now need the same flexibility as women. Like Kevin’s ex-boss, this will take a bit of time, and a flood of fathers like Kevin (and my son). We all need to start preparing our sons!
A parallel challenge is to start recognising and encouraging elder care which you would think would be a naturally gender-neutral endeavour. We all have parents. Ageing societies and generationally balanced demographic pyramids mean that elder care will become as common and unavoidable as childcare. Yet it’s still women who pick up the bulk (66%) of the elder care. So, not only should we working on our sons, we need to work on our brothers too!
My Q3 self listens with great satisfaction to what’s new in my uber-familiar conversation with Q2 Kevin: he’s a man. And he’s working with other men to define and embrace new roles and new relationships. It’s a joy to hear and read him. Forward his newsletter to the men in your lives.
Gender Balance at Harvard Business School? Yes, But
Then I had a rather more sobering exchange with a table of impressive young women who invited me to dinner. They were from four different countries, including India and Japan, not the most women-friendly countries on the planet. They are MBA students at Harvard Business School, part of the most gender balanced cohort yet – 46% female to 54% male. A balance that took 60 years to build, as HBS only admitted women into their MBA programme the year I was born - 1961.
American business schools have been global leaders in gender balancing the representation in their classes, with most of them now respecting my definition of gender balance: a 60% maximum of any gender. At least among MBA students. The next challenge is balancing faculty, governance – and culture.
From the sounds of my conversation, there is still a lot of work to do on the latter. Gender is nowhere on the core curriculum, there are ‘women reps’ who are meant to represent ‘women’ but no male reps to represent men – since that is the default dominant culture. The women said their male colleagues scoff at the need for women reps at all, since surely now gender balance has been won? What more can women possibly want or need?
We had a lively conversation about what that might include:
Balanced Faculty: who are themselves gender balanced and understand the differences between genders so that they are skilled at teaching inclusively across them.
Educate the Dominant: A recognition that ‘inclusion’ requires educating the dominant or ‘in-group’ on how to avoid dominating, not corralling out-groups into ‘affinity networks’ that these women say are still too often perceived as self-serving lobbying groups.
Let the In-Group Lead: That the education above needs to be led by in-groups and aimed at them. So that women aren’t caught in the same, eternal struggle of explaining to a bunch of sceptical male colleagues, why the current system isn’t designed with them in mind.
For the moment, we are still educating tomorrow’s women leaders in very masculine molds. Many of my friends on the ALI programme have admitted to having become men to succeed. A generation later, it sounds like we aren’t yet free of this formatting. Countries are all over the map on the issue. But even in places where the balance is better, there is still work to be done on the culture.
How might the next generation want to pick up the relay?
Replace women’s networks with gender balance networks and get enlightened men to join in the push.
Lobby future employers and organisations to reframe gender balance as a 21st century leadership skill.
Get gender balance (and all its complexities) onto the core curriculum of schools and business schools, so that tomorrow’s leader (of any gender) are skilled and comfortable at balancing the organisations they will run.
This week was a reminder that what hasn’t changed is the need for more balance, something I’ve been working on for the past quarter century. I thought by now I’d be able to move on and embrace other issues, but this one remains stubbornly central to so many things: from the longevity issues I have been researching and the way we pace careers and care over longer, 4-quarter lives to the US midterm elections where all the pro-abortionists won their seats; the ongoing turmoil in Iran led by women; the nurse’s strike for more pay – the first ever – announced in the UK; the toxic masculinity on display in autocratic regimes that refuse to play by any but their own rules.
In each, the rise of women’s views and voices continues in new generations that are ever more allied with ever more men - of every age. The math will help multiply the impact.
What gender balance was to the 20th century, generational balance will be to the 21st. Getting alignment across genders and generations to fight for balance (and everything else) will be key to everything from democracy to climate change.
Let’s make pictures like this last one history. We’ve still got a lot of work to do.
