The Distribution of Domestic Labour and Its Significance for Organizations
Why are there so few women to be found at the top of organizations? Why is it that, in many sectors, women represent the majority of employees but are under-represented at management level? What explains the fact that, in many countries, more women than men are qualifying as medical doctors but conspicuously few hospitals are headed by women? How is it that, in many countries, a much larger proportion of women graduate from higher education institutions but this is not reflected in the gender balance at professorial level?
balance at professorial level?
The reason for the under-representation of women is obviously no longer to be found in formal structures, as in most countries there are no longer any positions from which women are formally excluded. Unlike the times before women’s suffrage, women can now become prime ministers or presidents. Women are admitted to higher education institutions, and there is no reason why they should not hold chairs or lead universities. And numerous armies have abolished rules which denied women the right to command combat groups or air force units. As far as formal structures are concerned, companies, public administrations, and hospitals, as well as armies, the police, most political parties, NGOs, and professional associations, are ‘ungendered organizations’.
Thus, the reasons for the small numbers of women in leading positions must be sought elsewhere. Daily discrimination at the micro level is by far not always a trifling matter and plays an important role. There are still administrative organizations whose staff feel the need to make sexist remarks when their female colleagues take the stage at conferences. There are still companies in which the male executives boast about the number of female assistants they have had sex with. There are still universities where rumours circulate among female students that, if they dress in a more ‘feminine’ style, they will be rewarded with extra supervision or advantages at oral examinations.
Apart from this everyday discrimination, which is rooted in organizational culture, there is, however, one factor that plays a crucial role: the question of whether a woman has children. It is notable that those women who do occupy leading roles in companies are likely not to have children. And in politics, the first female presidents and chancellors were also women without children. There was a long-standing belief that, while a woman might well have been able to become a professor, having a child, and most certainly having more than one, could not be reconciled with an academic career. Given that having children was apparently never an obstacle to men pursuing their careers, we may conclude that one central reason for the low level of representation of women in leading positions lies in the distribution of labour within families. That should not come as a surprise. Empirical studies show that, even if both parents are working full time, cooking and cleaning responsibilities are distributed unequally. This is not the result of biological factors but of patterns in the division of domestic labour which have developed over centuries.
For both women and men, it is safe to assume, a day has 24 hours, and thus the imbalance in the domestic division of labour necessarily impedes the careers of women. This means that measures for the improvement of women’s career opportunities cannot be limited to the removal of micro-discriminations in the workplace. There must also be a balanced distribution of activities within families. However, for very good reasons, organizations cannot intervene in family matters – an employee’s line manager cannot tell the employee’s husband that he should do the washing up more often or make sure he is free to take the kids to the doctor.
Once an imbalance in the distribution of domestic labour is established, the well-known effect of self-amplification sets in. The woman stays at home for the first few months after giving birth, taking advantage of the largest part of the statutory maternity leave, and thus almost by necessity taking care of most of the child-rearing and household work. While the women are working for the household and the child, the men are usually taking the next steps in their careers. And by the time the children are half-way grown up, at the latest, they earn significantly more than the women. If it then becomes necessary, for whatever reason, for one of the parents to reduce his or her professional ambitions, it is usually her, because the loss of income will be smaller. Thus, once women decide – often of their own free will – to spend more time bringing up the children than their male partners, the mechanisms which prevent women from advancing in their careers set in.
There is an effect that organizations may use in trying to break this cycle, at least on a small scale. Despite the lip service that organizations pay to family-friendliness, it is not uncommon for men who take part-time parental leave for an extended period to be expected to do more or less as much work as their full-time colleagues. And despite all the certificates attesting to the family-friendliness of universities, male academics who share child-rearing responsibilities equally with their partners often rise up the career ladder as fast as their childless colleagues. Once women have won the domestic battle for equality, many organizations – notwithstanding their public protestations that they are already family-friendly – will have a lot on their plates in seeking to adapt their organizational culture to the resulting changes.
