McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org recently released the annual Women in the Workplace report, the largest such study of its kind. This year's report found 1 in 4 women are considering either downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce entirely due to Covid-19. This follows six consecutive years of progress in women's representation in corporate America.
The report looked at data and insights from more than 317 companies, which in total employ more than 12 million people, as well as survey responses from more than 40,000 individual employees. It emphasizes the importance for companies to take swift action to face the issue head-on, including recommendations to address worker burnout resulting from feeling "always on," which has become more prevalent than usual in current workplace conditions.
Facebook COO and LeanIn.Org co-founder Sheryl Sandberg says the situation puts corporate America in danger of undoing years of progress for women in the workforce.
"If we had a panic button, we'd be hitting it," says Sandberg. "Leaders must act fast or risk losing millions of women from the workforce and setting gender diversity back years."
Kevin Sneader, global managing partner at McKinsey & Company, agrees. "This crisis for women is not going away, but the solutions are within reach," says Sneader. "Companies need to adapt their strategies to more fully support women's lives amidst a new world of work."
The report further details the unique challenges of the Covid-19 crisis on women in the workforce, particularly for mothers, women in senior leadership, and Black women. According to the report, working mothers are more than three times as likely as fathers to be managing the lion's share of family housework and caregiving during the pandemic. They're also twice as likely to worry their performance will be judged negatively due to those responsibilities.
These challenges are felt particularly among senior-level women, who are more likely than women at other stages of their careers to be mothers, according to the report. They're also almost twice as likely as women at less-senior levels to be the only or one of the only women in the room. These factors contribute to senior-level women being more likely than their male counterparts to feel pressure to be "always on" and have to work more to prove their competence.
The report aims to give companies guidance on concrete steps they can take to mitigate the problem, including greater flexibility, open and empathetic communication with workers, and guarding against bias in performance reviews.
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