Virtually everybody resorted to some version of the work/family narrative to explain the paucity of female partners. But as we reported last year with our colleague Erin Reid, the more time we spent with people at the firm, the more we found that their explanations didn’t correspond with the data. 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.
There are a lot of detrimental aspects to the culture of overwork that impair businesses; gender inequality is only one among many symptoms. Maximum utilization (a/k/a overwork, but in...
There are a lot of detrimental aspects to the culture of overwork that impair businesses; gender inequality is only one among many symptoms.
Maximum utilization (a/k/a overwork, but in business-speak) of staff means:
no time to train and upgrade the workforce for new challenges;
increased stress-related ailments, absenteeism, and associated healthcare costs (in the U.S., anyway);
poor employee retention (loss of institutional knowledge and hiring costs);
increased errors, negligence, and malfeasance (with associated legal and reputational costs);
ongoing increase in technical debt
That's just a back-of-the-envelope list of what I saw in the place I used to work. I'd say the company continually ran at about 25% over capacity for its staffing levels.
And yes, some of the gender issues in the article came into play as well. Two of the men on my team had new babies, and I literally had to order them not to work during their paternity leaves (which, BTW, were half as long as the maternity leaves allocated for female employees, thus setting women a little further back in "productivity" advancement). I know I was typically running 55 - 60-hour weeks (that's an average; there were some 100+ hour weeks in there). My boss didn't know that the only way I was managing it was because I didn't have kids, until I quit.
The shareholders are just f*cking themselves for short-term gains because this practice isn't sustainable. That company was losing market share and stock price at a drastic rate (about 75% loss in 2 years) before COVID-19, largely because it was performing its core business so poorly due to overextended staff.
From the article:
There are a lot of detrimental aspects to the culture of overwork that impair businesses; gender inequality is only one among many symptoms.
Maximum utilization (a/k/a overwork, but in business-speak) of staff means:
That's just a back-of-the-envelope list of what I saw in the place I used to work. I'd say the company continually ran at about 25% over capacity for its staffing levels.
And yes, some of the gender issues in the article came into play as well. Two of the men on my team had new babies, and I literally had to order them not to work during their paternity leaves (which, BTW, were half as long as the maternity leaves allocated for female employees, thus setting women a little further back in "productivity" advancement). I know I was typically running 55 - 60-hour weeks (that's an average; there were some 100+ hour weeks in there). My boss didn't know that the only way I was managing it was because I didn't have kids, until I quit.
The shareholders are just f*cking themselves for short-term gains because this practice isn't sustainable. That company was losing market share and stock price at a drastic rate (about 75% loss in 2 years) before COVID-19, largely because it was performing its core business so poorly due to overextended staff.