Hybrid work won’t fix the gender leadership gap. It will likely make it worse.

When it comes to women in senior leadership, the US has a miserable track record, and it is about to get worse. 

Although women constitute nearly half of the professional workforce, they account for “only 14.6 % of executive officers, 8.1% of top earners, and 4.6 % of Fortune 500 CEOs.”[1] Even in traditionally female-dominated fields like education and nursing, most senior leaders are male. For women of color, the numbers are even more grim. While they account for 18% of entry level positions, women of color are just 9% of senior managers, 3% of C-Suite positions, and 1.2% of Fortune 500 CEOS.

For years, flexible work arrangements, such as four-day workweeks, remote work, job sharing and the like, have been hailed as the best way to get women into senior leadership positions by supporting them while they juggle career building and caregiving. However, no matter how much data scholars mustered to show the benefits of flexible work for employee satisfaction and productivity, companies didn’t take much notice. 

Always-on work culture valued over flexible work

Outside of a few failed experiments with the Results Only workplace at Best Buy, most companies continued to embrace the 24/7, always-on work culture that values the quantity of hours worked over the quality of the output. So when the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of Americans to work-from-home for an indeterminate amount of time, it seemed like the dream of normalizing flexible work arrangements was within reach. 

As companies ponder what the new normal will look like going forward, hybrid work has emerged as a recurring theme. But hybrid work may not improve the leadership prospects for working mothers, and it may well likely make them worse by creating an implicit hierarchy that rewards employees who work in person most of the time and penalizes those who don’t.

Lots of things changed in March 2020, but the American concept of work did not. As a cultural anthropologist, I focus on the underlying cultural assumptions that shape the way Americans think about work, and unfortunately, the pandemic did not overturn our deep-seated beliefs about work—it just put them on hold. 

German sociologist Max Weber was among the first to point out that the Protestant work ethic, inherited from our Calvinist ancestors, predisposed Americans to fetishize work as an end unto itself, rather than a means to an end. One doesn’t have to dig far into the recesses of American popular culture to see the glorification of hard work, but there is more to it than that. 

For Americans, work involves sacrifice, best expressed by That Seventies Show dad Red Forman’s famous phrase, “if it were fun, it wouldn’t be called work.” And, that is the crux of the problem. 

Americans are convinced that work must not only be hard, but that employees must make sacrifices for their work to be recognized. Given our devotion to the idea of sacrifice, we don’t believe in shortcuts, efficiency, or in research that shows an individual can be twice as productive as another. If we can’t see evidence of blood, sweat, or tears, it’s not really work. I see this mindset in myself every day: I’m instantly skeptical of words that came too easily, of a task that was accomplished too quickly. It can’t be that good, I think to myself, because I didn’t put enough time into it.

It’s critical to point out that the American mindset about work goes against nearly all scholarly findings about how to best support productivity. Productivity is not the end game here. If it were, all the technological advances of the past 50 years would have led to shorter working hours. iPhones, which should have made our lives easier, further tethered us to the office and removed any possible excuses for not responding to messages right away. In one fell swoop, the smartphone did away with the “I didn’t get your message last night” excuse. 

I do not deny that there is a certain virtue in our determination to always do more, but I think it is important to ask ourselves why, through the sheer stubbornness of habit, we cling to a concept of work that excludes large swaths of employees from leadership positions to everyone’s detriment. 

Certainly, the period in which a young woman is balancing a career with three young children may not be the ideal time for her to put her foot on the career accelerator, but the perception of an employee as not being “committed” to her job because she has a family is permanent and irreversible. Once a woman expresses interest in flexible work, she is viewed as “not career-oriented” and placed on the mommy track. Spoiler alert: the mommy track does not lead to senior leadership positions.

Old habits die hard, and there is little evidence that the American mindset has changed. The great work-from-home experiment of 2020 temporarily relaxed the stigma against flexibility because employees had no choice but to work from home. Before the Omicron surge forced companies to backtrack on plans to resume in-person operations, old school enthusiasts like JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon were anxiously clamoring to get butts back in cubicles. 

There is no doubt that when remote work is no longer mandatory, the old order will kick in. Managers will revert to old habits of rewarding facetime over remote time, perceived sacrifice over impact, quantity over quality, and those workers who work from home, even just part of the time, risk becoming a silent underclass who are passed over for promotion. Trouble is, most of these will be women, and most of those will be working mothers.

It’s time for us to confront the inconvenient fact that workplace flexibility, which enables many women to participate in the workforce, is also the death knell to their career advancement. The stigma associated with flexible work is the scarlet letter of the modern workplace, and once an employee takes advantage of flexible work arrangements, she is viewed as less than her peers, no matter how much of a rock star she is.

 It’s bad enough that this happens at all, but my biggest fear is our deeply ingrained attitudes about work will create a permanent underclass of hybrid workers while we congratulate ourselves for being so flexible and conclude that working mothers really didn’t want to lead after all. 

Many Americans will earnestly believe that their workplaces are set up to accommodate remote work, but absent a paradigm shift in the way that we interpret, judge, and reward work, remote workers will be set up to fail, all the while wondering what they are doing wrong.

Hybrid work offers the possibility of a more diverse, humane, and productive workplace, but for flexibility to achieve its stated aims of creating more advancement opportunities, we must tackle the outdated American mindset about work. Otherwise, we will very likely see the already small number of women in leadership positions dwindle even further.

[1] Center for American Progress

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