Women in the Workplace: The Unfinished Fight for Equality | CBS Reports

Summary

The CBS Reports feature, "Women in the Workplace: The Unfinished Fight for Equality," explores the ongoing challenges and obstacles women face in the professional world. Despite significant strides, such as movements like #MeToo, there remains a large gap in leadership roles and equality, especially for women of color. The documentary showcases personal accounts of women navigating these challenges and underlines the critical importance of addressing systemic biases, instituting supportive policies such as universal childcare, and engaging men in advocating for gender equity. The pandemic has exacerbated these issues, pushing women back into traditional roles and threatening decades of progress. The video highlights both individual stories and larger systemic issues in the fight for workplace equality.

Highlights

• The #MeToo movement has been pivotal in exposing workplace biases against women. ⚖️
• Women leaders continue to face stereotypes and labels, such as being called 'emotional' or 'aggressive'. 🎭
• The pandemic has forced many women to leave jobs, emphasizing the need for better caregiving policies. 🏠
• Sponsorship, as opposed to mentorship, is crucial for advancing women of color in corporate settings. 🌟
• Efforts to support women's re-entry into the workforce are critical post-pandemic. 🔄

Key Takeaways

• Women face unique challenges in achieving equality in the workplace, with systemic biases still prevalent. 💼
• Movements like #MeToo have highlighted inequalities but significant gaps remain, especially for women of color. ✊
• The COVID-19 pandemic has reversed decades of progress for women in the workforce. 📉
• Supportive policies such as universal childcare are essential to regain and sustain gender equality in workplaces. 👶
• Men, particularly those in leadership roles, must engage actively in promoting gender equity. 🤝

Overview

The documentary opens with powerful statements about breaking barriers and the ongoing quest for gender equality in the workplace. It highlights the role of significant movements like #MeToo in shining a light on the biases that women continue to face, stressing that despite some advances, the fight is far from over. The program shares poignant personal narratives that underscore these enduring challenges, particularly the compounded discrimination faced by women of color.

Throughout the feature, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women's employment is brought to the forefront. The pandemic has pushed many women out of the workforce and rekindled traditional gender roles. Personal stories reflect how the lack of a caregiving infrastructure in the United States has made it particularly challenging for women to balance work and family life, threatening decades of progress toward gender parity.

The final segments of the documentary emphasize the importance of systemic change and male involvement in advocating for gender equity. It calls for actionable policies, like universal childcare, and highlights the necessity for men, especially those in leadership roles, to champion these changes. The video concludes with a hopeful message for sustaining progress in women's workplace equality, an essential pursuit for creating more inclusive environments.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Gender Equality Movements The chapter titled 'Introduction to Gender Equality Movements' covers the idea of leadership qualities not being exclusive to men, emphasizing that intelligence, compassion, and brilliance are universal traits that can be embodied by anyone regardless of gender. It references the progress of gender equality movements such as #MeToo and Time's Up, which have played pivotal roles in revealing and confronting biases and inequalities faced by women in various spheres.
• 01:00 - 05:00: Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Women's Careers The COVID-19 pandemic has been a pivotal moment for women, highlighting significant challenges and sacrifices faced by women worldwide.
• 05:00 - 10:00: Personal Stories and Career Challenges The chapter discusses personal stories and career challenges faced by individuals, particularly focusing on the speaker’s role within their family dynamic. It highlights the significant regression in gender equality within the workforce, emphasizing that the progress made over decades was wiped out within just a single year. This regression presents varied challenges for women, irrespective of their capabilities, due to societal norms and ingrained human nature.
• 10:00 - 15:00: Entrepreneurship and Gender Dynamics The chapter explores Luminary, an inclusive membership growth and career accelerator that serves as a collaboration hub primarily for women, while also welcoming men. With a backdrop of the founder's nearly 20-year corporate career, the chapter delves into the dynamics of gender in entrepreneurship and professional growth.
• 15:00 - 20:00: Cultural and Systemic Barriers in Corporate America The chapter begins with the narrator reflecting on their career in investment banking and their decision to leave this field to become an entrepreneur. They launched a company named Luminary with the mission of advancing all women in the workforce, regardless of their professional journey. The narrator emphasizes the importance of self-funding their venture to stay true to their mission.
• 20:00 - 25:00: Conclusion and Future Directions for Gender Equity The chapter discusses the personal experience of a woman progressing through her career and realizing the competitive nature of her environment, which was largely dominated by men. Initially motivated by aspirations to outperform her peers and become a leader or manager, she later realized that her gender placed her at a disadvantage as she advanced further in her career. The narrative highlights the challenges and realizations that come with navigating gender dynamics in professional settings.

Women in the Workplace: The Unfinished Fight for Equality | CBS Reports Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 but while i may be the first woman in this office i will not be the last what do we think of when we think of leader we think of someone who is brilliant intelligent compassionate that can be anyone that doesn't necessarily have to be situated within a male's body the metoo movement and the time's up movement have really been at the forefront of uncovering and exposing the biases and inequalities that women
• 00:30 - 01:00 have experienced it was a seminal moment for women we saw people pay the ultimate price in ways that we think we've never seen before now for us it's what's next 41 of the fortune 500 companies are headed by women we need to do better 2020 in particular has seen women being pushed back into these gender roles right when my husband and i talked about the decision of someone having to leave it just was not a question of
• 01:00 - 01:30 who that person would be it was naturally that it would be me because of the role that i play in our family dynamic a single year we wiped out three to four decades worth of progress on women coming into the workforce and being able to make a living for themselves and their families and so women have a different road ahead of them no matter how good they are it's just societal norms and human nature
• 01:30 - 02:00 luminary is an inclusive membership growth and career accelerator as well as a collaboration hub for women but we do not exclude men after a almost a 20-year career in corporate and
• 02:00 - 02:30 investment banking rising the corporate ladder i decided to throw that all away and become an entrepreneur launching luminary and self-funded it to boot our mission is to advance all women in the workforce regardless of their professional journey [Applause] i think probably the first half of my
• 02:30 - 03:00 career it was just about doing well and doing better and being super competitive with my peers which were mainly men because i wanted to have that leg up i wanted to to be better and and i wanted to be better because i wanted to aspire to be a leader i aspired to be a manager as i sort of hit that second half of my career that's when i realized that that womanness was at a disadvantage for me i just knew
• 03:00 - 03:30 that i had to compete i was a competitor naturally i was an athlete growing up i had two brothers and so that natural spirit was there but it definitely hit you when you were looked at a little bit differently right what you wore how you acted but the labels that were put on you you're emotional you're aggressive uh you're harsh you're cold i never as a manager gave any of that type of feedback to men so why was i getting that
• 03:30 - 04:00 i think there were multiple times where i felt like others were being promoted when i wasn't mainly because of those labels and i just wouldn't stand for it i was always the dissenter like how can you say that to me like what do you mean don't just give me a label explain what that means and um a lot of times that bit me in the behind
• 04:00 - 04:30 [Music] women are not perceived as capable in the ways that we have historically seen men right and that's because of the patriarchy right the way that power um plays out to strategically create uh resource and access for men driven by men led by men women who are oftentimes seen as strong
• 04:30 - 05:00 and they're aggressive right black women in particular if you're strong you're you're angry right gender stereotypes do really play a negative role in how women are able to access opportunity so there are lots of reasons why women have not reached the heights in corporate america this is after decades of talking about it and working on it and having pipeline programs and mentoring programs and ergs so one of the problems is clearly the tactics that we have been using have
• 05:00 - 05:30 been insufficient but it also means changing our culture you know changing how we think about women's leadership changing about how we invest in our young women and giving them the courage and the aspirations and the inspiration to dream bigger for themselves and to fight through the daily indignities to realize that bigger dream we're raising our hands and our companies and saying give me more responsibility help me move up and the reality is for most women this excuse they get when
• 05:30 - 06:00 they sit in that room with their boss is you're just not ready yet you don't have all of these okay so teach me most companies don't have the budgets to do that for every single employee so why can't i do that and supplement what companies are doing around learning and leadership development when i leased the space and built luminary here in new york i have a great landlord and said there's this empty roof up
• 06:00 - 06:30 there what do you think about a rooftop lounge and i said great it's got to be called the glass ceiling because it's an extension of luminary and we want to break through the glass ceiling when you look at the fortune 500 when you look at women of color there's still so few in leadership roles and so for us this idea of the glass ceiling just represents who we are as a company who we are as a community and that we're all in this together collectively
• 06:30 - 07:00 we are literally here to break the glass ceiling i raise a glass to the community because we don't exist without all of you my full name is mother mita malik and it means sweet friend and my name has been a source of pride
• 07:00 - 07:30 and joy and it's also been a source of embarrassment and anxiety for me throughout my life i entered corporate america with mother mita malik and i had a boss at the time who did not want to learn how to pronounce mother mita which was fine he also didn't want to call me mita which was an option i had given him and he decided to nickname me muhammad
• 07:30 - 08:00 and so he would say muhammad are we ready for the four o'clock call muhammad are you ready for delivering the sales samples tomorrow muhammad are you ready for lunch and that happened both privately and publicly and i share that story because it's important to share but it's painful to think that i responded to a name that was not my own for many months until i finally left that company marginalized groups
• 08:00 - 08:30 are having to pay an inclusion tax in an effort to mitigate the impact of racial gender aggressions that they're experiencing right and they're doing this in order to be included in white spaces in particular um but also to resist right or conform to um white normative standards in these in these spaces so i think that when we're when we're looking at the experiences of women of color in in organizations and corporate organizations in particular
• 08:30 - 09:00 we have to understand that they are having to deal with so many different um obstacles that are creating really creating barriers to their ability to gain access i have left jobs due to excessive bullying those experiences range from everything to being yelled at to being screamed at gaslighting i've been told by a leader that no one else will ever want you to work
• 09:00 - 09:30 for them in this company i gave you a shot i have had the my work product question the integrity of my work questioned and i've had my job threatened i don't have enough fingers to count on the number of my hands on how many times credit has been taken or stolen from me i'm sure many women of color can relate to you put in the work and you have great ideas and solutions and you're ultimately not the one who presents or gets credit for it
• 09:30 - 10:00 there is a 2019 study that showed that 40 percent of managers are women and of that 40 women of color only made up between 2.5 and 4.3 percent the numbers really speak volumes about the experiences of women of color in corporate organizations women of color sit at the painful intersection you know as kimberly crenshaw has named it of of race and gender discrimination and
• 10:00 - 10:30 so they live with both of those forces coming at them what's sometimes hard for women of color is they don't not only sit at that intersection they get lost in the intersection because you know when even as companies are getting better about for example counting and looking at their diversity data when you start to ask all right how many black women do we have i know up in our c-suite the numbers fall off the map i mean i think in the fortune 500 right now there's two black women ceos
• 10:30 - 11:00 a year ago there were zero right so i guess we should be excited that we now have two or maybe it's three it's 20 21. that's three out of five hundred sponsorship is key i am over mentored and i am under sponsored i don't need any more mentors and i mean that in the most loving way i have so many mentors who have really been critical in my career in life but a mentor is not going to help me advance my career and sylvia and hewlett talks about this in the harvard business review book called sponsor effect where
• 11:00 - 11:30 a sponsor is somebody who's in my organization they're typically two levels ahead of me above me and this individual will use their political capital their social capital they will have skin in the game and they will help me advance my career and so that is what needs to happen more is that we need more women of color to be sponsored so that they can get into the c-suite and boardrooms i remember very clearly going to see michelle obama on her book tour becoming and she talks about microaggressions as
• 11:30 - 12:00 being the everyday paper cuts the everyday assaults that women of color face and over a lifetime the accumulation can have a devastating impact on your sense of self-confidence and worth having people that i can talk through about the things that are going on in my career have been incredibly important having a really strong network of family and friends and other women of color who empathize and understand the experiences i'm going through and i think there's nothing like
• 12:00 - 12:30 children to help keep you grounded and realize what's important in life a new report says women make up one of the fastest growing groups of entrepreneurs and employers they include sarah blakely of spanx the tagline should be don't leave home without it the woman who started the shapewear revolution and allie webb who was well on her way to following sarah's footsteps unlike the kind of ambitious woman in a
• 12:30 - 13:00 book like lean in by cheryl sandberg who's trying to work her way up the corporate career ladder a girl boss is someone who says i'm not working my way up the ladder like i'm going to start my own thing some of the most notable girl bosses are mickey agrawal who is the founder and self-proclaimed ceo of thinx period underwear emily weiss the founder of glossier which is a beauty brand audrey gilman and lauren cassan were co-founders of the wing welcome to no man's land this is the wing
• 13:00 - 13:30 a social and co-working space for women only and so they were trying to be exclusive but they were held to account for not being inclusive enough and that kind of escalated and exploded in this expose in the new york times by amanda hess there were allegations from hourly wage employees at the wing particularly women of color who felt they were treated like the help a lot of the membership it appears to be were upper middle class white women but if
• 13:30 - 14:00 you went on the wings website the photographs were very diverse so if you went on the website you might think 90 of the wing was women of color and trans women [Music] i started working at the wing as a design director in september 2019. when i started the people felt kind of distant pretty inaccessible i struggled fitting in or feeling like i
• 14:00 - 14:30 had any kind of real support or welcoming from the team i was very excited because it was such a large design team there were so many women they're all very talented and i expected there to be a little more camaraderie but it just felt highly like everybody kind of looking out for their own interests a little bit i actually remember in interaction with one of the designers
• 14:30 - 15:00 she was one of the junior designers saying very bluntly like well you have to earn that space with us my impression of the two founders was that they were very glamorous women they were beautiful and confident well-spoken they presented really well i think that they wanted to present themselves as accessible as like
• 15:00 - 15:30 one of us kind of but it wasn't that way
• 15:30 - 16:00 [Music] do what i think about the leadership at the wing is ultimately their primary focus was growth was making sure the venture capitalists who were keeping this moving were happy i think leadership
• 16:00 - 16:30 was phony i think they presented this mission that they think sounded really good and they had no right to lay claim to i think the girl boss is individualistic i think she is out for herself i think she is highly ambitious to a fault [Music]
• 16:30 - 17:00 there was a big expose of steph corey of away luggage about what a nightmare of a boss she was to work for she micromanaged her employees she didn't allow private emails everything had to be in slack so it was in public
• 17:00 - 17:30 but if you look at elon musk or jeff bezos very similar work culture at amazon or at tesla there's extremely high expectations but the way these men are written about is that they push employees to be their better selves they're so brilliant the employees say i learned so much from working for this person they're a complicated leader so even in the media coverage of these startups i think women are held
• 17:30 - 18:00 to a certain standard where not only should they be ambitious driven visionaries but also nurturing compassionate you know someone you could go to to say i have a health issue i need to deal with and you could ask for time off or you could ask for financial support and that's a lot that's a really that's a lot of expectations for a founder
• 18:00 - 18:30 so i think we have to let people learn and grow while also holding people accountable for bad behavior and bad management of course there should be consequences but if we say you get one shot at this and you better get it perfect on the first try why would anyone start a company we're gonna lose the next generation of founders if they don't if they don't jump in the arena
• 18:30 - 19:00 i was raised to be an independent woman never depend on anyone you go to school you get a job you make a career and you get married you have children but you always stay independent never depend on anyone now i was leaving my job and i was going to have to depend on my husband and i questioned it every day
• 19:00 - 19:30 every day i worked at l'oreal for 17 years my last role at the organization was an assistant vice president of hr hr doesn't always have the best reputation and my goal was always to change that perception of hr and be a trusted confidant and support system for employees who really wanted to grow their careers there my husband is a correction officer and when the pandemic started
• 19:30 - 20:00 we made the decision that he was not going to come home until we figured out what the virus was because there is no such thing as social distancing in the jail so i was alone supporting my children i had a child in pre-k and while it's pre-k it sounds like it's not a big deal but you want to prepare them for kindergarten and you want to teach them how to learn so there was rigor in that and then my son in first grade it was a very important year for him my
• 20:00 - 20:30 child was a bit behind where he was supposed to be so my fear was he will get left back school is very very important to me and my family and the fact of getting left back meant i failed my son and i couldn't imagine that i also felt a lot of pressure from my job while we didn't have the type of layoffs that many other companies were having
• 20:30 - 21:00 there were some these types of conversations where i have to let people go this was hands down the hardest time and i took it very very personal i remember the day distinctly when i made the decision in my heart that i just something had to give that night i spoke to my husband and i said i think i need to leave l'oreal when my husband and i talked about the decision of someone having to leave
• 21:00 - 21:30 it just was not a question of who that person would be it was naturally that it would be me because of the role that i play in our family dynamic [Music]
• 21:30 - 22:00 we're to turn now to the economic toll of the pandemic on women the coveted recession is the first in which more women have lost jobs than men 275 000 women left the workforce this past january compared to 71 000 men according to the u.s labor department a new study by mckinsey and company and lenin.org warns that the crisis could erase all the gains that women have made in recent years in the workplace 2020 in particular has seen women being pushed back into these gender roles
• 22:00 - 22:30 right and and narratives around their um home life right so picking up a significant amount of the work with caregiving child rearing and housework in addition to the work that they're doing in their professional lives but being relegated back into the default caregiver status very nurturing status also kind of reinforces those old traditional stereotypes that were already you know that women were already fighting against right in order to break into the public
• 22:30 - 23:00 sphere in order to break into access to being in organizations and in these leadership roles a single year we wiped out three to four decades worth of progress on women coming into the workforce and being able to make a living for themselves and their families on being able to realize a career and a dream and a lot of the reason is in this country we have no caregiving infrastructure right we have uniquely in the united states thought
• 23:00 - 23:30 that caregiving was not a real job it was just something for workers to have to figure out on their own and everyone was left to their own devices people have said to me you're so lucky you get to leave you have a husband who you know supports you but there is sacrifice there's sacrifice in the sense that i'm i'm not necessarily feeling the same fulfillment that i had before there's a gap in my career right now and will an organization understand why
• 23:30 - 24:00 i made that decision many professional women had to make a decision between employment and caregiving and several chose caregiving supporting their entry into the workforce is going to be critical for us to retain for us to gain the losses that we have sustained as women during this pandemic and i think with that we have to create the
• 24:00 - 24:30 universal child care policies essential to support families i think we also have to strengthen our networks as women to identify opportunities and support opportunities for re-entry before when i was working in corporate what motivated me was the title elevation i wanted to make 250 000 base that was my goal and i left
• 24:30 - 25:00 right at the cusp of it and i walked away and now that i've been out of the corporate world for almost nine months my mind has completely shifted to what motivates me is not the money it's the time that i now get to spend with the people that i love when people would ask me how you guys doing during the pandemic i literally would say i feel like we're
• 25:00 - 25:30 rich we have a home we have food on the table and my family's healthy that's all we need honestly i think our progress in terms of women and leadership is slow across all sectors but trending in the right direction the issue for me is how do we accelerate that change and how do we sustain that change and it's no one answer
• 25:30 - 26:00 we've got to make sure that we have the policies that ensure that women can become unfettered from caregiving roles in society i think equally important is that we need to have men cisgendered men who stand up and speak for gender equity and against gender discrimination and who speak for gender inclusion it is critically important for men to be at the table look in a world in which 93 and 94 percent of
• 26:00 - 26:30 the fortune 500 ceos are men we are not going to change the workplace if those men aren't at the table aren't invested in it so we critically need male leaders to step up and embrace these issues and lead from the top i have been reminded that you take none of your gains for granted and that you have to protect your gains and then you have to keep advancing them
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