No Women in Leadership?
Episode 98 - Why are we still not seeing more women in senior roles? - with Carly Moulang and Alessandro Ghio
Why are we not seeing more positive outcomes for women in the workforce?
What can employers do to help women overcome the barriers to entry for senior positions? These are some of the questions that researchers Carly Moulang and Alessandro Ghio asked employers in Australia. Their findings are now available in a report titled "Working women and wellbeing."
In this episode, I interview Carly and Alessandro to understand more about what women and their employers can do to overcome gender issues in the workplace. As always, I wanted to know more about Carly's career, Alessandro's career, how they started their research together, and then deep-dive into their research findings.
Do we still need research on this topic?
Carly Moulang: "When Alessandro and I started talking about this, we're like, what's going on here? Why are we not seeing a better representation of women at these more senior levels of accounting firms? [In Australia], 43% of the top 100 accounting firms have no female partners. And so that got us interested in this topic, particularly because we know that organizations are investing more money in having more formal supports in place to support women in the workplace. Despite having this growth, proper support, and things like flexible working arrangements, carers leave, maternity leave, why are we not seeing the outcomes for women? So really, it was like curiosity that drove this project and drove our interest in this area."
Listen to this episode to learn about their recommendations to employers to better support women and minorities. You can use their findings and recommendations to identify red flags in your current employment or during the recruitment and selection process. This may help you identify good and bad employers for women so you can make better decisions for your career moving forward.
I hope that you enjoy this episode as much as I did.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Timestamps to guide your listening
04:48 - Carly's career
06:11 - Alessandro's career
07:23 - Researching gender issues in the workplace
10:44 - Research findings
18:04 - Minorities in the workplace
21:12 - Recommendations for employers
30:42 - Recommendations for women and minorities
48:23 - Final words from Carly and Alessandro
Transcript of this episode
Renata: Why are we not seeing more positive outcomes for women in the workforce? Our mental health, wellbeing, and performance for women issues that the employers can help with so that they can overcome the barriers to entry for senior positions. These are some of the questions that Carly Moulang, Alessandro Guio, asked employers in Australia and their key findings are now available in a report called “Working women and wellbeing”, which you can find in the links below in the episode show notes. And in this episode, I interview Carly and Alessandro to understand more about what women and their employers can do to overcome gender issues in the workplace. I wanted to know more about Carly’s career, Alessandro’s career, how they started their research together, and what they found. What were the recommendations that we can apply for both the employers seeking to better support women and minorities, as well as women and minorities, looking for employment?
Renata: Are there red flags that can identify good and bad employers for women when they're applying for jobs, for example, and moving up the career ladder? I hope that you enjoy this episode as much as I did. I've been trying to organize this for quite some time with Carly and Allie, but because of lockdowns and, you know, people working from home with families and all of that, either from my side or from their side, it took months for us to be able to manage and organize this. So I'm very, very grateful to both of them for taking the time to speak to me and therefore speak to you as well. This is a very important episode. I would say it's part of a series of episodes that we have done before in women's issues. There are other episodes that I’ve linked below for you with Div Pillay, Michelle Redfern, Sonali Shah, Susan Colantuono.
Renata: And there's also an episode with my friend, Jacob Thomas, about issues in the corporate workforce for queer professionals. So have a look at those, if you're interested in these themes and if they help you be better at career progression, job hunting, and career advancement. If there's anything that I can do for you, or of course, don't hesitate to get in touch with me. Remember to subscribe to my newsletter. There is a link to my newsletter below. I will send you every single new episode of the job hunting podcast as they come out weekly. So it's a weekly podcast and a weekly newsletter. And I also send you a curated list of articles that I think are important for career professionals to read and, um, get up, updated on things that might find their way into equipping them for promotions and job-hunting opportunities, the future. So sign up for my newsletter. There's a link there below, or you can find it on https://renatabernarde.com , which is my website. All right. Without further ado, I hope you enjoyed this episode with Carly and Allie.
Renata: Okay. Well, you know, I feel like I've been in isolation just as you have. I don't think I've done anything or gone anywhere. I just decided not to, even though I could go out and do shopping. In fact, because I have some knee problems at the moment, I haven't even exercised. So I'm feeling like a complete sort of bear in Melbourne winter, hibernating at home.
Renata: Oh dear. Alright, my friends, I'm happy that we finally made it. This is a long time in the making, isn't it? Carly?
Carly: Yes. Yes. It's good to be here finally.
Renata: Yes. It's maybe since the end of last year that we've been talking about doing this podcast, so I'm very happy that we're finally doing it, but why don't we start by both of you one at a time, introduce yourselves and tell the listeners a little bit about your careers. Why don't we start with Carly first?
Carly: Okay. I am Carly Moulang. My career started back in the late nineties when I did a degree in accounting and public sector, financial management. And then I worked in a big four accounting firm. And after a while, I decided to go back to university and do an honors degree. And then in 2001, I came to Monash University in Melbourne Australia to take out an assistant lecturer position and to do my Ph.D. So I've been at Monash now for 20 years. I obviously finished my Ph.D. and, gradually got promoted through the ranks and I'm currently an associate professor at the Monash business school. And I've also recently done a graduate diploma in psychology in the medical faculty at Monash because my research is multidisciplinary but psychologically based. So I have a lot of interests, but one of the things that I am particularly interested in is wellbeing in the workplace. And that relates a little bit to the topic that we're talking about today.
Renata: Excellent. What about you Alessandro? Tell us about your career so far.
Alessandro: Thank you. Thanks for having us on your podcast. So yeah, my name is Alessandro Guio, as you can guess from my accent I'm European. So I grew up in between France and Italy and my academic career started there. I did the first Ph.D. management at the University of PISA in Pisa, and the second Ph.D. in financial accounting in Paris at the sete. And I went to the states for a year in Indiana exploring the Midwest. And then I arrived in Melbourne four years ago where I've been a lecturer. And now I'm an assistant professor at Laval University in Quebec, Canada. So a bit across the globe and my research are mostly around diversity and my interests are about LGBTQI in professional service firms, as well as gender issues and women wellbeing. And which is part of the talk today and the amazing work that Carly and I are doing in this field.
Renata: Alessandro, what made you and Carly work together? How did it all start?
Alessandro: It all started actually on a kitchen conversation. I was just thinking yesterday we’re near the kitchen of the office of pre-COVID when we could still have informal chats. And so I've been working a bit on sexual identity in the accounting profession, and I knew that Carly for a long time has experience in gender issues is something that really fascinated me. So we started discussing our different interests and why we still observe that women and LGBTQI are so little represented in the higher ranks in accounting and professional service firms. And so we want to explore more of that and also explore not only from a performance base like we have a lot of studies showing more women or more diversity leads to better performance, but what else besides return on assets or return on equity? How can we explore wellbeing? How can we explore resilience? How can we explore burnout? And Carly with her psychological background, and I with my background in sociology and management forte was a great combo.
Renata: Interesting. Carly, what interests you in gender studies? I mean, you started in accounting, what made you get interested in this? Is it part of also your professional experience before joining academia, but also maybe even doing academia that made you interested in the gender issues in your profession?
Carly: Well, what may be particularly interested in the fact that you have been teaching now for just over 20 years, and looking at the cohort of my students over those years, it's always been around 50% females. And then, you know, we look at the curve of the gender slate in professional associations, like CPA Australia, where there are 49% females. And then we look at the accounting firms and if we look at the top 100 accounting firms, we only have 14% who are women partners. And so when Alessandro and I started talking about this, we’re like, you know, what's going on here? Why are we not seeing a better representation of women at these more senior levels of accounting firms? And not only that 43% of that top 100 accounting firms have no female partners. And so that really got us interested in this topic, particularly because we know that organizations are investing more money in having more formal supports in place to support women in the workplace. So despite having this growth, informal supports, but things like flexible working arrangements, carers leave, maternity leave, why are we not seeing the outcomes for women? So really it was like curiosity that drove this project and drove that interest in this area.
Renata: Yes. I don't know if you remember Carly, I used to work at the Institute of chartered accountants back in 2010 to 2012. And at that time we were still looking at parody in the graduate intake of women and men from, you know, high school, getting into university and then from university getting into graduate opportunities with CA firms chartered accounting firms. And part of my role as a career marketing relationship manager was also to bring in regional kids to add that diversity and indigenous kids to add that diversity. And we did a lot of interesting pipelines to bring them in, but once they reached, let's say KPMG or one of the big four, there wasn't the support system there for that type of new graduate, the graduate that had blue-collar parents, or came from regional Australia or were from indigenous communities and required maybe more leave than, you know, if an auntie passed away and they had to go back to their country, they had to go back for five weeks and KPMG wasn't ready for that. I know it's kind of a bit off-topic, but I'm actually very curious to know if things have improved in that sense because that’s like 10 years ago more or more.
Carly: Well, look, I think it may have improved in that more attention has been paid to providing more formal supports. When it comes to practically speaking role, and this is something that's really come in our research and it's that the formal supports are not enough to impact particularly wellbeing and resilience at work and our wellbeing and resilience impact our outcomes, like the extent to which you might get burnt out to our engagement within the workforce and our turnover intentions. So one of the key things that we've found in our study is that just having those formal supports and policies that you might have in place, they're not enough. You need to have a culture that also supports the individual. And perhaps that's what you're saying that might've been lacking back then. I mean, we still see similar problems now. So we're still seeing that a lot of the support that's needed in organizations will be considered informal supports. So that consists of things like culture, a little bit like you're talking about there, other informal supports that were found that are important to wellbeing includes supportive leadership, having psychological safety in the workplace. So that's the shared belief that you're safe from interpersonal risk-taking at work and having autonomy within your work role.
Renata: Yes, no, I think that I'm glad that you mentioned culture and not policy because you would expect work environments to have outdated policies, but if there's a good culture in place, there will be opportunities to bypass the old fashioned policies and to reinvent, you know, the structures and the protocols to adapt ongoing, to make the workplace more diverse. Alessandro is there anything that you would like to add to that first introduction to your research that Carly has just given us?
Alessandro: Maybe just a point too, just to expand a bit more like an example, like we compare big four to non-big four. So big 4 like KPMG that you are mentioning before, EY and, PWC and Deloitte. And we show that these big firms have much more policies than non-big four. At the same time, when we look at their wellbeing and their resilience of women in these workplaces in big four is much lower when in non-big four. So what we show is that the former practices per se, are not enough. What really makes a difference as Carly was saying, and this is evident in non-big four is the culture, the leadership support, and psychological safety. So one of the key takeaways as well is that we cannot delegate this to HR policy and that leadership and the leaders, people at the top of the firm needs to support the wellbeing in the workplace.
Renata: Did you find that surprising? Was that a surprising outcome of your research? I'm not surprised, you know, maybe because I had that experience working with the mid-tier firms and the top tier firms, and I mean, you work at Monash University, you know exactly what I mean by bricks and mortar and, you know, the institutionalized culture, that's kind of ingrained everywhere. Especially if you're a multinational, you have to operate across the country across borders. You tend to have more sort of more established policy. It's I dunno it's might be counter-intuitive for some, but for me, like when I remember when I had a very out-of-the-box young graduate, that was brilliant. I knew that it was going to be taken up by the mid-tier. It was never, you know, a candidate that the top four would accept. So I wasn't surprised, but was it surprising to you?
Alessandro: I would say that this was a bit surprising because they put a lot of resources, both human and financial, and they are aware of this problem that they don't retain women. They have quite a lot of women in consulting, associate level, but not at partner or director level. And they keep questioning this and they put a lot of resources, but clearly, it's the culture, the competition, which is still there and has not changed. So that is the harder work that the leadership should do. And then also another surprising factor I would say that we look into flexible work arrangements. Now we are all familiar with COVID, which before were very gender things because mostly women would take because they have caring responsibilities still today, most are on their shoulders. And so we show that actually, flexible work arrangement led to more wellbeing. So actually the women would experience better work environment, more engagement, but at the same time, they lead to more burnout because probably they have to juggle many, many things at home and at work, the boundary is blurred and we all know this with zoom and COVID, but so it's something that firms needs clearly to be aware.
Renata: Yes. Well, despite the fact that you have found that the culture seems more, well challenging in the big four, than in the mid-tier accounting firms, did you find that that also reflected or correlated with the seniority of the women? Are there more senior women in mid-tier than in the big four? Carly, do you wanna answer that? Because sometimes they would have affirmative actions in place anyway, and you know, they would have more women, even though the culture doesn't seem to be quite right.
Carly: Well, I guess we didn't sort of look at that specifically in our study, but we did see a lot of women in those firms who were ex-big four, and the reasons for why they moved to non-big four firms was primarily because they didn't feel supported enough in their role. And they found it very hard to have work-life balance in that type of environment. So we definitely saw a lot of women leave for that reason. And also because there was lack of opportunity to have part-time work in a lot of big firms as well. So that's a real missed opportunity that we see for a lot of firms where a lot of women sort of drop off because they decide to work part-time and that that's a better fit for them while perhaps their children are young or at primary school. And if they found it pretty much impossible to get part-time leadership roles in large firms, and that was often what motivated a move to a smaller or mid-tier firm.
Renata: Yes. Right. When they exit the organization, where do they go? Do they remain working as chartered accountants or do they move to operational roles? What's the outcome? I mean, I don't know if you've looked into it, but I'm curious to know.
Carly: I guess we didn't look at that specifically, but a lot of them continue working as accountants, but in smaller firms. And smaller firms that tend to have a lot stronger informal aspects, which are supportive to them. So just being much more flexible when it comes to things like flexible working arrangements, was interesting. We've actually received a bunch of reflections from the women who were involved in our study about how COVID impacted their careers. And one woman said that a colleague of hers had been asking for flexible work arrangements, you know, for the last 10 years and had kept being told, no, because it's going to impact your productivity. And then all of a sudden, overnight, everybody was working from home and, you know, productivity did not skip a beat. And so a lot of these things have been very difficult for women to arrange in a lot of these larger firms. Where smaller firms just tend to be more flexible and have a more supportive culture when it comes to work-life balance, and having to leave early to pick up children and those sorts of things.
Renata: Yeah. So what was the recommendation from your research to employers and to women? What would you say the top recommendations were for employers Alessandro can you let us know?
Alessandro: Yeah. I would say that there are a number of recommendations. First of all, I would say that even for those women that remain and reach the highest partnership level, first need to give them a set of decisions at the decision table. Why is this? Because we show that actually even women without a partner when they ended up being in non decision-maker roles, like communication, HR, whereas men, even at similar levels in senior leadership take the strategic decision. So first of all, women need to be able to add, to give them the possibility to take the decision. Second, also looking at flexible working arrangements, easier access to caring days because it's too hard at the moment. It's too complicated to get access to caring days which will not affect productivity, on the contrary, it will help to better reconcile work and work-life balance. And then, of course, a change in culture. So leadership support, and change with culture of long hours, of competition, of just showing off at network events after hours, which often are not accessible to women because they still have a carer responsibility and creates these invisible barriers to get promoted. So definitely with a change of culture in professional service firms and policies are not enough.
Renata: Yes. I'd like to add that, even though I think all of what you're saying is right, what I also believe is that women have been conditioned to act in a certain way up to maybe a generation or two ago. I think that you know, I'm really so impressed with the young women coming into the workforce right now. I think they're absolutely brilliant, but women of my generation, for example, would have access to going to networking events or being able to, you know, engage in that sort of social aspect that usually allow them to progressing their careers. But they wouldn't know how important that is. I'll give you an example, I worked at Ceda which is an organization in Australia that organizes lots of very important networking opportunities because it's a platform for politicians and industry leaders to deliver white papers or new policies or, you know, whatever big agenda that a premier would have.
Renata: So there will usually be 200, 400 people in a room. Women were always the first one to leave the room, you know. Went from 12 to two. At 2:00 PM, you would see women starting to leave. So they were there just for the delivery of the information they would arrive just in time. And then they would leave as soon as the event was over. And that chit chat that happens at the beginning and at the end of those events that are really important for your career advancement, they would miss out on that because they were given an opportunity to attend most likely paid by their employers, KPMG, or a law firm or an engineering firm, but it didn't click. And can you understand that I, as a mother of two, I can completely understand that they felt like they had to be there, but they also had to finish work because they needed to leave on time to, you know, get the kids from after school care and go home and all of that. And that kind of really impacts women's ability to grow professionally and grow their network to do the sideways that men do.
Carly: Yeah, well, that's something that sort of came out of our recent findings when women reflected on how COVID impacted their career. And if anything, it's created a more level playing field when it comes to not being able to attend networking events like that in person, or needing to leave early, or perhaps not being involved in some other social aspects of work, like golf days and all these sorts of things that can often go ahead, which are primarily male-dominated. This means that a lot of women often miss out on those events, you're not having the ability to hold those events during COVID has meant that women have been, you know, are more on a level playing field when it comes to things like promotions now, because, in terms of that social side, which they can find challenging, that's no longer as much of a barrier because we don't have these, you know, social events in person, I guess.
Renata: The whole conversation and the structure of career advancement and promotions is really biassed towards a more, you know, masculine way of operating. I remember supporting a very senior leader, female. And we used to walk into boardrooms and it was just the two of us female. And then all the other guys in the room, we're talking about either foodie or golf for 15 minutes and not looking at her or not looking at me. And until they exhausted all of the news about the weekend's footy result and their golfing, you know, stuff, they wouldn't start the meeting. Didn't matter that she was the actual senior person in the room and it took her maybe a year to change that dynamic. And then all of a sudden, because she liked cycling so much, cycling wasn't big back then.
Renata: Now, everybody talks about cycling all the time. But she found something that was in common between everyone that they could then chit chat about. And I'm not sure that the men in the room realized how excluded we both felt for, you know, a big part of her first year in that tenure. And it was really excruciating. And we used to walk out of that meeting and just roll our eyes like, oh my god, I can't believe we have to go through that again. And I wondered and I wrote about this on LinkedIn. I'll put a link to it below. What would happen if we would walk into a meeting Carly, you and I, and a bunch of girls with just one or two men, and we would talk about makeup, or I'm not saying that's all women talk about, but definitely that's all I talk about.
Renata: If I could, I would talk about makeup all the time or whatever online shopping I did or, and that would never fly. Right? That would be perceived as me not being professional in the workplace. So I find that, you know, there's this dichotomy that also when I'm supporting clients that come from other countries, I need to explain to them what the small talk is like in Australia. And I'll give you an example of a woman that I'm coaching and she's European, Alessandro. So she said, it's really interesting, the recruiter sends me an email and say, let's have a casual catch-up over the phone and the catch-up’s not casual at all. It's really like, they just go straight on, why are you applying for this role? And I thought it was casual. I was ready to be casual. I wasn't ready to answer interview questions. So, you know, it's still sort of cultural things that we take for granted that people come from France and they would not understand that casual is not actually casual. It's part of the interviewing process.
Carly: I think another thing that we've noticed as well, when it has come to COVID and how that's impacted the workplace is that women have become sort of in charge of a lot of the emotional labor that occurs in the workplace. It's the women in the teams who feel responsible for the well-being of teams or the wellbeing of their workforce. And so women's work has significantly increased because carrying the emotional labor in a workplace tends to be unappreciated, but a massive task. There's an opportunity process, of course, for all of your time. And women are spending more and more time on this emotional work in the workplace. And I think that that has become a significant gendered burden on women. And that increases a lot of pressure for them as well, because, you know, it takes up their time. It's very emotionally taxing and, it has sort of, it has become like a woman's being a woman's task. So I think that that's another big challenge that we're seeing in the workplace has come apart in the last year as well.
Renata: And Carly, in terms of the recommendations for women, I'm very interested to know what you have to say because I don't know if you've seen the recent research that came out last week about the employee sentiment and how executives and professionals are ready to jump out of their current jobs and find new opportunities. So that research shows that 41% of white-collar workers in the US are keen to move jobs. So if you think about 41%, 21% are probably women, what do you think that they should look out for? What are the red flags that would indicate that the culture is not right for them?
Carly: So I think that something like COVID has really identified some problems that they can be in the workplace. And one of the red flags, I think are unreasonable expectations from workplaces. So one of the things that came out of our research, which didn't terribly surprise us, but did upset us is the expectation that burnout is normal. Like everybody expected to become burnt out in their work role. And that wasn't seen as something where we should try to avoid this, or what is actually causing burnout. So there are significant workload in a lot of places and significant burnout. And a part of that comes about by having unreasonable workloads, unreasonable expectations. This has been blown out with COVID as well. We were expected to be available all the time and available online all the time, blurring those boundaries between home and work. And so that definitely would be a red flag.
Carly: So trying to ascertain what the actual expectations are from the workplace, how flexible they are when it comes to where and how you go about your work. Another red flag to me would be high turnover. And also just looking again at the demographic of the workforce, if I saw a significant amount of junior women, but then I looked at the mid and later career levels and did not see women there or saw what Alessandro alluded to earlier, where women may be at senior levels, but they're not in decision-making roles. So something that came out from our interviews in accounting firms is that men tend to be in charge of profit centers and women are in charge of cost centers. And so if I saw that, yeah, that's giving me a signal that there's not great equality when it comes to the workplace, even though you may see women and men technically on similar levels, it's the decision-making power of their roles that differ. And so I would want to be seeing more equality at those more senior decision-making levels, I think. And I'd also something that came out in our study, which is also concerning, there is a lot of stigmas still when it comes to part-time roles for women. I would like to see more women in leadership part-time roles in workplaces. And I think that that better supports more equality and diversity in the workforce. And so, yeah, I think that that's something else I'd look out for.
Renata: Are there good examples of companies that we can look up to and say, because in Australia we have, you know, the best place to work for women. There's like a ranking system. Did you look into that to see if?
Carly: No. That wasn't really a part of the research.
Renata: The other thing that I‘m fascinated by, because I am now, you know, quite close to Susan Colantuono, who has done this research and then presented on Ted, I think there's like 14 million views. I mention this Ted talk all the time and it's called ‘the missing 33%’. It's the fact that so much of the professional development available for women internally, you know, those sort of things that you have at Monash, that every organization has, tend to focus on soft skills. So, you know, the mentoring that they get, the soft skills development, the leadership, and then they apply for the promotions. They don't get it. And they actually failed to mention all their business acumen. You know what you mentioned before about that commercial knowles, I mean, this we're talking about accountants, so if you're listening from the US you know, these are female CPA professionals, they have failed to mention that because they just, they took it as a given, of course they know I'm a CPA I don't need to talk about it.
Renata: But then from the employer’s side, when they were asked, why, you know, you didn't ask about their business acumen. And they said, well, you know, it was a given that the man had more. So it's kind of really completely biassed in that sense. And that's what Susan's Ted talk is all about. I'll put a link below. Did you look into the training that's available for women? There's a lot of very sort of targeted training for women. And, you know, I remember from the time that I was at Monash, it tended to be really a lot about mentoring and soft skills development.
Carly: So in regards to the training, I think that women there's costs and benefits to the women-orientated training because part of it does give women that subconscious message that they need this leadership training. And we don't see this for men, right? And men often they need exactly the same type of training that women do. They need to work on their soft skills. They need to work on their communication skills. So we did see workplaces offering this sort of training. We also saw some benefits of coaching, particularly coaching when women came back from maternity leave. So what we saw in our assets there is when women had coaching available to them, when they returned from maternity leave, that significantly improve their resilience. And it also significantly reduce their turnover intentions in the workplace. So there's quite sort of quantifiable benefits to having a coaching, particularly at times of pre transition. Does that answer your question?
Renata: It does. It does. I still think that when women are going up and up and they're interested and ambitious for their careers, they often forget that they are CPAs or that they're CAS. I have seen that in my practice. I have had to remind my clients that they have that commercial acumen, that they can use that to their advantage, to get their next job. And they would tell me, oh, but I'm not a CPA anymore. Now I work in operations. Now I'm a project manager. And I'm like, yes, but can you imagine you're competing with lots of other project managers, none of which have a CA qualification, and you're not mentioning this why? And they go, oh, okay. I hadn't realised it. And it's really that missing 33%, which is the business understanding the commercial acumen, the banking and finance background, that they may have the consultancy background, that they may have it if they come from a big four, which many of these clients that I'm thinking of have, and they forget about it. They, you know, they position themselves as generalists because they've been almost trained. I believe that they have been trained to think that it's the leadership skills and their agile leadership style and all the sort of jargon they learning in executive education that will get them their next job. When in fact, what the employer actually wants is trusting someone that has good commercial acumen that can run their business. I can think of a handful of clients I have right now that have that problem. And we fix that in the way that we present them on LinkedIn and in their resumes.
Alessandro: And what we also find. And it's complimentary to this, is not only what they will put in the application for promotion for the job, but it's also going for a job or applying for promotion. What we show and we find in our searches is that men give it a go. Whereas very, very, very often women, if they don't tick all the boxes, they will not even apply. So we have a self-selection cause they don't try to go and they don't feel prepared in certain aspects. So we have also this problem, very strong in professional service firms, where women if they don't do 110%, they feel that they are more than ready. They will not even apply for a more senior role or for a different job.
Renata: Agreed. And, in fact, it's me saying this, it's not Carly or Alessandro, if you are at Deloitte or any of these firms and you're in the mid tier consultancy role, you have the worst job of all of the people in there because it's the busiest job with the biggest KPIs, really high responsibilities to bring in clients. You know, I'm talking about the senior associates to director roles. And if you go a step up, all of a sudden, you know, you're managing people, it’s not just about your individual contribution as much, it's about your leadership and your ability to run the project or run the client portfolio well. And I try to convince sometimes, you know, prospect clients that come to me and they're thinking about applying for a more senior role in a consultancy firm or a law firm. And they say to me, oh, you know, I'm not going to hire you cause I've given up.
Renata: I just want to stay where I am because I have young kids and it will be easier for me. I mean, this role is so much more responsibility and I'm like, oh no, every role you stay, once you have kids, women, let me tell you, it will be hard regardless of where you are in the organization. It will be really hard. You're just going to be paid less. And you're going to have more stress because the workload in those sorts of sandwich, middle management roles are so much tougher than if you go a level up and a level down. Yeah, so they miss out because they don't understand what the difference is. Once you go a level up that you are going to be engaging others and delegating more, and you will have more resources to manage your personal life plus your work-life balance. I don't know if there is a balance, but I guess whoever is listening. If you don't understand get in touch with me, let's have a chat and I'll explain. But yeah, no, it's really interesting to see the dynamic and the thought process that goes into making those decisions to go for promotions or not go for promotions. They usually make no sense. And it's just a misconception.
Carly: I also think that for women to go for those promotions, that is when you need to have those strong informal supports in place. And to really know that you have, you know, the proper leadership support, and autonomy to fulfill those roles as well. So I think that that is another time when having those really strong informal supports makes a difference in deciding whether to put yourself out there and to go for that extra level of responsibility. And, you know, just having formal policies and procedures, that's sort of not enough to help push you to those, you know, those higher levels as well.
Renata: I'm very interested in the women-to-women dynamic. You know, I have clients that are working for senior women and they don't find themselves supported by those senior women. And in fact, Alessandro, I know you do LGBTQIA research as well. I find it's the same with the queer professional community. You know, I have some friends and they're all, you know, excellent at what they do, but they don't get along and some are more senior than others. And, there seems to be a generational clash between queer professionals. Is there research behind this? Or is this just me anecdotally figuring things out for my clients?
Alessandro: So for the LGBT people, what it also very often show in our research is that very often these networks of LGBTQI tend to be very groupie. So if you don't belong to a group that very often now network groups are white gay male from middle-upper class, you feel excluded. So can identify as lesbian and you can define as trans or you've got ethnic background. You will not fit with certain networks. You will not feel supported by this new group that creates new dominant structure we would see in our research.
Renata: Yeah. I've experienced that with my son at the university he went into. He tried to join the queer committee and he wasn't accepted. And I was like, you forgot to say, you are Latino and gay. You know, you have to use all of the labels. And he's like, well, too late now, I don't want anything to do with them anymore. He felt really left out and it was sad for him. He had just came out that year. So it was, he really wanted to join.
Alessandro: Yeah. If we can make a recommendation to companies looking at LGBTQI is to be more open and having more diversity in their network groups. And very often since it's such at the moment, it is more minority to go so across firms. So I'm not only looking at PWC law but looking more broadly in professional service firms and creating events and spaces for everyone so that everyone can have a role model so that a young lady can see that even if you are a woman identifying as trans, you can make it until partnership level, as well as for the diverse spectrum of identities.
Renata: I suppose that there is a level of, you know, a tokenistic approach to diversity. Have you found that in your research, is that still happening? And is it still a big thing? Because I think that, you know, friends of mine from the queer community, they feel like sometimes they have been considered for a role. They got the role because of that, you know, he's she or he, your day at the token person in the company. And then once they do get the job, there's this huge, massive responsibility. All of a sudden they're in charge of absolutely everything to do with diversity in that organization. And also I feel that when, you know, I have clients from ethnic backgrounds that feel like that there's that pressure for them to do their jobs plus something else to do with their ethnicity, diversity, or their background. It's almost like an educational role.
Alessandro: So yes, it still happens. I'll say it's quite stressful because a lot of minorities still feel that they have been appointed on certain committees just for their identity. And this is very strong in Australia for indigenous people. And we have seen in other research showing how they have to take so many committees on the shoulders, which they prevent them to do their daily jobs and even at advancing their career. And, we also had the case, for instance, in one of our interviews, that one woman that was in the audit committee of an organization, she was the only woman in this and all the other were men. And very often men would not listen to her. It took more than a year to make them accept that it was not just because she was a, they needed a room on their committee to look pretty but that she could actually bring something to the table. So very often also these women that feel a bit isolated at the top because they are the only one there and they have been a bit look at just for what they represent for them and for their skills.
Renata: Yes. Well, it seems like we touched on almost everything unless, you know, is there anything else that you want to add Carly before we wrap up?
Carly: I think I would add with how workplaces can better support women in the workplace. Particularly like at the moment when we feel like women are particularly stressed because I have a lot of workplace pressures and a lot of home pressures at the moment. Is the workplaces to really meaningfully acknowledge the impact of the pandemic on women and their output, and to be authentic when it comes to caring about the wellbeing of their staff. So one thing that came out to is that, you know, a lot of workplaces say, you know, at the end of a message, or if you need help, here are the details of their employee assistance program. Now that sort of is not really seen as meaningful and authentic when it comes to caring about people's wellbeing in the workplace. So I think that to give that genuine message, you need to actively show that you're being authentic.
Carly: If you want your staff, for instance, to, you know, attend a wellbeing course, give them time in their working week to attend that course, sort of don't expect them to their workload, not to be impacted for that week and for them to have to do it in their personal time, just, you know, give those clear messages that we are in a pandemic. And so our expectations of you are not going to be the same as they were prior to the pandemic. And I've got a really good example of how this has worked. My husband started at HESTA, which is a very female orientated superannuation firm, and he started a week before COVID hit and we had our first lock down and they were very, very practical about what they expected from their staff as a result of COVID. And if he needed to, you know, take time for parents leave, they made that really easy.
Carly: They also said things like, you know, we don't expect you to work a 40 hour week at home during this time. And they sort of reviewed all of those expectations and those messages were very clear and very specific. And I think that when you get those messages that tells you that you really are valued and that they really do care about your well-being. So I think that just reconsidering how those messages come across and making sure that they're practical and authentic would really help women feel more supportive. And men too. Everybody, absolutely families at that, the benefit definitely extends. But I think, you know, particularly given that a lot of pressures have fallen on women's shoulders, particularly when it comes to homeschooling and they've lost a lot of supports, like their domestic help, feeling authentically supported by your workplace is really important at the moment.
Renata: Okay. Allesandro, where can people find your research? Where should they go? I'm going to put the links below, but I want you to tell us, and if you have final thoughts, I'm happy to hear them.
Alessandro: Sure. So they can find our work on https://workingwomenandwellbeing.com , where we have a website with all our research, key findings, our media, and also feel free to contact us. And a final thought for maybe any of the lists and errands. And also because it's very close to my heart, identify as a minority, as a sexual identity, like a woman who is transitioning or bisexual who is a very invisible identity at work. And still is a stigma, many workplaces, well do not hesitate to reach out to psychological health because mental health and well-being is still very much a stigma. So many employers, employees assistance programs in Australia, or psychological support, but also talk because this will help to alleviate part of this stress because of hiding this part of your identity already your marginalized community will really impair your wellbeing. So reach out and look after mental health and companies should do also much more to support the mental health of their employees.
Renata: Thank you so much. And in fact, we have another episode in the job-hunting podcasts with Jacob Thomas, from Monash University as well, where we discuss the change of pronouns during your professional career because I had a client who was transitioning and they had a change of pronouns. And that made me reach out to Jacob and record an episode. So I'll put the link below if you want to follow up in and listen to that. And I'll also link below other women-related episodes that we've done with Susan Colantuono, that I mentioned before, Michelle Redfern, Div Pillay, and well, there could be others I'm forgetting, but I'll link them below.
Renata: Thank you so much to both of you. I'm so happy that we finally did this and that your research is out there for a lot of professionals to find out more or listen to this podcast and then reach out to your website, contact you if needed. So thank you for the work you do, really appreciate it.
Carly: Thanks so much, Renata. Thanks for the time.
Alessandro: Thank you. Thank you to all the listeners. Thank you.
About the Host
Hello, I’m Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I’m also an executive coach, job hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach professionals (corporate, non-profit, and public) the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
If you are an ambitious professional who is keen to develop a robust career plan, if you are looking to find your next job or promotion, or if you want to keep a finger on the pulse of the job market so that when you are ready, and an opportunity arises, you can hit the ground running, then this podcast is for you.
In addition to The Job Hunting Podcast, on my website, I have developed a range of courses and services for professionals in career or job transition. And, of course, I also coach private clients.
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