According to new research by Chicago-based executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, women now hold one fifth (20.2%) of corporate board seats in the U.S. That’s progress from the 18.7% they held in 2013 and a three-percentage-point rise from the 17.2% of seats women held when Heidrick & Struggles first started tracking women on boards in 2009. If the rate of increase holds steady, Heidrick predicts, women on boards will achieve parity with men in 2042, 27 years from now.
Heidrick sent me a press release heralding this as good news. “Board selection committees are becoming acutely aware that women are underrepresented in the boardroom and that the fresh perspectives they bring can be good for the bottom line,” says Bonnie Gwin, a managing partner at Heidrick, in the release.
But I have to wonder. Should we be cheering? That’s more than a quarter century away, when almost all of the women of my generation, the Baby Boomers, will be retired. To me the progress is too slow.
I know first-hand that becoming a parent slows many women down. Pumping breast milk at work is draining and time-consuming, and business travel that takes you away from your small children can be wrenching. We want to be present for our kids as they get older, as Anne-Marie Slaughter pointed out so eloquently in her much-discussed Atlantic magazine article three years ago, “Whey Women Still Can’t Have It All.” I only have one child who is reasonably well-adjusted but I went through the college search process with him this year and found it time-consuming and emotionally draining.
To be sure, increasing numbers of women are “leaning in” to their careers, in the words of billionaire Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and more men are doing more to care for children. But I don’t think leaning in is becoming easier. It’s getting harder, since we are all always on call now and work hours are getting longer, not shorter. Many workers have grueling travel schedules that make it nearly impossible to carve out enough time to feel like they are being good parents. I recently reported on a somewhat depressing study by the Families and Work Institute together with the Society of Human Resource Managers that showed that 38% of employers let people work from home on a regular basis, up from 23% six years ago. It’s encouraging that the number is on the rise but discouraging that the percentage is still so low. And that study also showed that the percentage of employers who allow a career break for family reasons has gone down, from 64% in 2008 to 52% today.
American companies need to recognize the demands of family, and work harder to make it easier for mothers to work harder if they choose. At the same time, we need a radical reevaluation of the intensity of work that prepares executives for boards. We need a greater commitment to flextime, more liberal work-at-home policies, a nationwide commitment to high-quality, affordable early childhood care, and salary equity for women. And dare I say it, we need to think about cutting back on the hours in the workday, instead of prolonging them.
We shouldn’t have to wait more than a quarter century before women and men have parity on corporate boards.
