Work-Life Among Information Workers: Notes from BlogHer ’10

At the BlogHer Conference in New York City this weekend, I co-hosted a panel to discuss how bloggers can use their powerful voices to rally for more effective family-friendly workplace policies. You can read a summary of the panel here.

The whole conference was imbued with discussions about work-life. I spoke with several women from large corporations who enjoyed flexibility and great policies, but spoke of a fear of stigma if they took full advantage. I spoke with a lot of small business owners who supported care policies but found it difficult to manage both financially and logistically when their employees took leaves. Of course, when you get 2,400 ambitious women together you’re going to discuss our struggles to achieve work life fit! But I had several a-ha moments during the two day event.

1) The most urgent point that emerged during my BlogHer session was something I had not thought much about- but once it was raised, it instantly hit a nerve. An audience member raised the issue of what she referred to as the “ghettoized female teleworker.” The audience instantly jumped on this topic- again, not surprising in a room full of information workers. How do you manage to both work remotely and stay in the game? Does working from home diminish an employers’ sense of your ambition?

Another audience member asked, “What ARE the steps to convincing the world/companies/men believe that being at home isn’t “sitting at home eating bonbons?”

I shared some of my own tips: the first is to charge what you’re worth, and not diminish your salary even though you work remotely. The second is to be professional: hold calls and meetings on a quality phone line, be available, and pretend like you’re in the office when you talk to colleagues. Never make jokes about being in your pajamas! Finally, make time for face-time, even if it’s periodic.

“We need to shift the perception that telecommuters are lazy, undressed, and off the grid.”  Another audience member suggested remote workers are even more available than office workers, since homeworkers are usually online. This, however, brings challenges too. Which leads me to point two.

2) In my session, we opened with the question: how many of you work flexibly? Almost every single hand went up. Indeed, at a breakfast with several senior women PepsiCo executives at the BlogHer Conference, The Chief Communications Officer of all of PepsiCo, Chief Marketing Officer of Gatorade, and VP of Global Design and Development all agreed they could take the time they needed for family. That’s not the issue: the issue is the unrelenting lack of boundaries that means any time they take away from the office needs to be “made up” at odd hours.

Gatorade CMO Sarah Robb O’Hagan referred to this as her personal “watchout”: everyone works flexible schedules, but they also work through the weekends. For professionals and professional services workers, the issue is not flexibility. It’s managing our own and others’ expectations of the sheer amount of time we spending working, if not necessarily at work.

3) From a public policy perspective, we had an interesting discussion (see CNN’s Eric Kuhn on the meeting here) with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Anita Jackson of MomsRising.org asked the Senator to share her thoughts on how to finally bring family friendly practices to every American business. Gillibrand started to reply with a rote answer on how businesses have to recognize that family friendly policies are good for business. I pushed the Senator: “you can’t just put the onus on companies and expect them to change everything.” She then shifted from platititudes to discussing her program to provide tax credits for employers to provide child care incentives.

Everyone knows that in an ideal world, on site childcare would be fabulous. But that will not happen anytime soon. Tax credits for large and small businesses who help provide free resource and referrals for childcare is different, and a more workable approach. For example, Senator Gillibrand supports a proposal to allow employers to deduct 20 percent of the costs for childcare resources and referral services. Currently employers can deduct only 10 percent of those costs. Senator Gillibrand also supports increasing the maximum deduction from $150,000 to $225,000.

For more on Gillibrand’s family friendly policies, click here. Tax credits alone won’t do much. But this specific policy focus reminded me that we must consider what Chrysula Winegar calls the “trinity” of elements that will bring about change: “It’s the holy trinity of individual knowledge and responsibility, corporate culture and policy and careful base-line legislation.”

Entrepreneurs: not who you think they are

Cross posted from Huffington Post:

If I say “entrepreneur,” whose image flashes into your head? Is it Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook barely out of his teens? Is it a bunch of brash twentysomethings coding madly on their way to Silicon Valley stardom? If you’re a young mother, as I am, it might be that other working mom who just happened upon a million dollar idea while she was whipping up organic baby food in her kitchen. Guess what: none of these stereotypes fits the typical American entrepreneur.

The obsession with venture capital funded entrepreneurship, the big exit, the genius nerd working 24-7 on code is misplaced, and it’s really holding women back. About 41% of U.S. private companies are female-owned, but only 3 to 5% of them get venture funding, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research. But most successful businesses are not VC-funded, and they are not overnight sensations.

I recently started a small business. This is not a venture capital type of business. This is a business that I started to earn a decent living, enjoy the fruits and flexibility of being my own boss, and hopefully do some good in the world. I only hope it will be what people dismissively often call a “lifestyle” business. A lifestyle business, in VC terms, is a business that will not return the multiples a venture capitalist needs to justify an investment. It is a venture that might support its founder and staff, but is not going to be the next Google. This definition is perfectly reasonable if you are a venture capitalist: after all, you need to make money. And we need Google and Facebook. But we need other businesses too. And there is a meme out there in the business literature that women are hamstrung by the desire to create lifestyle businesses, that we’re thinking too small. An investor recently said to me, “You see women starting lifestyle businesses. They are capable of growing large businesses, but they want to stay small. And if that’s what they want, that’s fine.” The implied message is that women won’t change the world by simply starting lifestyle businesses; new research shows that may not be true.

I was lucky enough to be at a small meeting at Harvard this week with Vivek Wadhwa, plus women entrepreneurs, VC’s, and academics. Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic who teaches at Duke and Harvard, shared work he has been doing with the Kauffman Foundation. The results show that entrepreneurs don’t have to be born; they can be made. And they don’t even have to be young!

Spending time with Wadhwa changed my thinking and I realized, perhaps it’s our very image of an entrepreneur that holds women back.

Vivek has been researching what makes an entrepreneur. It turns out they mostly come from the workforce, they are older than we might expect–middle aged–they have families, and want to make it big before it’s too late.

And here’s the thing about women: Wadhwa’s research finds that the profile of successful women entrepreneurs is the same as men. There are some differences: women are more conservative, women rely more on business partners, and need more encouragement than men do. But the life circumstances that lead them into entrepreneurship are not different. Wadhwa includes, “By almost every metric you look at, women-led companies do better than men do. And we’re handicapping these women.”

Wadhwa says too many decisions are guided by the stereotype that the ideal entrepreneur to invest in is Mark Zuckerberg. The people who get encouragement are those young brash white males. The vast majority of founders of companies that have made America what it is are not Zuckerberg. And, says Wadhwa, you end up leaving out half the population if you fund based on stereotypes.

On his blog A VC, Fred Wilson quotes entrepreneur Tereza, who provides a potential solution to the example of Y Combinator, a legendary tech incubator that has funded lots of successful (male) young tech entrepreneurs:

“Y Combinator participants are for the most part very young — in their early 20′s. This is not when women would be most inclined. Women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing, and be trained and experienced in it. That takes up our 20′s. We have kids in our 30′s. Our entrepreneurial sweet spot is around age 40. Conventional tech investors are not really into this group and the metrics they look for are really hard for these people to hit. Most of the (few) women’s businesses that go big were funded by friends & family or strategics, not traditional angels and VCs.”

If most successful businesses started by women who are older and rely on the dollars of families and friends (or try to grow the business from revenue) why do we promote the mythology of the VC-funded firm? Wadhwa suggested that perhaps we should encourage “lifestyle” businesses that encourage women to give a piece of profits to investors over time: He says this would create more jobs over time and encourage long term investment and growth. Sounds like the American dream to me. Now we need to build media and social media energy around changing the VC myth; Rachel Sklar is helping to get this started with Change the Ratio here.

It all comes down to how you define a successful entrepreneur, in the culture, in the media, and among ourselves. Very few are multi-million dollar venture funded efforts, but they can grow to be multi-million dollar businesses. Or not, and that’s fine too.

Blogging from the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility

I’ll be at the White House tomorrow covering the first ever Forum on Workplace Flexibility.

You can watch the meeting stream live starting at 1:15 on WhiteHouse.gov.

For incredible perspective on the historic nature of this event, please read Ellen Galinsky’s column on the Huffington Post:

The idea of having a White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility would have been beyond anything I could have imagined when a literally handful of us came to the independent conclusion in the 1970s that work was “not working” for employees.

We came from very different places in arriving at the same conclusion. My own research had been on children and families as had others’; a few had conducted research on the workplace; and a few worked for large corporations or for business schools. And even before the Internet would have made finding each other easy, we did manage to connect, to meet, conduct studies, and implement more family-friendly programs and policies (as they were called in those days).

At a meeting of the Conference Board’s Work Life Leadership Council (where many of us convened on a regular basis beginning in 1983), we once went around the room, round-robin style, to share why we cared so much about this issue. The reasons were all profoundly personal–one of us had had a boss who was not flexible during a difficult pregnancy, another had huge support during the death of a parent, and another had a daughter who was treated differently than her male colleagues. The reasons were all about our own families and personal lives.

Although those of us who joined forces to help create the field of work and family life were men and women, we began by focusing on women and child care. We used to say, “demographics are destiny,” meaning that the rapid influx of women into the workforce made workplace change inevitable. Our words, however, hit many brick walls–the prevailing attitudes were “if women can’t hack it in the workplace, they should go home.” So while the business champions argued that these shifts in workforce demographics were here to stay, they still had the need to make a strong business case for addressing child care (turnover and absenteeism were costly) so that they could “fix” the problem. And frankly, some truly believed that they could fix this problem and then move back to serious business issues.

But, of course, child care problems were not so easily “fixed,” and the business champions among us got more deeply enmeshed in doing more with child care, then in adding elder care and workplace flexibility to their portfolios.

Still there was strong resistance. Work and family life were seen private issues, not business concerns. I can’t tell you how times we heard, “if you give employees an inch (flexibility), they will take a mile.” In a worldview where “presence equals productivity,” the business champions found the road to workplace change full of pitfalls.

What’s more, we all understood the resistance. The view that “presence equals productivity” is appropriate in an industrial economy. Furthermore, managing in new ways to work can be difficult.

Read more here

Wolf at BestBuy- Women’s Affinity Group with Bottom Line Effect

I’ve been fascinated by BestBuy’s Wolf program (their women’s leadership program) for a long time. I’m also a member of Julie Gilbert’s excellent WolfPack Online Community. Julie founded Wolf when she worked at BestBuy and has since left to start her own Wolf venture.

At the Conference Board Work Life Conference in DC current Wolf leaders Mary Stoddart and Liz Haesler talked about their strategy. It’s a bit shocking to a purist. Wolf is a women’s leadership- or affinity group- made up of BestBuy hourly employees, BestBuy corporate/executive employees…and BestBuy customers. At some level, it’s meant to sell more appliances for BestBuy. But it also seems to function as an effective way to promote women’s leadership and professional growth at BB. They noted that “six years ago women weren’t banging down the door to work at BestBuy,” now, apparently, they are. Unlike a lot of corporate affinity groups, the Wolf model helps literally push the company’s bottom line.

There’s a whole Wolf language but the concept is simple: networking events with local customers create pilot groups of “Omegas” who give BestBuy advice. Local store employees drive these groups, and then get help from corporate women to put together proposals, business cases, etc.

Dr. Leslie Wolfe of the Center for Women Policy Studies said, it’s “Basic community organizing.” Well, yes, but community organizing that gets corporate attention and money by driving sales in a slow sector for BB- appliances. It’s actually very smart.

The Mommyblogging Mystique

Cross-posted from Huffington Post:
If you’re a mom, you probably work. But isn’t there at least a little fantasy piece of you that would prefer to work when you wanted to, or from home? Wouldn’t you love to have a personal brand that allows you to get recognition and respect without having to show up 9-6 in an office with a long commute? Well, according to the New York Times, if you were a successful mommyblogger, you could do just that: toddler in lap, laptop buzzing.

Smart women online are up in arms about the Times’ Styles section piece. For example Joanne Bamberger put words into many mouths when she wrote in response to the piece on mommybloggers, “Was it really necessary to write a story on a professional blogging conference with the title Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. She’s Busy Building Her Brand? The headline alone drips with mocking condescension that says to the world that it’s perfectly acceptable to continue to belittle women for the exact same things that men are doing in the online world today. We’ve come a long way? Not.”

This is not the first such mommyblogger story and yet it conforms to a pattern. Like the stay at home mom cum CEO of her own organic foods brand, the well-paid mommyblogger is a fantasy figure for our time. I believe the fantasy of mommyblogging (different than the reality, which is as heterogeneous and varied as the Internet itself) is part of our modern day Feminine Mystique. The fantasy of mommyblogging as portrayed by the mainstream media allows women to gain some power and recognition, but only in the safest possible way. Because after all, these moms are at home with the kids, at least when they aren’t at blogging conferences. Mommyblogging is seen as safe and non-threatening (although if you actually read the best of it, it is far from safe). Women have been getting paid to write about kids stuff for centuries.

Why do we need the fantasy? Because most women feel ambivalent about the reality of our work lives, which is that we have to work, long hours usually, and we have less flexibility than we need. The truth is, we are all of us, men and women, ambivalent about the increasing financial responsibilities women face, which means less time for home pursuits and time with kids. Women earn 44% of household income in the US, and this will only increase, as we’ve just become half the workforce.

A Pew study finds only a small minority of Americans (19 percent) now think women should return to their traditional roles in society. But Pew also finds that most parents think that moms working part-time is ideal. Most parents experience work-life conflict. A 2002 Catalyst survey found 49% of working mothers who were not the sole breadwinner said they would leave their jobs if their husband earned enough money for the family to live comfortably.

Robin Marty writes on Care2, “The obvious problem [with the article], which Mom 101 points out so succinctly, is that it’s still assumed that women who blog are a homogeneous group that sit at home and write up their day to day moments raising their cherubic cheeked progeny in between folding the laundry, making the dinner and catching up on our soaps.”

The public fascination with the mommyblogger is that it’s a non-threatening fantasy of successful womanhood in the Digital Age. The media likes this message too. Part of us want to go back to that life. But since we also have the pressure to use all of our education and earn money (well, in truth, most of us have to earn more than a little money, but we’re talking fantasy here) what better, and more femininely appropriate way to do it than mommyblogging!

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