经济学人精选文章：职场媽咪之路

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    现在的职场当中，女性强劲势头不可阻挡，然而，由于固有眼光和某些考虑，女性Themommytrack职场妈咪之路Therealreasonwhym



现在的职场当中，女性強劲势头不可阻擋，然而，由于固有眼光和某些考虑，女性在職场当中仍然屬于弱势群体。女性的职业发展道路上荆棘塞途。学习自然科學、工程学、計算机或者数学相关的女性寥若晨星，晋升机会也微乎其微。




The mommy track职場媽咪之路The real reason why more women don’t rise to the top of companies职场金字塔，女性为何越来越难以登顶？IN “BORGEN”, a Danish television drama, the country’s first female prime minister returns home late each night to domestic bliss. Her stay-at-home husband stacks the dishes and massages her back. The children cheer her televised speeches. But before long her son is seeing a shrink, the neglected hubby is having an affair and our heroine is throwing furniture around her office.在丹麦电视剧《权利的堡垒》中【1】，国家的首位女总理每天很晚才能到家享受天伦之乐。她的家庭煮夫会收拾好了碗碟贴心唤她回家，她的孩子們为她在电視里的精彩演讲而欢呼。但好景不长，不久后她的儿子便被带去看心理医生了，她那被冷落的丈夫也有了外遇，而我们的女英雄只能悲憤得在辦公室里摔家具。Rarely has there been so much angst about women reaching the top. In the Atlantic magazine last month, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first female director of policy planning at America’s State Department, declared that women cannot successfully combine a super-demanding job with bringing up young children. (She quit Washington, DC, to return to academia.) This month a British member of Parliament, Louise Mensch, resigned, saying it was too hard to juggle job and family. Yet the news is not all grim. In July Yahoo!, a struggling internet firm, picked a 37-year-old from Google, Marissa Mayer, who is expecting a baby in October, as its new boss.处于事業巅峰的女性有这么多的痛苦困扰也不多见。在上个月的《大西洋月刊》里，美國国务院政策規划司首位女司长Anne-Marie Slaughter（她已经退出华盛顿政坛回归到學术界）表示女性不可能同時扮演合格的母親和成功职业女性的角色。而本月辞職的英国国會下议院女议员Louise Mensch也说要平衡好家庭和工作的关系困难到几乎不可能。當然現實也不都那么残酷。今年6月，在困境中奋斗挣扎的Yahoo迎来了它的新老板-来自Google的37岁的Marissa Mayer，而她是一位即将在今年10月迎接她孩子出生的准媽妈。America’s biggest companies hire women to fill just over half of entry-level professional jobs. But those women fail to advance proportionally: they occupy only 28% of senior managerial posts, 14% of seats on executive committees and just 3% of chief-executive roles, according to McKinsey & Company, a consultancy. The figures are worse still at big European firms, which is perhaps why the governments of Belgium, France, Italy and Norway have set quotas for women on boards. The European Commission is threatening to impose such rules across the EU. It would be better if women could rise naturally to senior executive roles rather than being forced on to boards. But how can this be done when everything tried so far seems to have failed?在初级專業性岗位上，美国的大型企业愿意一半以上雇佣女性。但之后，这個比例开始逐渐失衡：麦肯锡管理咨询公司的研究表明，女性的比例在高级管理岗位上只有28%，在最高执行委員会里只占了14%，至于首席執行官的职位上，女性只有3%的席位。這個比例在欧洲公司里更糟糕，这或许是为什么比利时、法國、意大利和挪威政府要强制规定公司岗位的女職员比例，欧盟委员會正在歐盟国中硬性实施此类规定。当然，女性要能自然晋升到公司高管职位当然比强行采用这種政策性保护措施更好，但當其他所有方法都无济于事的時候不这样还能怎么办呢？Several factors hold women back at work. Too few study science, engineering, computing or maths. Too few push hard for promotion. Some old-fashioned sexism persists,even in hip, liberal industries. But the biggest obstacle (at least in most rich countries) is children. However organised you are, it is hard to combine family responsibilities with the ultra-long working hours and the “anytime, anywhere” culture of senior corporate jobs. A McKinsey study in 2010 found that both women and men agreed: it is tough for women to climb the corporate ladder with teeth clamped around their ankles. Another McKinsey study in 2007 revealed that 54% of the senior women executives surveyed were childless compared with 29% of the men (and a third were single, nearly double the proportion of partnerless men).女性的职業发展道路上荊棘塞途。學习自然科学、工程學、计算机或者數学相關的女性寥若晨星，晋升机会也微乎其微。一些陈腐的男權主義论坚称即使在開明自由的行业里情况也是如此。但其实她们发展最大的障礙还是来自于是孩子（至少在一些富裕国家）。高管的职位往往工作強度大并且随時随地可能需要處理公务，因此无论你多么善于管理，要把它和家庭责任同时兼顧好简直難于上青天。在2010年麦肯锡的一份研究中指出，男性女性都认同：有孩子负担【2】的女性在職业发展階梯上步履维艰。而在另一份麦肯錫2007年的报告顯示，54%的女性企业高管都是没有小孩的，而这在男性中只有29%(这其中有1/3女性依然是单身，同比是男性的2倍)。Many talented, highly educated women respond by moving into less demanding fields where the hours are more flexible, such as human resources or public relations. Some go part-time or drop out of the workforce entirely. Relatively few stay in the most hard-driving jobs, such as strategy, finance, sales and operations, that provide the best path to the top.很多受过高等教育才華横溢的女性接受了調岗到压力小一些工作时間更加弹性的职位上，例如做人力资源或者公共关系。有一些只做兼职工作甚至索性不工作了。而只有寥寥无几的女性还继续呆在工作艰辛却最有可能晋升到公司最高管理层的职位上，例如做公司戰略、财务、销售、运营等相关工作。Consider this example. Schumpeter sat down with a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who says that, before starting a family, she was prepared to “give blood” to meet deadlines. After the anklebiters appeared, she took a job in corporate strategy at an engineering firm in Paris. She found it infuriating. Her male colleagues wasted time during the day—taking long lunches, gossiping over café au lait—but stayed late every evening. She packed her work into fewer hours, but because she did not put in enough “face time” the firm felt she lacked commitment. She soon quit. Companies that furrow their brows wondering how to stop talented women leaving should pay heed.参考这样一个案例吧：我曾经對話过一个從事公司并购案的律师，她说她会在建立家庭之前为这份辛苦的工作浴血奮戰到最后一刻。而当有了孩子之后，她在巴黎的一家工程公司找了一份戰略策劃的工作。结果这份工作让她很不爽，她发现她的男同事们把大量的时间不是花在吃中饭上就是在咖啡间里聊八卦，他们整天无所事事却还在辦公室故意呆到很晚才下班。而她虽然更高效的完成了工作，却因为在办公室的考勤時间不夠长而被认為没有敬业精神。于是她很快離職了。这个案例值得那些为如何留住女性人才而发愁的公司反思。Could corporate culture change? In their book “Future Work”, Alison Maitland and Peter Thomson describe how some firms give staff more flexibility. Not just women, but men and generation Y recruits, say the authors, are pushing for a saner working culture. Unilever, a consumer-goods firm, wants 55% of its senior managers to be women by 2015. To that end, it allows employees to work anywhere and for as few hours as they like, so long as they get the job done. Despite being one of the world’s most global firms, it discourages travel. McKinsey lets both female and male consultants work for as little as three days a week for proportionally less pay—and still have a shot at making partner. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s high-profile chief operating officer, says that she has left the office at 5.30pm ever since she started a family in 2005.可以通过改变公司文化来改善这种现象吗？在Alison Maitland 和Peter Thomson合著的新书《未來的工作》中，他们阐述了公司應该如何给员工更多的弹性空間。作者认为，不仅是女性员工，男性員工以及新入職场的80,90后也都渴望健全合理的公司文化。快消公司联合利华希望到2015年他们的女性高管比例能达到55%。为了實現这个计划，他们允许员工只要能完成工作任务，在哪里办公，办公多久都不受限制。作为一家最全球化的公司之一，联合利华卻并不鼓勵出差。而麦肯錫公司让自己的咨询顾問们雖然赚的少一些但每周只工作三天，也依然培养出合伙人。Facebook公司的首席运營官Sheryl Sandberg说從她2005年成家后，她每天下午5点半就下班了。Such examples are rare. For most big jobs, there is no avoiding mad hours and lots of travel. Customers do not care about your daughter’s flute recital. Putting women in the C-suite is important for firms, but not as important as making profits; for without profits a company will die. So bosses should try hard to accommodate their employees’ family responsibilities, but only in ways that do not harm the bottom line. Laurence Monnery of Egon Zehnder International, an executive-search firm, reckons that companies should stop penalising people who at some point in their careers have gone part-time.但是這样的例子毕竟凤毛麟角。在大多数的重要岗位上，超长的工作时间和商务出差都在所难免。客戶才不管你女儿是不是要办长笛演奏會了。对于企業来说，培养女性的最高管理层【3】固然重要，但重要性还比不上給公司创造利润，没有了后者會致公司于死地。因此老板們只有在不损害公司利益底线的前提下努力帮助员工承担好他们的家庭责任。亿康先达国际人力資源咨询公司的Laurence Monnery认為企业不應该再处分那些在有时去做兼职的员工。Better be good最好干得精彩点All the flexitime in the world is unlikely to yield equal numbers of men and women in the most demanding jobs. Ms Mayer of Yahoo! is an inspiration to many, but a hard act to follow. She boasts of putting in 90-hour weeks at Google. She believes that “burn-out” is for wimps. She says that she will take two weeks’ maternity leave and work throughout it. If she can turn around the internet’s biggest basket case while dandling a newborn on her knee it will be the greatest triumph for working women since winning the right to wear trousers to the office (which did not happen until 1994 in California). To adapt Malia Obama’s warning to her father on his inauguration, the first pregnant boss of a big, well-known American company had better be good.世上所有高要求的岗位对于男性和女性给予的弹性工作时间不可能能协商出一個绝对平等的待遇。雅虎的Mayer对很多人来说是一个让人鼓舞的榜样，但在实际中很難效仿。之前她在Google的工作時间一周有90个小时。她相信“崩溃”只存在于弱者的詞典里，她表示在將來2周的产假中会坚持工作。如果她真能抱着孩子還能处理好Yahoo这个互联网行业最大的烂摊子,那这将是继1994年在加利福尼亚女性爭取到可以穿裤装上班的权利以來最伟大的職业女性的成就。像Malia Obama对她爸爸就职演說施压时说的那样【4】，作為知名美國企业的首位孕婦老板，Mayer最好干得精彩點！【1】《权利的堡垒(Borgen)》是丹麦的一小時政治剧电视系列。它讲述了一个有魅力的政治家Birgitte Nyborg，意外成为丹麦首位女总理的故事。【2】teeth clamped around their ankles对应后面的“anklebiters”，在英国或澳洲的俚语中有小孩子的意思【3】 C-suite : “C型雇員”, 指企业最高管理層, 因其英文名称开头字母都帶C (如CEO/CFO/COO...)而得名【4】2009年奥巴马在参加其就职典礼前夕，他的10岁的女儿Malia Obama曾对他施压说：“你是第一位非裔美国總统，内容最好精彩点。”