Carolyn Centeno* says women continue to be plagued with the idea that work and motherhood are at odds with each other and they have to choose between them.
Context is queen.
Female leadership is not only the outcome of good intentions and hard work, it also comes from societal and systemic changes to address the realities of what it means to be a woman (whether you choose to become a mother or not) and a leader (in whatever form you choose to lead).
Recently, one Professor at IESE, an innovative global business school in Spain, sought to understand these systemic realities of female leadership at a global level and how they have changed since 2006.
Professor Nuria Chinchilla (pictured), Director of the International Center on Work and Family, has dedicated her career to understanding the nuance of work–life balance, a hot topic in leadership circles of every organisation.
Her passion for this topic was sparked when she disputed the idea that work and life are at odds with each other and women have to choose to be successful in either.
This may seem like a concept we have moved past.
But what’s surprising is that it’s actually not.
And the choice continues to plague another generation of women around the world.
For the IESE Global Leadership Survey, Professor Chinchilla and team sampled thousands of inputs across 34 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries to understand the nuances behind why specific countries have higher numbers of female leadership in four general areas: political leadership (political figures), social leadership (social support for mothers), business leadership (management) and personal leadership (entrepreneurship).
And the findings are fascinating.
For instance, the US is quite complex.
It is ranked ninth in terms of the amount of women who decide to be mums, but 34th in terms of social leadership due to no mandated paid maternity leave, flexible work schedules and reasonable school hours.
It is ranked fifth in business leadership, but 24th in the world in terms of overall female leadership.
That means US women are choosing to have more babies than most countries and be business leaders, despite the fact the US had severely shorter and unpaid maternity leave periods than other countries and impossible-to-work-around school hours.
This leads most women who want children to be forced into a complex web of questions: freeze their eggs (an expensive, long and invasive process), have their partners stay home or have a more flexible job, spend an inordinate amount on childcare or be completely burnt out doing everything.
Professor Chinchilla also pointed out an interesting negative outcome of a country which had good intentions.
Spain has tried to protect flexibility towards female leaders through a law that prevents organisations from firing mothers working part-time until their children are 12 years old.
This would seem like a really empathetic law that would prevent mistreatment from happening and provide more flexible work schedules.
What is actually happening is quite different.
Most organisation in Spain fear hiring women of childbearing age for more flexible positions due to the possibility that they will have children, be underperformers and not be able to get rid of them.
The important word there is the possibility.
That is basically any woman who is perceived as fertile in their twenties to forties.
The outcome for women who do not want to have children is that they are not hired for more flexible jobs.
This law is a great example of a societal change that was well-intentioned but has caused less flexibility for women, which causes a talent gap for the economy.
France on the other hand, she says, places family at the centre of its policies.
Their “couverture maladie universelle” takes into consideration women who have healthcare costs related to childbirth, paid modular maternity and paternity leave based on the amount of children, and pays families a cheque every week to support their family.
Their work schedules are more flexible and most school hours have a half-day Wednesday.
The country, therefore, creates a flexible schedule that makes it easier on families.
I asked Professor Chinchilla how can we change globally to embrace female leadership.
She outlined what she calls the ‘three Fs’ and the ‘five Cs’.
The first is through Femininity: we have to open the eyes of both men and women to embrace what it means to be a woman through a caring and complementary economy.
That means that even if women do not choose to be mothers, both genders have to work together in a way that is complementary and empathetic to the reality of the bias we put on them and the choices we make that affect their ultimate choice to become them.
The second is Flexibility through commitment and continence.
That means that we have to create workplaces and societies that allow for us to be flexible with schedules and mindset so that we can make a commitment to their futures and put trust (continence) in them.
The third is family (in the traditional or non-traditional sense) and co-responsibility and competencies.
Whether or not we choose to have families, we have to create support systems for women through partnership (co-responsibility) of their chosen partners or selected family/friends and embrace the competencies of women.
When I asked her what advice she would give women around the world she told me that women today who have ambitions to be mothers should be careful to pick a partner or friends who support them and their dreams, to be very intentional about where they want to live and work and why (support, maternity leave, labour laws, and more), and if they can, who they work for (what type of culture they are creating, if they have unconscious biases and if they are able to give them the flexibility they need).
So ladies (and gentlemen), let’s work together to bring these more subtle nuances of society and business to light in how they are affecting how we define what it means to be a woman and a leader today.
* Carolyn Centeno is a brand strategist and founder of The We Age.
This article first appeared at www.forbes.com.
