So does Norway, third on the WEF list and famous as the first country to institute a 40% female quota in corporate boardrooms. Women in both countries are well represented in parliament—about 40%. Yet the ladies still work fewer hours than their male counterparts and they are two times as likely to be part timers.
Since I had to write a paper on the Norway experiment in my sociology class, I thought I'd make a few points.
One of the interesting things about Norway is that the corporations were very upset about how they were forced to put more women on their boards - yet, the companies that put the women on the boards did better overall than those that didn't. Which begs the question, why were they so against it?
So why did those companies do better? It was found women did a lot more prep work for board meetings, and spent more time doing the 'job' as opposed to the men who spent a lot more time socializing (basically, women spent more time 'getting down to business'). So to say that women 'work less' strictly based on hours may be a false assumption. Not saying this is normal across all jobs or businesses, but it's interesting that this is what happens at the top levels, and it's interesting that working fewer hours is associated with 'not as valuable'. Reminds me of my mom's old boss - he would show up at 7 am and not go home until 8pm nearly every night, but spent the vast majority of that time hanging out with the guys in the back shop, taking clients out for 2 hour lunches, going golfing and so on. My mom worked her ass off from 8:30-4:30 and got far more accomplished (she did sales too, and even though she had to put her sales through her boss's employee number, she once calculated it and found her sales surpassed his) in far less time. I witnessed it as a teen, and she did work extremely hard compared with her boss. For salary, she made 1/3 what her boss made and definitely did not receive the same bonuses.
Another interesting part of the whole Norway experiment was that those men who were pushed out of their positions were very 'concerned' that women who were 'inexperienced' were taking their positions - even though it was acknowledged that women on the board made for a more successful company (by tracking stock prices) - and thought that women shouldn't be on the boards until they had more 'experience'. Yet, when it was studied, it was shown that women were very rarely able to acquire any experience at lower levels despite being overqualified for those positions. In studying this in my sociology class, the text and my prof theorized this may be due to the "Ol' boys' club" thinking...they enjoy not working as hard (the felt compelled to work harder when the women were there), they enjoy socializing, their position on the BOD is part of their identity and yes, they did feel like they deserved the position more than the women did. The study also found that things were worse for women in terms of sexism if there was only 1 or 2 women on the board (1 woman was seen as the 'other' and representative of the entire sex, 2 women were seen as 'conspiring'), but that the whole dynamic changed as long as there were 3 or more women.
Very interesting stuff. I think the very premise that one must work long hours in order to get things done is, in and of itself, perhaps an antiquated view. It depends on the industry, of course. At the BOD level, at least, it doesn't apply.
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