Many policies promote work-family balance, i.e. a balance between work and personal life. What has more effect, however, is not the policies, but the leadership. Going back to what we saw in the July 2024 seminar, the most important thing is human relations and the links we develop: whether or not we trust our bosses, whether or not we can tell them about our challenges.
When François Rabelais said, “Laughter is man’s attribute”, he was of course talking about mankind… But the question still needs to be asked: are men and women equal when it comes to laughter?
To find out, let’s take a look at the figures and the scientific literature on the subject.
In fact, when we talk about the “situation of women in the past”, we’re referring to a specific situation: that of bourgeois women in the 19th century.
Bourgeois because in other environments, women have always worked outside the home or in family businesses.
The bourgeois idea we’re referring to was that of the “devoted mother”, the “obedient daughter”, submissive to the man and with no aspirations other than marriage and little else.
From the second half of the twentieth century onwards, women began to change this idea and feminisms were born.
Just as I like to talk about feminisms in the plural, I prefer to talk about women in the plural.
Women participate more actively in society, in politics, in their professions, because they also have a lot to say.
In that sense, I think we’ve won.
Based on our reading of the GSS data, there is no strong evidence of weakening support for the core principle of gender equality among men, including young men.Questions about the relative position of men and women, the role of feminism, the case for preferential treatment, the extent of sex discrimination (in either direction) are being asked with new urgency. There is much to learn here. But it should be some comfort that, up to this point, fears of a male backlash against gender equality are likely overstated.
Our findings align with a growing consensus among gender scholars: What holds women back at work is not some unique challenge of balancing the demands of work and family but rather a general problem of overwork that prevails in contemporary corporate culture.
Women and men alike suffer as a result. But women pay higher professional costs. If we want to solve this problem, we must reconsider what we’re willing to allow the workplace to demand of all employees.
The Paris Olympic Games will be the first in history to feature parity: 5250 female and 5250 male athletes are expected to take part in this major international sporting event.
But does parity mean mixity?
Not quite.
Taking an interest in the way sport deals with the issue of gender equality is particularly interesting for thinking about the subject in business too.
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