Because so many women leave the workplace after having kids, company leaders should also offer better support for women who are exiting and re-entering their jobs from maternity leave. Strong support comes from clear communication and thorough preparation. One of the best resources to provide that support is Lori Mihalich-Levin’s Mindful Return initiative. Lori is an attorney, a mom of two kids, and the author of Back to Work after Baby: How to Plan and Navigate a Mindful Return from Maternity Leave. Lori advises companies and offers online courses for both women and men who take parental leave. The course includes a “Leave Template” that allows employees to communicate their plans with their workplace teams before leaving. The course also assists women with the daunting logistics of returning to work, including plans for nursing and childcare, while helping men address the “career fear” that’s often associated with taking leave.
When dads of daughters—or other men—become advocates for workplace flexibility or mentors for women, it’s not just women who gain. Men benefit, too. So do businesses. The same study that found that only thirty-four percent of women had access to the workplace flexibility they needed found that fifty-one percent of men needed more flexibility as well. Flexibility gains for women are gains for everyone seeking a healthier work/life balance. Learning from mentoring relationships also goes in both directions. As Brad Johnson and David Smith explain, “[d]eliberately and skillfully mentoring women is an opportunity for us to open our minds, listen, and become better employees, colleagues, and men.”
Even after three decades, Qusi Alquarqaz still adores being an electrical engineer. He always hoped that his two daughters would follow in his footsteps, but his plan was not to be. After his first daughter, Rawan, announced that she wanted to study fashion design and business, Qusi pinned his remaining hope on his younger daughter, Ryzan. She recently told her dad that she might go to law school to become an international lawyer. Qusi will support her no matter what career she chooses, but he still had a lingering desire to convince at least one daughter of the joys of being an engineer.
With almost thirty years of experience in the power industry, Qusi could make a persuasive case. “Wherever you look you will see engineering’s positive impact on humanity,” he told his daughter. He explained how engineers get to innovate, solve problems, and improve communities. He mentioned the prestige and good pay. He even played on her emotions. “Imagine how life would be like without engineers,” he said. “Engineers avert disasters and protect the world. Be part of that and create a change!” But none of his encouragement worked. His daughter’s answer was still no.
Qusi’s desire for his daughters to become engineers is unusual, which is part of the problem. A recent survey asked 770 parents in 150 countries about the careers they wanted for their kids, who were eleven to sixteen years old. Parents of boys were twice as likely as parents of girls to say that science and technology were the fields they most wanted their child to pursue. The disparity was even bigger for engineering in particular. While eleven percent of parents would choose engineering for their son, only one percent would choose it for their daughter.
Even though Qusi is among the one percent of parents who want their daughters to become engineers, he still couldn’t spark his daughters’ interest. He asked them why they weren’t drawn to engineering, and they said that none of their teachers ever talked about it as a career. That concerned Qusi, who thinks that schools should actively encourage students to become engineers. He also saw his daughters struggle to stay engaged with chemistry and math because the teachers weren’t using real-life problems or examples. When they couldn’t understand the theory, his daughters concluded that they weren’t smart enough for a math or science career.
Qusi also blames the male-dominated reputation of the engineering profession. “When people think about engineering,” he says, “they often think about hard hats, steel beams, winches, long hours, relocation every few years, and instability. There is a misunderstanding that engineering involves tedious or hard physical labor suitable for men only.” Lurking behind those misperceptions is a lack of female role models, which makes it harder to get girls excited about becoming engineers.
The data bears out Qusi’s concerns about the lack of educational pipelines for girls into STEM. Girls and boys perform similarly in math and science during primary school, but girls never participate in computer science and engineering at the same rate as boys. Although women are earning close to sixty percent of all bachelor’s degrees, they earn only forty-three percent of math degrees, thirty-nine percent in physical sciences, nineteen percent in engineering, and eighteen percent in computer science.
These disparities carry over into the workforce. In the US, women fill only a quarter of all STEM jobs. Sometimes art-related jobs are added to this group—changing the acronym to STEAM—which may raise the percentage of women slightly. But overall numbers hide the extremely low participation rates of women in engineering and computer science. Most of these women head into the social, biological, and life sciences, filling only eleven percent of jobs in physics, astronomy, and engineering. Women are particularly scarce in mechanical engineering, where they make up only eight percent of the workforce. Even worse, the percentage of women in computing jobs has actually decreased from thirty-seven percent in 1995 to only twenty-two percent in 2017. This is likely linked to the massive gender pay gap in the field. For those holding an advanced degree and working full-time in science or engineering, women’s median annual salary is over thirty-one percent less than men’s.
Perhaps most disturbing is that many women who earn STEM degrees don’t end up in STEM jobs. Thirty-eight percent of women who get engineering degrees stop being engineers or never take an engineering job in the first place. Almost half of women who enter the tech field eventually leave—a rate that’s more than double that of men. The exit rate is particularly high for women after having their first child because of the minimal support for childcare and nursing and the lack of flexible hours. This loss doesn’t just cost women, it also costs the tech industry itself. Silicon Valley tech companies spend more than $16 billion a year in turnover costs to replace and re-train workers to fill jobs that women and minorities leave.
Women’s exodus from the field—and their reluctance to enter—also results from a pervasive culture of sexual harassment. Dubbed “The Elephant in the Silicon Valley,” the full extent of sexual harassment in the tech industry is just coming to light as part of the #MeToo movement. In a recent survey of over 200 women who had been in the tech industry for at least ten years, a stunning sixty percent reported facing unwanted sexual advances at work. Ninety percent of the women had witnessed sexist behavior at conferences and company offsites, and one in three had feared for their personal safety in work-related situations. In another study of minority female scientists, every single respondent reported experiencing bias at work.
Not wanting to jeopardize their careers, thirty-nine percent of the women who experienced sexual harassment didn’t report it. That’s a rational decision in an industry where retaliation is rampant and women are viewed as outsiders. Sixty-six percent of the women said they were already excluded from social and networking events, and fifty-nine percent said they weren’t given the same opportunities as their male colleagues. For women who did report sexual harassment, sixty percent felt unsatisfied by the response they received. Many women leave the tech industry altogether after facing sexual harassment.
The result of the hostile work environment, pay disparity,