This week, the future for working women after a really tough stretch. Plus, McKinsey senior partner Dame Vivian Hunt and former Unilever CEO Paul Polman on stakeholder capitalism, and business building from the ground up. |
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Higher hurdles. McKinsey research over the past year shows just how dramatically the COVID-19 pandemic has affected working women globally. They’ve grappled with a “double shift” of household responsibilities, mental health challenges, a more difficult remote-work experience, and higher rates of unemployment. Women in emerging economies have struggled even more, reporting greater challenges and feeling them more acutely than those in developed nations. |
Dropping out. The latest Women in the Workplace report shows that after years of halting progress in corporate America, one in four working women said pandemic-related challenges had made them consider downshifting their careers or dropping out of the workforce entirely. For working mothers—especially those with young children—that number was one in three. And in a new McKinsey American Opportunity Survey, women were among the most likely to report decreases in income, savings, overall wealth, and well-being over the past 12 months. Women were also the most likely of any group we surveyed to say that they are not on track to achieve their long-term financial goals. |
‘It’s a spiral.’ Research shows that what is good for gender equality is good for companies, the economy, and society. Yet the recession caused by the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on women’s employment—so much so that many have dubbed it the first “shecession.” In a recent conversation with McKinsey, Dr. Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, noted that gaps in employment can affect rates of promotion and compensation, among other career factors. “Seeing the job numbers from December, combined with some of the commentary we are seeing about no end in sight for the job losses of women, it’s a spiral,” she noted. “Because for those women who are able to go back to work, they’re not going to be able to advance to the degree they would have before.” |
Given all that … what are the solutions? In all of our research, one solution rose above the rest: improving access to childcare. The McKinsey Global Institute found that the value of unpaid care work done by women is $10 trillion, or 13 percent of global GDP. Possible interventions include the state-funded provision of childcare or tax policies that encourage both spouses to work; family-friendly policies, such as flexible and part-time programs, to support workers experiencing an increased childcare burden during the pandemic and beyond; and a professionalized childcare industry, with public-financing support, in developing countries, where the social-services infrastructure is less well developed. |
Businesses can act. Companies, too, can adjust childcare-related policies and programs. One step is to reset norms around flexibility—including making paternity leave as available and commonly used by men as maternity leave is by women—and creating returnships so that women who have to leave the workforce can reenter it without penalty. |
Building a better workplace. But more broadly, organizations can respond by building a more flexible and empathetic workplace that will retain the employees most affected by the pandemic and nurture a culture in which working women have equal opportunity to achieve their potential. “Never waste a crisis” may be a cliché, but in this case it rings true: policy makers and business leaders have a chance to act now to remove barriers to working women or allow a disappointing status quo to prevail, leaving massive economic opportunity on the table and negatively affecting the lives of millions of women. |
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OFF THE CHARTS |
Boards: All together now |
The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated operational changes at companies as well as strengthened the collaboration between board directors and management—both key to a board’s success. In the depths of the pandemic, boards’ interest in corporate resilience surged while every other topic fell down the agenda. |
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See McKinsey’s daily charts on a wide range of business topics here. |
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PODCAST |
In reputations we trust |
In this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey senior partner Dame Vivian Hunt and former Unilever CEO Paul Polman, now cofounder and cochair of IMAGINE, talk about the growing imperative for stakeholder capitalism—and how building long-term value for everyone is increasingly good for the bottom line. “The value of a company now is created in trust and reputation,” Polman said. “That means, ‘do what you say, say what you do.’ That means working in a much more transparent environment.” |
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MORE ON MCKINSEY.COM |
How to launch a new business | Despite growing enthusiasm for business building, incumbents with good ideas, strong commitments, and big ambitions frequently run into a big question: How do we actually go about building a business? Here are three approaches that work. |
Ten ideas to unlock Indonesia’s growth after COVID-19 | If the country can quickly return to prepandemic growth rates, it may become the world’s seventh-largest economy by 2030. |
Climbing the private-equity learning curve | CEOs who are used to engaging with public-company boards need a different playbook when it comes to private-equity boards. Here’s what they can expect. |
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FOUR QUESTIONS FOR |
Josh Linkner |
Josh Linkner is the founder and CEO of five tech companies and a professional-level jazz guitarist. His new book, Big Little Breakthroughs, is a practical guide for turning ordinary ideas into extraordinary results.
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What problem are you trying to solve with this book? |
Innovation, generally, is looked at as an exclusive club for a select few. I set out to write a book that helps everyday people become everyday innovators. I was trying to give people a practical tool kit, as well as some inspirational mindsets, so they can go on to unlock their own creative potential—ultimately, to achieve the outcomes that they care about the most. |
What is it that holds us back? |
I saw a study that 72 percent of our gross domestic product here in the United States doesn’t come from the breakthrough ideas that we see in the media; it comes from everyday innovation—people building their small businesses, say. The research is crystal clear that all of us, and I mean all of us, have enormous reservoirs of dormant creative capacity. Your hardware is there, and so then the question is what’s holding us back? It turns out that fear, not a lack of natural talent, is the biggest blocker of creativity. |
Fear and creativity cannot coexist. If there’s fear in the room or in the building, your creativity is going to suffer. The best thing that we can do for ourselves and our teams is to create a safe environment where all ideas are celebrated—the good, the bad, and the ugly—because sometimes it takes a bad idea to get to the good ones. |
How do organizations turn an anticreative bias into something that can spur more creativity? |
We need to talk about how do we get those ideas out of people’s brains. If you have a 10,000-person organization, how do you get everybody being creative? Unfortunately, so often it looks like this: there are 16 people who have permission to be creative, and all these other amazing people, who, by the way, we hired for their creativity—we shut it down and don’t let them use it. So for leaders running organizations of any size, I think it’s one of the most important jobs—to create a systemized approach to cultivating and harnessing and deploying that resource. |
What’s the difference between an idea and a spark? |
If you think of an idea as a molecule, what’s inside the molecule? Stick it under the microscope and let’s take a look. So I tried to look at the anatomy of an idea. And in fact, what I recommend people do is when they’re just kicking around new ideas, don’t even call them ideas, because an idea itself, in theory, is ready for scrutiny. |
Instead, you should first generate ideas and think of them as a spark. And that’s a much easier way to deal with it because if you’re sharing a spark, you’re not sort of getting behind it and endorsing it. You’re just saying, “Hey, it’s a possibility.” And often it’s the spark that leads to the spark that leads to the spark that becomes the great idea. Too often, people extinguish those sparks prematurely, without giving them the time and space to really breathe. |
This is an excerpt from a recent edition of our new Author Talks series on McKinsey.com. Check out other interviews in the series, as well as our exclusive lists of business bestsellers on our McKinsey on Books page. |
— Edited by Barbara Tierney |
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BACKTALK |
Have feedback or other ideas? We’d love to hear from you. |
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