Regarded as one of the foremost experts on negotiation and gender, scholar Hannah Riley Bowles has conducted highly relevant research on women's leadership and the role of negotiation in educational and career advancement, including managing work-life conflict. the family. She is one of the star professors at Harvard, where she chairs the Area of ​​Management, Leadership and Decision Sciences (MLD) at HKS (Harvard Kennedy School of Government), co-directs the Center for Public Leadership and the Women and Public Policy Program, and directs Women & Power and Women Leading Change, HKS's women's executive programs.

To talk about the multiple gender challenges, she connects via Zoom with La Tercera from her home in Boston. She is emphatic in looking from a multiple and intersectional perspective, as well as thinking not only about improving institutions and public policies, but helping people in their daily lives and challenges, especially by highlighting the importance of co-responsibility. "It's really hard, not just in heteronormative couples, to share the work completely equally," she says.

The coronavirus has deepened gender inequalities. What are the main challenges for the near future?

First, it is very important to think about this from an intersectional perspective. In the United States we are talking about and profiling a lot of mothers in crisis, but many of the ones we are showing are relatively privileged. And if you try to break down the numbers, it's clear that the pandemic has different implications for those who can work remotely and those who can't. It is a critical distinction. For people who were working in person and lost their jobs in sectors like retail, where women are overrepresented, it was very hard. And then there are jobs -where there is also an overrepresentation of women-, who must attend in person: nurses, first line of health, caregivers, emergency personnel. They have experienced severe stress. (The pandemic) looks very different depending on your socioeconomic status and how you connect to your work.

Which women have been the most affected by the pandemic?

Women who are heads of household, in single-parent households, and who had to go to work in person, without flexibility. And there they were in a very difficult position, there was not much they could do. And what we saw in our data is that if they didn't have support, or family members, like grandparents or grandmothers who could fill in, then maybe they dropped out of the workforce or reduced their hours. Their situation became increasingly precarious, with the potential to fall into poverty. That was one of the toughest scenarios, where we put working parents in a situation where they really had nowhere to go.

What measures can be taken for this group in this year?

I think there might be an opportunity for them to be retrained, and the point is how do we think, from a future of work perspective, about training people for things that robots won't be able to do. For example, care work. And it's very important to think about these issues not just in terms of how privileged you are, but what kind of job you're in, and whether your kind of job is changing as a result of the pandemic.

What has happened to other groups of women?

If you look at the reality of professionals or university-educated, knowledge workers or administrative staff, who have had the possibility to carry out their tasks remotely, they have suffered by having educational and care work (of children) back inside the house. And that's what women have suffered more than men, that's true. But I also think there is an opportunity in the growth of remote work.

Why?

The best evidence shows that the gender gap for college-educated people is really in the gender division of housework. To the fact that women pay a cost for having more flexible and predictable work because they are caring, as established by Claudia Goldin's research. And while it's true that there is gender segregation in certain occupations, with men tending to be in the higher paying occupations, even - as Goldin says - if you look at lawyers, they earn much less than half if they do 40 hours a week instead of 80. In certain professions, businesses, laws, there is a pay off for working huge amounts of hours. If we build muscle to have more flexible work and are able to retain those more flexible workers, we could be entering a new period.

But wouldn't it be bad for women to be trapped in that category of flexible work?

There is an opportunity, precisely, because I see men wanting to have access to these more flexible arrangements as well. If flex jobs morph into a new “pink collar” or “mommy track” job, that's not good. If only women with children enter the flexible schemes, it is not good. But if organizations develop the ability to work and coordinate remotely, I think we'll see everyone take advantage of that, and that can open doors. It doesn't necessarily make life any easier: People who work flexibly often tend to work longer hours than those in the office, and that's not counting unpaid work from home and juggling all the time. But taking that into account, it also gives you this flexibility to live a fuller life.

“Valuing care work is critical”

You are an expert in negotiation and gender. How can the gap or access to better jobs be negotiated?

I have two answers for that. First, I think that focusing on negotiation and mutually beneficial resolution of problems can speed things up. Because there are many organizations, large corporations, that are introducing flexibility, wellness and health policies, and people don't know how to use them. And as much as there are good policies, people don't use them or are afraid to use them. And that is a critical point where the negotiation comes in. Negotiation is very important in times of change, because it is a way of making sense, of understanding what matters to you, explaining where I am starting from, showing limits, suggesting creative solutions... I think this is a key moment for everyone us in terms of negotiating and renegotiating what the future of work is, and negotiation is central to this. The second important element is that in the United States there is a lot of discussion today about "fixing the system and not the people." That everything should be at the level of public policy.

And what's the problem with that look?

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That if you only fix the system and not the people, and only focus on institutional change, you are effectively saying that you know all the answers. And I think that could be a bit of liberal paternalism or progressive paternalism, of assuming that we know how to build a more equitable world. Of course we need changes in public policy, and for people with as much institutional influence as possible to push forward for institutional change. But we should also be looking for information and input from the bottom up. We need the ideas of the same people. Privilege, by definition, underestimates or obscures the barriers to advancement.

Why exactly?

People with privilege have all the resources available to them and therefore see all the opportunities. And they literally don't understand what the landscape looks like for people who are struggling to get ahead. So we must be looking and gathering input and asking: would this work for you? o How can I make the forms of compensation available to you in this organization more transparent? The other thing that I would like to emphasize has to do with the part of paternity, of the parents. I think it's critically important.

Why?

Because in some debates the role of fatherhood continues to be merged or associated (only) with women. And we will fall short of gender equality if we continue to pile paid work on top of women's unpaid work. What we should be doing is thinking, on the one hand, of enriching the economy and politics with more intellectual and human capital of women, and also enriching the life of the family and that of men with more opportunities for care work for they.

How has this been affected by the pandemic?

One of the things that has come out of the interviews I've been doing for my research is how impressed many parents are with how much their children need them. Being at home (due to the pandemic) they saw it, and they liked it a lot, and they have recognized the importance of this. So we will see, I hope, is that there is support from men and women to see how they handle these roles together.

Returning to gender and negotiation: her own research has established that if a woman negotiates assertively or directly, she generates rejection; but the same in a man is valued. How to overcome this?

What the data repeatedly shows is that women face resistance when advocating for themselves, especially for pay. Salary is something special, in the sense that it is still associated with the male provider, even though the world has changed and women contribute significantly to household income. It is also seen as a resource of high status, and that tends to be associated with men as well. And finally, there's this gender stereotype that women are better perceived when they advocate for others and not for themselves. So salary negotiation is arguably the toughest for a woman: evidence shows they face backlash and resistance.

What can be done?

Much of the wage gap is explained by the job or sector you are in. The wage gap exists and it's real, but - at least in the United States, I don't know about Chile - it's not spread like peanut butter throughout the economy in the same way. There are places where it emerges and there is a lot of ambiguity and subjectivity, but the greatest differences in the wage gap occur in work trajectories, not so much in differences in the same job. If we see the biggest piece of the puzzle, and I've focused on working on that in recent years, it's how we push the occupational advancement of women, and not just that they get paid a little more in low-wage jobs where they are... And the two big barriers are flexibility, because of family work, and the second is the (difficulty) of advocating for leadership positions for oneself. Interestingly, there is growing evidence that men experience something similar when advocating for more flexible work for themselves. So we see that it's hard for everyone to do something that seems outside the stereotype. Now, when women are advocating to bring their group, community or country to a better place, thinking of others can prevent them from falling into the trap I described earlier.

In Chile we are writing a new Constitution with gender parity. What should be promoted to make society fairer and more equal in terms of gender?

My newest contribution would be that it's important to focus on parenting, as I said earlier. I recently presented this at the Advanced Leadership Initiative. And it was a little awkward at first, because it's not what these powerful women wanted to talk about, for some good reason. “I don't want to talk about men, but about women”, deep down. But this is so critically important for gender equality. We can fall into a bit of a feminist elite trap if we only focus on giving women access to increasingly higher spaces and salaries. Because when we do that, we may be diminishing the value of traditional female care work, as if to say: we want to get out of that. And I don't know if that helps our sisters who are primarily doing that work, and furthermore that diminishes the value of that work, which is extremely important to society. So (we should) think of ways to engage men on both sides of that equation. I think we will hit a ceiling if we focus only on improving women's economic opportunities and not on sharing the family burden. I hope that men (or couples) have access to parental leave, flexible work, that the health system covers leave for each child, in short, that these processes are shared. If we don't involve men more, women will continue in this impossible dilemma, of holding up the sky, doing everything at the same time. In short, instead of accommodating women in organizations with special policies, we should be changing the way we work, so that all people have the potential to balance the different aspects of their lives.

The care economy is something that has been debated in the Constitutional Convention. Should it be an activity paid by the State?

There are many countries that are looking at the issue of unpaid care work, including that done with older adults, professionalizing it, certifying people, so that they are paid for a job they are doing without pay. That is elevating care. This work is critically important, and the more we can highlight, celebrate and learn about it, the better. Another important thing to note is that if you look at the future of work, the care work sector is one of those that is not threatened to be replaced by robots or artificial intelligence. And the pandemic creates a great opportunity to highlight its importance.

Chile is at a time when negotiations are required, since there are no majorities either in the Convention or in Congress. How is negotiation restored when it is devalued, and is often seen as surrender or surrender?

That's a big deal, and very often people think of negotiation in those terms, as a zero-sum game: if I give you something, I necessarily lose something of mine. But leadership is, at its base, negotiation. Because when you try to lead, what you're saying is: Follow this path forward that I'm proposing, which is better compared to the alternatives. You are not really leading if you are coercing them to go in a particular direction; you have to persuade people. And what is very important is to make sense, to tell the story, to explain what people are doing, to show that you can develop creative solutions to problems. And a couple of things about gender and negotiation would be good to keep in mind. One is that women can easily be perceived as "peacemakers." And they can also be mis-stereotyped in that sense, because they can think that they are capable of surrendering to achieve peace. They can get caught in that trap, of appearing very fierce, so as not to be accused of having given up. Women are often considered "problem solvers." They have an ability to come together and there are many good examples, certainly in the United States and other parts of the world, where women have been able to come together across ideological divides. So perhaps there are ways for women to build coalitions that are more diverse than have existed in the past. And furthermore, women, because of their life experience, are often better positioned to reach deeper into communities. Many of the community leaders are women. If I were there, I would see opportunities to build coalitions across the political spectrum to explain that even though some things are difficult, these are the core values ​​that we share and that motivate us and that's why we're working together. And spread this out as much as you can, have a lot of conversations, get as close to people with this message. I think that is very important. The other thing is that there will probably be people scared with this gender parity thing. And there should be some degree to explain and educate.

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