Many high-achieving women in our study acknowledge these concerns, citing their own situations with parents and in-laws who are still healthy and active but whose care will become a top consideration in the near future. Few look forward to negotiating the balance between their careers and their elder care obligations. A female accounting professional in Beijing sums it up by saying, “It is a very heavy role.”
EXTREME JOBS
It's 4:30 in the afternoon, and Claudia still has three teleconferences to go before she can head home for the day. As a Dubai-based executive for a multinational company whose headquarters are located nine time zones away, Claudia doesn't just feel that she works a 24/7 schedule—she is running a marathon that never ends.
She gets to the office at 6:45 in the morning and usually puts in a twelve-hour day at her desk. “I wish I could leave earlier, but New York [where the home office is] is starting their day when it's almost evening for us. All the telecons start in the evening here. Sometimes I get meeting invitations for 11 p.m.”
Claudia would like to exercise after work, but instead she usually rushes home—she counts herself lucky to have only a thirty-minute commute—to spend time with her two children, having dinner with them, helping with their homework and putting them to bed. “Then I do a second round of e-mail between 9 and 11.” During rush periods, she stays up even later.
Weekends don't offer much of a break. The Middle East takes its weekend on Friday and Saturday, so when Claudia fields the end-of-the-week crunch calls from New York, “it kills the weekend.”
In our 2007 study, Seduction and Risk: The Emergence of Extreme Jobs, we identified a new challenge for top talent.6 “Extreme jobs,” as we dubbed this development, are characterized by extended workweeks, an always-on culture at work, and intense performance pressure. Our latest data adds to this scenario in the case of emerging markets.
In BRIC and the UAE, long workweeks are not limited to high-wage earners but are routine among college-educated employees. And although extreme jobs are the norm among highly qualified and ambitious women worldwide, the average workweek for employees of multinational corporations in developing economies is especially onerous. In Russia and China, the average workweek for multinational employees is well over sixty hours; in India and the UAE, it is more than fifty hours. “I think about seventy hours a week isn't uncommon,” reports one Hong Kong-based manager for a consulting company.
No particular sector or industry stands out in our data as more extreme than others, and neither seasoned executives nor junior professionals are immune to these demands. “In India, people look at you if you leave early,” observed a young finance professional. “It was only because people knew I was going to school that it was okay for me to leave at 5:30. You never do that unless it's only once a week or for a doctor's appointment.”
Furthermore, the demands of work have intensified over the past few years: one-quarter or more of the women in our sample report working some eight to eighteen hours more per week than three years ago, a staggering one to two extra workdays.
The same factors identified in our original study—the global span of operations, modern communication technology, compensation structures, and leaner and meaner organizations that are increasingly demanding of an employee's time—are also driving the extended hours in emerging markets. But the fact that the sun never sets on a multinational company's operations has an inordinate impact on its offices in far-flung geographies. Professional women in BRIC and the UAE routinely suffer from teleconference schedules that favor U.S. and European time zones. We heard numerous examples of conference calls being scheduled during the middle of their night, on local public holidays, or on weekends (especially if weekends are taken on different days).
One underlying cause of resentment was a sense from our focus group participants that their bosses displayed greater sensitivity about after-hours calls to time zones in North America and Europe and that their schedules habitually got short shrift. “Thursday evenings (the start of the weekend here) are often destroyed by conference calls, as are Fridays,” one UAE-based woman said. “They say, ‘Sorry, sorry, but it's really important.’ It often is, but essentially they make a joke out of it. There is no respect for boundaries.”
The extended workdays and capriciously scheduled conference calls that come with a multinational job are reasons that public sector jobs look so attractive, with more than 80 percent of BRIC and UAE respondents applauding their benefits. The UAE labor laws, for example, restrict local companies to a maximum eight-hour day; employees in the public sector have an even shorter schedule, typically from 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.7 That's half the amount of time that Claudia routinely puts in.
Exacerbating the pressures of the onerous day-to-day schedule are the protracted commutes endured by many of women in our research. Traffic jams are the bane of urban life in the cities where many of the women of our study live. IBM's 2010 Global Commuter Pain Survey ranked cities 1 to 100 for their commutes.8 Based on factors such as traffic, road rage, and gridlock's effect on drivers' ability to get to work, São Paulo ranked 75, New Delhi 81, Moscow 84, and Beijing topped the charts at 99. More than 40 percent of the Moscow respondents have been stuck in traffic for at least three hours, and nearly 70 percent of Beijing commuters have experienced traffic so bad that they turned around and went home. Sizable percentages of commuters in the worst-affected cities said they would choose to work more if their commute time could be reduced.
Although many women bemoan the hours wasted in these extreme commutes, others note the toll on their ability to work. In the IBM survey, 95 percent of drivers in Beijing say the traffic has negatively affected their health. “It's just time-consuming and stressful … awful roads and awful traffic,” said an IT manager in India, adding, “I am so much more productive on work-from-home days. I work better and longer.”
This was a common refrain, and one employers should note: avoiding traffic by working from a satellite or home office could enhance productivity and improve morale. Flexible work arrangements and work-from-home options are still a nascent idea in emerging markets. In some countries, such as Brazil, laptop computers are expensive and even when employers supply them, crime is so prevalent (as we discuss later in this chapter) that walking down the street with a laptop case is an invitation to be mugged. More significant, though, is the huge premium placed on face time in BRIC and the UAE. Women who are already dogged by the workplace biases described later simply can't afford to give their critics any more ammunition by not being at their desks when everyone else is.
BIAS AND STEREOTYPES
Since becoming the HR director for the Brazilian operations of a multinational pharmaceuticals firm, Andrea has become accustomed to feeling that she's always on trial.
My male colleagues test me a lot. They ask questions or try to test your knowledge or how self-confident you are on the issue under discussion. It's different from the way they interact with their male peers. They try to go deeper and deeper into the details. I think it's not just because I'm the first woman to hold this job but a combination of being a woman and being younger than they are. There's a sense of “Let me test this little girl to see if she really deserves to be in this place.”
What I've learned from this is that I always have to be 150 percent prepared. Before having an interaction with them, I try to think about all of the questions and all of the resistance that might come up during the conversation. It's like I have to prove myself twice as much as if I were a man.
The subtle forms of discrimination faced by women in the workplace have been the topic of much scrutiny, particularly in the United States,
