Business will suffer a major brain drain.While riding the train to a Stockholm interview yesterday, I found myself reading back logs of The Economist (stacks of which my father leaves by my bed— oh the glory of parents’-house sejours), and stumbled upon the following:
 A brief article entitled “Vital Statistics” divulged interesting findings from recent research about education and sex. Remember how boys are inherently better at math? Turns out, according to Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute in Florence and his colleagues, it’s culture and not biology that decides the score, in math at least. “In this week’s Science, they show that the gap in mathematics scores between boys and girls virtually disappears in countries with high levels of sexual equality, though the reading gap remains.” The math-gap “vanished in countries such as Norway and Sweden, where the sexes are more or less on a par with one another.” The study, which examined some 276,000 15-year olds from 40 countries, showed that girls scored higher on reading overall. But in highly egalitarian countries where the math gap had vanished, the reading gap had only increased. The result? “Girls may acquire an absolute advantage over boys as a result of equal treatment.”
Now that is interesting. We’re in Sweden interviewing Swedish young people, so the news doesn’t strike me as that revolutionary. After all, “of course!” is the resounding response to splitting parental leave and household responsibilities equally, and, perhaps most interestingly, the majority of the young Swedish women we have interviewed claim that they think they will be equally or more ambitious career-wise than their future husband. Remember my little Drivers Ed blog a while back? I discussed how basically all of the young women we had interviewed so far, in all of the countries we traveled to (up until Sweden), said they were looking for a husband who was more ambitious than they. What did the Swedish girl we interviewed yesterday answer? “I think he should be happy for my sake if I am making more money! Really, now.”
If the Economist’s education stats are correct, the Swedes may be on to something. With girls taking the lead academically, perhaps couples better get used to a shift in who-earns-what. Women may very well be earning more in the future. But what will happen to the family, then? Women are, after all, globally the ones who shoulder most of the domestic duties. And no matter their brainpower, women seem to be the ones to re-prioritize after having children. As several young women interviewees have said, “Balance seems more important for women.”
When are we going to reach a point where we realize that balance is important for business as well? With all of these high-achieving women choosing balance over work schedules that they consider incompatible with a healthy and well-rounded life, companies are losing out. If those education stats are true, while women continue to opt out, business will be suffering a major brain drain.
The most successful companies of the future will be the ones who figure out how to retain young and restless talent. I am certainly not the first to say that. But it is high time big business listened up. Create more flexibility, more creative freedom, and less vertical hierarchies and you’re bound to keep some innovative thinkers and doers who might otherwise choose to leave.
As one young Swedish engineer (a woman) commented in an interview this week, “If my company is not tolerant and understanding of my needs, I’ll leave. I have that option, and I have no qualms about doing it.”
Our generation doesn’t have much inherent company loyalty. The challenge for companies is to give us a reason to get some. - Astri read a truncated version of the article online here photo by foundphotoslj on Flickr under Creative Commons License
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