Want to Empower Female Executives? Pay Up

In 1989, feminist Arlie Russell Hochschild argued that working women go home to work a “second shift,” performing the majority of the labor involved in caring for their homes and children. That’s not the only extra shift working women are doing. Some are also being asked to do a second, unpaid shift at work, where they’re putting in extra time to help boost the careers of other women. This kind of labor — such as mentoring or serving on committees designed to improve corporate policies toward women — is essential to helping women advance, which ultimately redounds to the benefit of their employers. So it should come with compensation.

One way senior-level women are needed to boost the careers of junior-level women is by serving as mentors. Women in C-suites were more likely to have had a mentor at any stage in their careers, a 2017 survey by consulting firm Egon Zehnder found, suggesting that it’s critical to attaining leadership positions. Although studies of the role gender plays in mentoring relationships have yielded mixed results, there is evidence that women do better when their mentors are other women, because they can see them as role models. But because women hold just 24 percent of senior positions globally, according to the nonprofit Catalyst, each one essentially must mentor more than one woman in order for women and men to ultimately achieve parity in leadership positions.