Why Mark Zuckerberg's Paternity Leave Is A Win For Women

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Hoodie-wearing Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced recently that he’ll take time off -- two whole months! -- after his wife Priscilla Chan has their first baby.

This is a big deal for working men both at Facebook and in the U.S. (and their families). Guys here rarely take paternity leave -- few companies even bother offering it. For the chief executive of a Fortune 100 company to take leave, is just unheard of.

Zuckerberg’s move signals that it’s OK for men to prioritize family over their jobs -- at least for a hot second when you have a brand-new infant at home. There’s a good chance he’ll inspire other fathers to take time off.

And that is amazing news for women -- that’s right, women -- who face serious penalties and discrimination at work for becoming mothers. When men take paternity leave, it is a signal that juggling work and family isn’t just “lady business,” it promotes real understanding and empathy between the sexes at work and goes a long way in eliminating outdated, useless stereotypes that harm everyone.

“It fosters a different sense of cooperation when the women and men are both taking leave and understanding what it’s like to have newborns at home,” Nancy Altobello, the vice chair for talent at the consulting firm EY, told The Huffington Post this summer while explaining why the firm encourages fathers to take paternity leave.

Working women and men are both up against certain stereotypes and expectations when they become parents. For men, this mostly works in their favor on the job and hurts them at home. Women, well, they’re just screwed either way.

Priscilla and I are starting to get ready for our daughter's arrival. We've been picking out our favorite childhood...

Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on  Friday, November 20, 2015

There’s a cultural expectation that a good father prioritizes his job because he is the breadwinner -- indeed, fathers often make more money after having kids, studies have found.

And despite the fact that women are the sole or primary breadwinner in 40 percent of U.S. households with children, it’s assumed they’ll prioritize family over work and, as a result, become less reliable and less hard-working.

“Mothers are less likely to be hired for jobs, to be perceived as competent at work or to be paid as much as their male colleagues with the same qualifications,” Claire Cain Miller explained last year in the New York Times, citing an extensive 15-year study that showed women’s pay decreased 4 percent for each child they had. Men’s pay increased more than 6 percent after having kids.

Some research has found that the pay gap between mothers and non-mothers is wider than between men and women. 

If a woman signals that work is her priority -- over her children -- she runs into problems. She’s judged extremely harshly for being a terrible mother.

“Women are fundamentally [supposed to be] oriented to the family not to work," Robin Ely, a professor at Harvard Business School, who studies gender expectations at work, explained to HuffPost a few months ago. “The expectation is if you don’t do it, then you’re not a good mother.”

When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced this fall that she’d only be gone a couple of weeks after she gives birth to twins in December, critics pounced. “Marissa Mayer’s Two-Week Maternity Leave Is Bullsh*t,” was the Daily Beast's headline. There were similar hot takes all around the internet.

Referring to Mayer’s two-week maternity leave stint in 2012 after she had just landed at Yahoo, the Telegraph summed up her double-bind pretty well: "Her 14-day maternity leave caused many to question her priorities as a parent. Others cast doubt on her dedication to her career."

Men face a different challenge: one that's become more problematic as more young dads of Zuckerberg's generation actively want to be more involved parents. These men run into problems because guys are often stigmatized or penalized if they demonstrate that work isn’t their top priority.

“The idea of a guy taking paternity leave was just [makes face] for my managers. Guys just don’t do that. They teased me," one consultant at a prominent firm told researchers from Boston University in a recent study.  "Then one of the partners said to me, ‘You have a choice to make: Are you going to be a professional or are you going to just be an average person in your field? If you are going to be a professional then that means nothing can be as important to you as your work.'"

Tell that to his little baby. Men who take paternity leave set themselves up to be more involved parents for that child's entire life. Seems important, yah? Oh, and fathers who are more involved at home certainly make life easier for their partners. Too often it's working women who wind up taking on more of the parenting work in dual-income couples.

Men want time with family, stigmas often keep them from doing so. @JoshLevs #AllIn

— marcyheinz (@marcyheinz) November 22, 2015

Paternity leave is a really powerful lever in changing these outdated paradigms. In Sweden, which provides paid time off for fathers, women’s earning potential rises 7 percent on average for every month a dad takes off. 

Some enlightened employers are recognizing this -- including Facebook, Spotify and Netflix -- and treat parental leave in a gender neutral way, offering equal amounts to men and women.

Facebook offers four months leave to dads -- but most do like Zuckerberg and only take two.

There’s still a long road till we get to equality. 

Jack Dorsey's Secret To Running Two Tech Giants At Once

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NEW YORK -- Jack Dorsey leads two public companies, but he isn't going it alone.

On Thursday, his financial-services startup, Square, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, where the stock price opened at $9 per share and quickly shot up 50 percent. The move comes nearly two months after Twitter, the struggling social networking giant Dorsey founded nine years ago, named him its permanent chief executive.

Running two firms at once would be a lot for even the most capable executives. Managing both Wall Street's expectations for a newly public firm and the turnaround of a separate public company is another thing altogether. Coping with that responsibility takes teamwork and a level head, as Dorsey said in a TV interview shortly after Square began trading.

"As long as I have great teams around me -- it's all made possible by the teams, our leadership teams," Dorsey said in an appearance on CNBC from the trading floor.

"It's definitely hard, it's definitely something I approach with a lot of self awareness," he also noted, adding later, "I just have the best teams on the planet." 

The tech executive echoed advice experts gave The Huffington Post last month about how to manage two companies without losing yourself in the process.

"To make something like this work, you have to have a world-class team around you," Sydney Finkelstein, management professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck Center for Leadership, told HuffPost at the time. "Effective leaders delegate. In this case, you probably have to delegate more than normal. … You have to be able to process in your brain two different worlds."

Making time to reflect is crucial, too. Dorsey is known to meditate and jog early in the morning and take long, meandering walks during the day. 

Luckily for Dorsey, he doesn't have far to go between his two offices. The headquarters of Square and Twitter are less than one block -- a two-minute walk -- from each other on Market Street in San Francisco, and Dorsey said he splits his days between them.

"I'm at both companies every single day," he said. "There's a Blue Bottle Coffee right in the middle." 

That could be the perfect time for him retreat into his own head for a minute or two. 

“In times of real craziness, you have to be able to find your training that allows you to meditate with a cup of coffee, or with the two minutes you walk from this office to this meeting,”Janice Marturano, executive director of the nonprofit Institute for Mindful Leadership, told HuffPost last month. “Rather than texting along the way, you say, ‘I’m going to use that time for meditation.’”

Damon Beres contributed reporting. 

Elon Musk Just Dropped Another Hint That Tesla May Take On Uber

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk said Thursday night the electric automaker is beefing up its self-driving car software. 

Ramping up the Autopilot software team at Tesla to achieve generalized full autonomy. If interested, contact autopilot@teslamotors.com.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2015

We are looking for hardcore software engineers. No prior experience with cars required. Please include code sample or link to your work.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2015

Should mention that I will be interviewing people personally and Autopilot reports directly to me. This is a super high priority.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2015

The urgency of Musk's offer, and the fact that he chose to tweet it to the public, could signal that the company is preparing to launch a self-driving mobility service akin to the one being built by Uber, the $51 billion ride-hailing service. 

Tesla declined to comment on Thursday night about how many engineers it hopes to hire and its future plans for them.

"We're going to let the tweets speak for themselves," a Tesla spokeswoman told The Huffington Post in an email.

Tesla launched its Autopilot feature last month. The current software enables restricted self-driving functions that allow the cars to steer themselves on highways and even to drive themselves on private property wherever an owner summons them. 

But the current software is limited. Soon after it became available, drivers began posting daring, if at times reckless, videos to YouTube that demonstrated the cars' inability to detect some badly worn lane markers, resulting in near-collisions with other vehicles. All along, Musk has insisted that drivers must remain attentive to the road and ready to grip the wheel at any time. 

Tesla's autonomy efforts at first glance may appear to be in keeping with the auto industry zeitgeist. 

There's currently a race in the auto and tech industries to perfect the self-driving vehicle. Google -- with its fleet of bug-like prototype vehicles puttering around Mountain View, California -- has probably garnered the most attention for its autonomous car program. 

In July, the University of Michigan opened a testing facility, designed to look like a town, where a consortium of traditional automakers and tech firms can test the software for their vehicles.

In March, Mercedes debuted a sleek, futuristic self-driving concept car around San Francisco. Two months later, its parent company, Daimler, unveiled an autonomous 18-wheeler. Then last month, General Motors announced "aggressive" plans of its own for self-driving vehicles. 

But despite these advances, Tesla's main competitor in the self-driving space may be Uber.

Earlier this year, the transportation company poached nearly "everybody" in the robotics department at Carnegie Mellon University, including the director, for its self-driving program. Adam Jonas, a revered analyst at Morgan Stanley who covers the auto industry, predicted that self-driving technology would radically upend traditional car companies. Fewer people will own cars, he said, and will instead rely on fleets of self-driving vehicles that come on demand, like Uber or Lyft drivers do now.

In August, Jonas wrote a memo to clients predicting that Tesla would launch a self-driving competitor service to Uber by 2018. After pressing an uncharacteristically tight-lipped Musk during an analyst call, Jonas doubled down on his prediction, forecasting that Tesla would announce a mobility app within the next two years. 

It could be that Musk, burning through investors' cash as he is, is just making sure Tesla remains a leader in the self-driving sphere. But -- perhaps if his tweeted job offer yields the right candidates -- Tesla could be moving beyond electric luxury cars and storage batteries fairly soon.

There Are 27 Countries Better At Gender Equality Than The U.S.

Equality is supposed to be the United States' thing, but when it comes to women, the country is falling behind, according to a comprehensive global ranking of 145 countries released Wednesday evening by the World Economic Forum.

The U.S. dropped eight spots on the list to 28th place --  just above Cuba and below Mozambique -- for overall gender equality, which the World Economic Forum measures by examining publicly available data on economic participation, political empowerment, educational attainment and health measures. The Geneva-based nonprofit, known for its annual super-elite business conference in Davos, has been measuring the gap between women and men for each category for the past 10 years.

 

The U.S. fell behind on the politics front, as the number of women in cabinet-level positions dropped to just 26 percent from 32 percent. The drop offset a slight rise in the percentage of women in Congress. That's unfortunate because research has found that the more women that participate in politics, the more likely a country is to have policies that promote gender equality.

Considering the political situation, it shouldn't then be too surprising that we are also slumping on the economics front, as the report found. The U.S. fell behind there because the percentage of women working or looking for work dropped last year, and the wage gap between men and women grew, explained Saadia Zahidi, head of the Global Challenge on Gender Parity at the World Economic Forum. 

Of course, the U.S. isn't a terrible place for women -- the ranking just looks at the gap in opportunity between men and women. That's why some countries that obviously offer less economic opportunity to both men and women are ahead of the country on the list. As more women have entered the workforce, U.S. policies on paid parental leave and childcare haven't kept pace. Nor have most businesses adapted to the new reality where women aren't at home taking care of employees' personal lives. 

"It's less about a belief in equality and more about policies and business practices having to catch up with the reality of today's family structures," said Zahidi. These things were designed for a world in which the primary caretaker was at home. "That doesn't exist anymore," she said.

No country in the world has achieved gender equality, at least by the measures that the report examines. It will take the world 118 years to close the economic gap between men and women, the report estimates.

Top-ranked Iceland comes closest to equality, having closed 88 percent of its gender gap, according to the report. Women make up 41 percent of the Icelandic parliament, and in 20 of the last 50 years a woman was the head of state. In the U.S. women hold 20 percent of seats in Congress. And, well, you know about the presidents, we hope. 

Iceland and its fellow Nordic countries lead the world on gender equality -- in part, because unlike in the U.S., their governments have made a strong effort to get more women into the workforce and help them rise to the top, largely by supporting moms and dads with paid parental leave (not simply maternity leave, but leave for fathers, too) and childcare. Iceland, the report notes, has the longest paternity leave in the world -- at 90 days.

"They haven't targeted women but have tried to make work-family balance better for all parents," said Zahidi.

Like the U.S., Nordic countries have a strong tradition of equality. But perhaps more importantly, Zahidi notes, they also have small populations and need to make sure that every single talented person in the workforce is able to get out there and work. 

That's something that's going to become more important in the U.S. as our population ages. 

Please Stop Blaming Women For Making Less Money Than Men

Despite what you may have heard, women are no worse at negotiating than men.

However, women must do more negotiating than men if they want to get ahead at work. Not simply for pay, but also for the right conditions that will help grow their careers.

The modern day workplace was constructed by men, for men. It’s assumed that men are ambitious and want promotions, that they have the kind of home life that will support long hours at the office and that they don’t need flex time to take care of children. Women are often penalized for ambition or judged for not seeming to pay enough attention to their home lives, as recent research from Erin Reid at Boston University found.

Even the office air conditioning was created with a guy in mind.

That means that if a women wants a promotion, she needs to ask. If a woman wants a different kind of schedule or work arrangement, she must ask. If she wants a role that will lead to the C-suite or the editor-in-chief’s office, she needs to ask. If she wants credit for doing extra work, that’s another negotiation, too. Need a space to pump breastmilk? Negotiate!

Deborah Kolb, a professor emerita at Simmons College who advises many top female executives on their careers, calls these asks small “n” negotiations. And they happen every day in the workplace.  

 

“They are totally tied to your success at work. They are about the jobs you want, the opportunities you get and the support you need,” Kolb, the author of the recent book Negotiating at Work: Turn Small Wins Into Big Gains, told HuffPost. And women must do more of this asking, Kolb explains, because of the way organizations are structured. "There's nothing associated with our biology that makes us bad negotiators," she says.

There are a lot of well-intentioned people out there who think teaching women to negotiate better can help close the gender pay gap. (Women make 79 cents to every male dollar, and the gap is bigger for women of color.) Indeed, the city of Boston recently launched a new gender pay parity initiative that includes giving free negotiation classes to working women. 

But simply blaming women for making less than men -- which is what you’re doing by trying to “teach” them to get better at salary negotiation -- isn’t going to fix this.

Instead, we need to address structural issues with the modern-day workplace that hold women back from getting to pay equality. And these issues have little to do with harmful stereotypes about women’s ability to be as “aggressive” or “confident” as their male counterparts when negotiating for pay.

Blaming women for making less than men -- which is what you’re doing by trying to “teach” them to get better at salary negotiation -- isn’t going to fix this.

Kolb notes that women are often placed in less visible or valued roles at work, for which they get less credit and compensation than men. They’re then forced to negotiate for the credit for that work in a way that their male counterparts may not have to do. They also must negotiate to get out of those roles.

In a piece about the way media company Gawker treats its female editors and reporters, Dayna Evans portrays a male-centric workplace that epitomizes the problem. At Gawker, Evans writes, women are doing the "invisible work" while men are getting the big, attention-grabbing bylines.

"'Gawker’s gossip sites often operate off of more or less 'invisible' female management behind the scenes,'" one editor told Evans. "'It’s hard for those women to get recognized for their work, because it’s not on the top of the masthead or on bylines, but they’re the ones pulling the strings each day. Their work isn’t missed until they leave out of frustration or get forced out. It’s a shameful cycle.'"

This isn’t just a Gawker problem.

At law firms, women are more likely to become "nonequity" partners -- where they can expect to make about one-third of what equity partners earn. Female partners are also less likely to get credit for their work, according to reporting from Julie Triedman at The American Lawyer. The same is true for female engineers at tech firms -- they're less likely to get their names on patents for their work, an economist recently told me.

At one manufacturing company, Kolb told HuffPost, women were being consistently hired into the human resource department while men were getting the so-called operational roles at the heart of the business -- the jobs that often pay better and are stepping-stones to the CEO's office. "That meant the women had to negotiate to put themselves forward for the operational roles," Kolb said.

At venture capital firms, men become investment partners -- the critical roles -- while women are shuttled into communications or marketing jobs. Only 6 percent of partners at VC firms are women. At investment banks, male partners work with clients, while the women more frequently get asked to run offices and do internal work -- think human resources -- that isn’t always as valued.

At newspapers, men more frequently cover economics and business, the kind of reporting that lands you on the front page and at the top of the masthead. Women are shuttled into covering personal finance or style -- not a natural path to the editor-in-chief’s office. At Gawker, most of the women work at its feminist website, Jezebel.

As a manager, I've negotiated pay with plenty of men and women. Some men were terrible negotiators; some women were excellent. There was never a clear trend line on gender, in my experience.

Back in Boston, the negotiation classes, which started in October, have women practice asking for raises and promotions, and teach them how to respond to job offers.

That’s not a bad thing -- women should feel confident about asking for more money.

But there’s more to this puzzle than pay. "Certainly you want to get paid fairly if there are inequities in pay," Kolb says. "But to think everything is pay is a problem. You want to negotiate the conditions that are going to make you successful, and the pay will follow."

And if companies and legislators are serious about fixing the pay gap, they’d do well to think about the frequency with which women (and men) need to negotiate their roles.

Google recently conducted an experiment meant to help get more women promoted. The company sent out an email asking women who were interested in promotions to raise their hands if they wanted one. The result: More women asked for promotions. A success -- but was it?

The onus shouldn't always be on employees to engineer their own promotions. It should absolutely be part of a manager's job to spot and promote talented workers before they ask. And those managers should be aware that there is a bias toward promoting men. But for the most part, that's not how it works.

Years ago, I was bored with what I was doing at work and feeling increasingly anxious about how little money I was making. I hadn’t had a meaningful raise in years. I was also pregnant with my second child -- not typically the conditions that signal to your higher-ups you’re in the market for a promotion.

I could’ve asked for more money, but instead I asked for a new job. It was a new role that had just opened up and was probably a bit of a stretch. I figured I’d never get it, but I really needed more money for the second kid. So I raised my hand.

It was a great move. I was respectfully interviewed by some higher-ups -- one who had no idea who I was and another who seemed surprised I wanted a job with more responsibilities. When they told me a little while later that I wasn't ready for the role, they also said it was good that I'd asked for it. The message: Now we know you're ambitious.

I wonder if a man would have needed to give them that kind of reminder.  

Tech Companies Step In To Help After Paris Attacks

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Droves of companies paid tribute this weekend to the victims of the attacks in Paris, brandishing their websites and social media profiles with the blue, white and red of the French flag. Chief executives offered words of support. 

But a few companies -- namely tech firms with vast international social networks -- stepped in to help amid the upheaval caused by the Friday string of mass shootings and suicide bombings that left 132 dead and 349 injured.

Home-renting service Airbnb -- which has its largest market in Paris -- urged hosts to house victims and those stranded by delays for free. The company created a site where people can request places to stay and hosts can offer space for no charge. By Sunday afternoon, 19 pages of listings were available.

"If you are able, we hope you will strongly consider helping those who are in need by making your listing available at little or no cost," the company wrote in an email to users on Saturday.

Airbnb also enabled a feature allowing hosts to extend an existing guest's visit free of charge.

Facebook activated its Safety Check tool, allowing people to alert friends that they are safe in the aftermath of the attacks. Until Friday, the feature had only been available during natural disasters. It was first activated last October after the deadly earthquake in Nepal. 

Still, the move took heat from critics who said debuting the feature for the attacks in Paris -- but not after the twin suicide blasts that killed more than 40 people in Beirut on Thursday -- demonstrates a higher value placed on lives of people in Western countries.

"You are right that there are many other important conflicts in the world," CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post addressing the criticism. "We care about all people equally, and we will work hard to help people suffering in as many of these situations as we can."

Skype and its Google-owned rival Hangouts, which charge money to make calls to phone numbers, both made all calls to France free. 

Even small companies rallied to help victims. 

In Boston, where memories of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing are fresh, companies in the city's burgeoning tech industry started a fundraiser with a goal of $10,000.

"Boston tech helped heal a tragic event with the marathon bombing, and in the process received amazing international support from our brothers and sisters in the EU. Let's reciprocate their gifts of friendship and humanity," Phil Beauregard, founder of the software startup Objective Logistics, wrote on the fundraising page. "Let's let the world know we all stand united against cowardice and treachery. Most importantly, let's help those affected by this despicable event with our financial support."

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More Bad News For Macy’s Ahead Of Holiday Shopping Season

It's been a bad year for Macy's, and it just keeps getting worse.

The company said on Wednesday that it has seen a 5.2 percent drop in sales between the beginning of August to the end of October, and is responding to these figures by speeding up closures of struggling department store locations and doubling down on its discount store chain.

Macy's announced in September that it would close 35 to 40 poorly performing department store locations. On Wednesday, the retailer's CEO, Terry Lundgren, said he'd close more stores once those locations are all shuttered, according to the Cincinnati Business Courier.

The iconic retailer launched Macy’s Backstage -- which, much like competitors Nordstrom Rack or Off Fifth, has bare-bones decor and carries clearance items year-round -- in August. It currently has six locations in the greater New York City area, and the company announced plans on Wednesday to open 50 more of the stores over the next two years.

Lundgren also intends to experiment with adding Macy's Backstage sections to 10 department store locations, the Business Courier reported.

A key reason for the decline in Macy's sales is the growing popularity of so-called off-price stores like T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, as many customers who prioritized bargain-hunting during the recession have maintained their frugal habits.

So-called off-price or discount retailers saw their sales grow 44 percent from 2009 to 2014, according to The Wall Street Journal.

 

 

 

Macy’s share of department store sales actually rose significantly from 2006 to 2013, according to the Journal. However, department stores’ share of overall merchandise sales dipped during that same period.

News about declining sales prompted Macy's share price to fall 14 percent on Wednesday, the Journal reported, bringing the total drop to 40 percent on the year. Since Macy's is the first department store to report earnings, investors interpreted the news as an ominous sign for other traditional retailers. The stock prices of Kohl's, Burlington Stores and Hudson’s Bay Company, which owns Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor, all fell the same day.

Macy’s will open its doors to shoppers at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, and offer Black Friday sales until 1 p.m. the following day.

H&M, by contrast, announced on Tuesday that it will close its stores nationwide on Thanksgiving Day. It joins a growing number of retailers, including Nordstrom, Costco and BJ’s, that have chosen to close all of their U.S. stores on Thanksgiving Day out of consideration for their employees.

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