Working women deserve more than lazy bits of trend analysis

But too often, these stories highlight trends that are not supported by research or data. he annoys me. If we are to address the challenges that limit women’s progress, it is important to separate perception from fact. Here are four questions I rely on to decide whether a story is worth my attention.

Is the perceived trend supported by data or using data from a reliable source? I’ve lost count of the stories I’ve read that describe what women are going through without putting numbers behind it. Data isn’t everything—there’s a place to tell a story—but to call it a trend, it needs to have some numbers to back it up.

For example, it is common for stories to say that highly educated mid-career women “opt out” of the workforce in the US without backing those claims with concrete numbers published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Cause? The BLS data do not support that particular ‘trend’. In fact, there are more college-educated women in the American workforce today than college-educated men.

That doesn’t mean you can’t personally name the many women who have left paid jobs to become stay-at-home moms, or that their stories aren’t important. It simply means that they represent a very small portion of the population. Furthermore, most women who leave their jobs to care for children are usually out of the workforce for a relatively short period of time. In a country with a European- or Canadian-style parental leave policy, they may not even show up in the data as leave.

Does the trend fail to make adequate distinctions between different groups of women? Many stories in the International Women’s Day genre talk about women without distinction among racial or economic groups. But there are interesting nuggets in the details. For example: The gap between the labor force participation of men and women varies greatly by race.

We can have an interesting discussion about those differences. But not if a story is what drives them in the first place.

Similarly, trend stories often suggest that women with young children stay out of the workforce because of psychological factors—from stress to guilt to maternal devotion. But a pre-pandemic analysis from the BLS showed that the workforce participation rate for women rises after their children reach school-age age, a sign that external factors—such as the cost and availability of child care—are – may be even more important.

Is there no mention of men in the story? I’m tired of trends that fail to lift men up too. In the last 20 years since I’ve been reporting on gender equality, journalists have gotten much better at discussing the role of employers in perpetuating gender imbalance at work. But pieces on women in the workforce still fail to mention their spouses, who after all people often have the biggest direct impact on women’s careers.

In households with opposite-sex couples, husbands play a large role in their wives’ decisions about how much to work and what opportunities to pursue, not only in what they say, but also in how they behave. A husband may say, “I’m proud of your work,” but if the wife doesn’t share the mental load of cooking, cleaning and child care, or managing all of the above, a wife’s career can still suffer. Could

Does the story idealize the behavior of men? Even a story that seems nuanced and data-driven may fall short. A common trend regarding women in the workplace is that we lack confidence. These stories are always backed up through peer-reviewed, academic studies about, in fact, the confidence gap between men and women.

But, but, but. It is important to note that although this finding is robust, it does not tell us whether men are justified in their confidence. It is an assumption. And when the researchers tested it, they found that the men were not a neutral control group. Instead, men have an inflated sense of their own abilities.

So women are less confident than men, it is true. But the reality is that men are overconfident, women are not underconfident. Again, this should affect which solutions we pursue. Do Women Need Assertiveness Training? Or should organizations stop associating glam with skill?

At the current pace of gender change, it will take centuries for women to achieve full equality with men. We have to do better. And getting smart about how we diagnose the problems women face is one place to start.

© Bloomberg