托福閱讀材料之職場媽咪之路

　　職場金字塔，女性為何越來越難以登頂?

　　IN “BORGEN”, a Danish television drama, the country’s first female prime minister returns home late each night to domestic bliss. Her stay-at-home husband stacks the dishes and massages her back. The children cheer her televised speeches. But before long her son is seeing a shrink, the neglected hubby is having an affair and our heroine is throwing furniture around her office.

　　在丹麥電視劇《權利的堡壘》中【1】，國家的首位女總理每天很晚才能到家享受天倫之樂。她的家庭煮夫會收拾好了碗碟貼心喚她回家，她的孩子們?yōu)樗陔娨暲锏木恃葜v而歡呼。但好景不長，不久后她的兒子便被帶去看心理醫(yī)生了，她那被冷落的丈夫也有了外遇，而我們的女英雄只能悲憤得在辦公室里摔家具。

　　Rarely has there been so much angst about women reaching the top. In the Atlantic magazine last month, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first female director of policy planning at America’s State Department, declared that women cannot successfully combine a super-demanding job with bringing up young children. (She quit Washington, DC, to return to academia.) This month a British member of Parliament, Louise Mensch, resigned, saying it was too hard to juggle job and family. Yet the news is not all grim. In July Yahoo!, a struggling internet firm, picked a 37-year-old from Google, Marissa Mayer, who is expecting a baby in October, as its new boss.

　　處于事業(yè)巔峰的女性有這么多的痛苦困擾也不多見。在上個月的《大西洋月刊》里，美國國務院政策規(guī)劃司首位女司長Anne-Marie Slaughter(她已經(jīng)退出華盛頓政壇回歸到學術界)表示女性不可能同時扮演合格的母親和成功職業(yè)女性的角色。而本月辭職的英國國會下議院女議員Louise Mensch也說要平衡好家庭和工作的關系困難到幾乎不可能。當然現(xiàn)實也不都那么殘酷。今年6月，在困境中奮斗掙扎的Yahoo迎來了它的新老板-來自Google的37歲的Marissa Mayer，而她是一位即將在今年10月迎接她孩子出生的準媽媽。

　　America’s biggest companies hire women to fill just over half of entry-level professional jobs. But those women fail to advance proportionally: they occupy only 28% of senior managerial posts, 14% of seats on executive committees and just 3% of chief-executive roles, according to McKinsey &Company, a consultancy. The figures are worse still at big European firms, which is perhaps why the governments of Belgium, France, Italy and Norway have set quotas for women on boards. The European Commission is threatening to impose such rules across the EU. It would be better if women could rise naturally to senior executive roles rather than being forced on to boards. But how can this be done when everything tried so far seems to have failed?

　　在初級專業(yè)性崗位上，美國的大型企業(yè)愿意一半以上雇傭女性。但之后，這個比例開始逐漸失衡：麥肯錫管理咨詢公司的研究表明，女性的比例在高級管理崗位上只有28%，在最高執(zhí)行委員會里只占了14%，至于首席執(zhí)行官的職位上，女性只有3%的席位。這個比例在歐洲公司里更糟糕，這或許是為什么比利時、法國、意大利和挪威政府要強制規(guī)定公司崗位的女職員比例，歐盟委員會正在歐盟國中硬性實施此類規(guī)定。當然，女性要能自然晉升到公司高管職位當然比強行采用這種政策性保護措施更好，但當其他所有方法都無濟于事的時候不這樣還能怎么辦呢?

　　Several factors hold women back at work. Too few study science, engineering, computing or maths. Too few push hard for promotion. Some old-fashioned sexism persists,even in hip, liberal industries. But the biggest obstacle (at least in most rich countries) is children. However organised you are, it is hard to combine family responsibilities with the ultra-long working hours and the “anytime, anywhere” culture of senior corporate jobs. A McKinsey study in 2010 found that both women and men agreed: it is tough for women to climb the corporate ladder with teeth clamped around their ankles. Another McKinsey study in 2007 revealed that 54% of the senior women executives surveyed were childless compared with 29% of the men (and a third were single, nearly double the proportion of partnerless men).

　　女性的職業(yè)發(fā)展道路上荊棘塞途。學習自然科學、工程學、計算機或者數(shù)學相關的女性寥若晨星，晉升機會也微乎其微。一些陳腐的男權主義論堅稱即使在開明自由的行業(yè)里情況也是如此。但其實她們發(fā)展最大的障礙還是來自于是孩子(至少在一些富裕國家)。高管的職位往往工作強度大并且隨時隨地可能需要處理公務，因此無論你多么善于管理，要把它和家庭責任同時兼顧好簡直難于上青天。在2010年麥肯錫的一份研究中指出，男性女性都認同：有孩子負擔【2】的女性在職業(yè)發(fā)展階梯上步履維艱。而在另一份麥肯錫2007年的報告顯示，54%的女性企業(yè)高管都是沒有小孩的，而這在男性中只有29%(這其中有1/3女性依然是單身，同比是男性的2倍)。

　　Many talented, highly educated women respond by moving into less demanding fields where the hours are more flexible, such as human resources or public relations. Some go part-time or drop out of the workforce entirely. Relatively few stay in the most hard-driving jobs, such as strategy, finance, sales and operations, that provide the best path to the top.

　　很多受過高等教育才華橫溢的女性接受了調(diào)崗到壓力小一些工作時間更加彈性的職位上，例如做人力資源或者公共關系。有一些只做兼職工作甚至索性不工作了。而只有寥寥無幾的女性還繼續(xù)呆在工作艱辛卻最有可能晉升到公司最高管理層的職位上，例如做公司戰(zhàn)略、財務、銷售、運營等相關工作。

　　Consider this example. Schumpeter sat down with a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who says that, before starting a family, she was prepared to “give blood” to meet deadlines. After the anklebiters appeared, she took a job in corporate strategy at an engineering firm in Paris. She found it infuriating. Her male colleagues wasted time during the day—taking long lunches, gossiping over caf au lait—but stayed late every evening. She packed her work into fewer hours, but because she did not put in enough “face time” the firm felt she lacked commitment. She soon quit. Companies that furrow their brows wondering how to stop talented women leaving should pay heed.

　　參考這樣一個案例吧：我曾經(jīng)對話過一個從事公司并購案的律師，她說她會在建立家庭之前為這份辛苦的工作浴血奮戰(zhàn)到最后一刻。而當有了孩子之后，她在巴黎的一家工程公司找了一份戰(zhàn)略策劃的工作。結(jié)果這份工作讓她很不爽，她發(fā)現(xiàn)她的男同事們把大量的時間不是花在吃中飯上就是在咖啡間里聊八卦，他們整天無所事事卻還在辦公室故意呆到很晚才下班。而她雖然更高效的完成了工作，卻因為在辦公室的考勤時間不夠長而被認為沒有敬業(yè)精神。于是她很快離職了。這個案例值得那些為如何留住女性人才而發(fā)愁的公司反思。

　　Could corporate culture change? In their book “Future Work”, Alison Maitland and Peter Thomson describe how some firms give staff more flexibility. Not just women, but men and generation Y recruits, say the authors, are pushing for a saner working culture. Unilever, a consumer-goods firm, wants 55% of its senior managers to be women by 2015. To that end, it allows employees to work anywhere and for as few hours as they like, so long as they get the job done. Despite being one of the world’s most global firms, it discourages travel. McKinsey lets both female and male consultants work for as little as three days a week for proportionally less pay—and still have a shot at making partner. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s high-profile chief operating officer, says that she has left the office at 5.30pm ever since she started a family in 2005.

　　可以通過改變公司文化來改善這種現(xiàn)象嗎?在Alison Maitland 和Peter Thomson合著的新書《未來的工作》中，他們闡述了公司應該如何給員工更多的彈性空間。作者認為，不僅是女性員工，男性員工以及新入職場的80,90后也都渴望健全合理的公司文化。快消公司聯(lián)合利華希望到2015年他們的女性高管比例能達到55%。為了實現(xiàn)這個計劃，他們允許員工只要能完成工作任務，在哪里辦公，辦公多久都不受限制。作為一家最全球化的公司之一，聯(lián)合利華卻并不鼓勵出差。而麥肯錫公司讓自己的咨詢顧問們雖然賺的少一些但每周只工作三天，也依然培養(yǎng)出合伙人。Facebook公司的首席運營官Sheryl Sandberg說從她2005年成家后，她每天下午5點半就下班了。

　　Such examples are rare. For most big jobs, there is no avoiding mad hours and lots of travel. Customers do not care about your daughter’s flute recital. Putting women in the C-suite is important for firms, but not as important as making profits; for without profits a company will die. So bosses should try hard to accommodate their employees’ family responsibilities, but only in ways that do not harm the bottom line. Laurence Monnery of Egon Zehnder International, an executive-search firm, reckons that companies should stop penalising people who at some point in their careers have gone part-time.

　　但是這樣的例子畢竟鳳毛麟角。在大多數(shù)的重要崗位上，超長的工作時間和商務出差都在所難免?？蛻舨挪还苣闩畠菏遣皇且k長笛演奏會了。對于企業(yè)來說，培養(yǎng)女性的最高管理層【3】固然重要，但重要性還比不上給公司創(chuàng)造利潤，沒有了后者會致公司于死地。因此老板們只有在不損害公司利益底線的前提下努力幫助員工承擔好他們的家庭責任。億康先達國際人力資源咨詢公司的Laurence Monnery認為企業(yè)不應該再處分那些在有時去做兼職的員工。