Sarah Green Carmichael is an editor with Bloomberg Opinion and a former executive editor at Harvard Business Review, where she hosted the HBR Ideacast. She recently wrote a piece in Bloomberg titled “Covid-19 Explodes the Myth That Women Opt Out” and she presents a compelling case for her conclusion that “When women leave the workforce, they’re not exercising their options — they’ve run out of them.”

Sarah cites 3 factors that conspire to make it difficult for women to remain in the workforce after having children: inflexible workplaces, the reality that women shoulder more of the burden of taking care of running the house and raising the kids and bad public policy. 

Data released in the McKinsey Women in the Workplace 2020 report shows that in August and September of 2020, more than a million people dropped out of the workforce, and 80% of them were women. Furthermore, 1 in 4 employed women and 1 in 3 mothers are thinking about quitting or downshifting their work hours. 

The long-term implications of this trend are alarming. Less diverse teams, fewer women’s voices setting corporate policy, and a diminished pipeline of women for promotion to executive-level roles. 

Join Sarah and I as we explore the data, share our own personal experiences with work and talk through solutions that could help make the workplace a more female-friendly environment. 

Find Sarah Green Carmichael here:

Covid-19 Explodes the Myth That Women Opt Out on Bloomberg

More articles by Sarah Green Carmichael

On LinkedIn

On Twitter @skgreen