Why can’t women make it to the top, still?

Elena Chen
2 min readAug 1, 2022

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Since Sheryl Sandberg gave her famous Ted talk “Why we have too few women leaders” a decade ago, the American workplace has made significant improvement on the topic of gender equality. For example,

  1. Many companies remove gender as a hiring signal when evaluating candidates
  2. Employers regularly check the wage gap between male and female to ensure equal pay for equal work
  3. We have tried our best to set similar parental or caregiver leave policies for male and female

Fast forward 10 years. Despite that 60% of junior managers and 40% of middle managers are female today, as many as 80% of senior managers and 93% of CEOs are still men.

What are we missing?

Anthony Divento, one of the best female allyship advocates I know, explained it well. “Showing up as an ally to women isn’t a 9-to-5 responsibility that ends when you close your laptop. Countless studies show that women with male partners bear a disproportionately high amount of childcare and household work at home. It’s essential that men show up at work — AND at home — to promote greater gender equity.”

The missing puzzle is “equal partner at home”.

Nowadays, women are still expected to take on 2x more housework and 3x more childcare responsibilities than men. We still only see women in the grocery store commercials. Men are still “babysitting” the kids.

In this week’s video, Anthony and I are going to dive deep into the topic of “True allyship starts at home”. You will have the rare opportunity to hear the male perspective on gender equality from Anthony. He will not only talk about the root causes of the imbalanced responsibility between men and women at home, but also share his recommendation to both men and women on how to build more equal partnerships.

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