YouSaid · the spoken record

Sandra Quince

lines on the record: 38
first: 2018-11-12
most recent: 2018-11-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, well, some of the sorting starts really, really young. I mean, you could go into an entire conversation on the educational system. And I think that's something that we looked at and thought a little bit about as well, which is to say education can play a role really early on in people's lives in terms of influencing what it is they think they're capable of doing. It's really important for educators and for parents to think about their children more broadly and not engendered terms and encourage them to pursue the things that they think are interesting independent of their gender.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would give the same advice largely to men and women starting out now, work hard, ask questions, be curious, learn as much as you possibly can, and that will help guide you in finding what it is that you really like to do and where you can add value that no one else can on a particular topic or particular issue. Writing this paper has also led me to add on to that and take a long-term view of what you're doing. But I don't think that women and men come into the labor force in any different way today. I think that they are at the same starting point and they need to do the same things to get ahead. It's only later that these questions start to come up and really be challenging. And women should keep an eye on them now, but start as everyone does.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's consistent for men and women. You should do something that you are extremely passionate about. Hopefully that passion intersects with your natural skill set because those things do tend to go hand in hand. Exploit the things that you're really good at and drive really, really hard at them because you can work really hard at getting better at something that you're not so good at. It's never going to differentiate you.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm surprised when you look at all of it in the aggregate how little progress we've actually made over a prolonged period of time, particularly when you look at the labor force dynamics. For me, that was sort of this depressing and aha moment all at once when looking at the work and the paper and saying, okay, this really matters. And we do actually have to be very proactive about looking at these issues and even talk about things that make people feel uncomfortable or less comfortable than they otherwise might.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What surprised me was really what we talked about earlier, this long-term implication, just from a financial perspective, because we like to think long-term over the course of our careers, but if you actually put it down on paper, what does it mean to take time off? What does it mean to step back? It's really striking, and I hadn't appreciated the numbers themselves. So to me, the facts about women in the labor force, facts about women in education were familiar, worth very much worth putting out, but also very familiar, but to say, look, this is really what the stakes are was very helpful or very surprising really to me.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the way and we haven't talked about it but I think this is an important point and it's one of the pieces of feedback we've gotten from clients this is now a question more broadly of do leaders in corporate America take a view on these issues and start to be vocal about them and really try to look internally at things that are working and things that are not working so that we can actually move the needle and when Sandra and I talk about the things that we've tried to do to help women internally in our own careers it wouldn't be possible if you didn't have senior leaders who decided that this was important and they were going to be supportive of you in those endeavors.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I very much agree on the advocacy and also think that the mentoring is incredibly important, particularly at this three-year head point, where it's very helpful to women to say, look, you want this promotion, these are the things that you're going to have to do to get there. And let me help you map out a way to do it and let me support you as you go through it. Mentoring can be structured and formal or it can be much more informal, but I personally have benefited a lot from it. And that is the way that I like to support women here to say, think about your career over the longer term, think about what you want, and then let's figure out how you can get there. It's hard to do that on your own. And I think the support is very valuable.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Even when you think about things like a promotion, I start worrying about the women around me three years ahead of a promotion. In other words, you really have to think long term. And Sandra talked about this, this long-term element. You have to make sure that that person has sufficient basis and time to demonstrate the quality of their work and to have the right profile platform and opportunities to actually do the things that are differentiating and that you're ensuring they have that at-bat and access to those opportunities to prove what they're capable of doing. But it does require taking a long-term view. And I think a lot of it is based in this notion of understanding someone's work, product, quality, and strengths and being able to advocate for them on that basis.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That goes back to your research, which shows that what we miss sometimes are those critical junctures. That's right. Where someone's re-entering the workforce or up for promotion and people are thinking about it maybe in too short term a way.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I try to do as much as I can. I think it's really, really important. Sandra does as well. I tend to think it's about advocacy, and I usually like to be in a position where there's a woman who is either at an inflection point, a promotion, a job transfer into a bigger seat. I like to be able to advocate for that person in that process. And I think that tends to be where you can be the most effective. And the basis of advocacy has to be that you've worked with them on something.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think so. Frankly, this is all about honesty. I mean, you need to have an open, honest conversation about all of these issues. There's nothing to hide, and we should have a very clean dialogue about some of these issues.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's how you end up with 6% of women being CEOs, even after 30, 40 years of an evolution in the broader labor market with women participating more in the workforce and women being better educated. And attrition rates declining at certain inflection points. And so for us, those are really fundamental issues”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the problem is the reluctance of companies to invest in women at these crucial points in their careers. The investment seems to be equal when people are just coming into firms. But it seems that there's a lot of whether intentional or unintentional reluctance to invest in women later because they might go on maternity leave. They might go on extended maternity leave. They might leave the labor force. Or even if they're here, they might not be fully committed to the job. And that keeps companies from investing in women, in some cases, in the way that they would invest in men. And by investment, we mean things like leadership development opportunities, high-profile assignments, visibility with senior people, all these things that are intangible, but very, very important to advancement. And if women don't get that, then that's really how they may find themselves in the end being downshifted because they haven't had these opportunities, and that keeps them in.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely, I agree 100%, but I would also add that one of our principal goals was being part of the conversation. We think it's really important this issue is top of mind. It's a big focus area. It affects half of the population, although they say women are now more than half of the broader population, and definitely more than half of the educated population where a lot of companies are looking for their future leaders and their workforce. And we wanted to ensure that we were helping to be solutions oriented and advising our clients and thinking through some of these issues. I would also say, I think for the six female authors who wrote this, I don't think I'm going too far in speaking for them that we all care about the issue personally as well and would like to see change more broadly in America and that some of these issues do actually get resolved over time.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would like to be helpful to our clients, and that was the spirit in which we wrote this, not to be judgmental about individual choices or firms' practices, but just to say if you want to change things or even look at them deeply, this is a way to go about doing it. So to the extent that we can help guide the conversation, that is a good outcome for us.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We looked a lot at processes. There's often a focus on changing people's thinking and their behavior, but we took a much more process-driven approach to say, you should look at your recruiting. Is your recruiting biased in a gender way? You should look at your existing promotion, compensation, leadership development programs, and really assess them to be sure that you are assigning opportunities fairly, that you're rewarding success equally. And that is something that companies can do that's a broad recommendation that can be tailored to their own circumstances. We want to say if you make structural changes or even just review your policies, you may come up with things that are relevant to your industry and your firm where you can even the playing field much more than you have today.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They also come back with a perspective that we tried to talk about in the paper that these aren't just women's issues that need to be resolved by women. And you really need senior support across men and women to make these things work. So for instance, paternity leave, as you say, it's very helpful if senior men actually take this and advertise that they're taking it and come back and say, I'm just back from paternity leave. But women alone are not going to be able to resolve these issues either socially or in the workforce. And the response we've gotten from our clients actually has also been we're all interested in this. It's not been women calling and saying, I'm grappling with these problems, but it's been clients broadly saying we all as a group are grappling with this.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this notion of a woman, why would I invest in her? She's going to leave anyway for however many months to take advantage of her maternity leave, which some companies may unconsciously do or consciously do. It helps if both sexes are actually taking advantage of leave. It makes there will be a lot less bias in the system.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some countries and some companies really encourage men to take fuller advantage of things like paternity leave, and that has an impact because all of a sudden those men are more deeply involved in raising the children and doing some things”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're familiar. But what companies do to say to women, we're here to support you, or we're not here to support you, is very important. And I think there's a lot of need for companies to say, we recognize this is a difficult transition period or can be difficult, and we want to put in place structures that do support you because we want you to be here for the long term. We're not looking for you to leave straight away, and we're willing to make this investment in you, and we want to help you do it. Things like programs for return from maternity leave or something that we talk about in the paper called upshifting, which is sort of helping women move into or back into high-profile positions, can be extremely helpful both for the individual herself and also for others around who see, oh, the firm's commitment is very strong.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the company perspective, return for maternity leave is a really interesting inflection point, and I think the way companies deal with this says a lot about their approach to women more broadly. And so the signaling that the company gives the woman is very important as she thinks about the next few years. But if you think about maternity leave in America, it's really short. I mean, four months is a generous maternity leave. And in the course of your 20, 30, 40 year career, it's really nothing. But it's made to be a big moment. And I think the companies need to respond by saying, on the one hand, this is a big moment, incorporating another person into your family is existentially difficult, and it's also difficult in terms of time management and demands on your time.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As we talked about at the outset, there are times in careers where there are inflection points. And it would not be unusual, based on anecdotal evidence, not the data, that women would face some of those inflection points around their childbearing years. And I say not the data because, by the way, women are happening to exit the workforce a little bit later and less so than they have in the past. But I think for women in particular, the reason why it ends up being an inflection point is because it's a huge personal adjustment to have another human being enter your life. You know, one of the things I say to women coming back from maternity leave is, A, it'll get better. Your child will sleep and you will survive. And B, ask for help, do not be afraid to ask for help. And there's no such thing as too much help.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We wanted to do it in a super conservative way so that people wouldn't say you're creating some sort of outlandish scenario. So we said we're taking this lockstep job. And when the woman comes back, having been out for five years, it's as though she never left. She sits right back in her seat. There's no question that her skills might have atrophied or her contacts might have gone elsewhere or that she hadn't kept up with what's going on in the industry. It's just as though she never left. And even so, and to our mind, very conservative scenario, the financial implications were enormous. And we really wanted people to see that long-term picture because I think when women are making these decisions and when firms are making these decisions about their employees, it's usually done with more of a near-term bent. I need to do something different now or we want her to do something different now. But if you look over the long term, the consequences are really quite significant.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We tried to do a couple of scenario analyses in the paper because we thought it helped make it more tangible for the reader to understand what the consequences would be. And one of them showed that essentially a woman has to work more than four years longer than a comparable man. So in other words, to make up that lifetime gap of income that gets lost, the woman would need to work to age 69, whereas the man could retire around age 65. We also looked at a woman who would leave the workforce for five years and come back. And when we did that, we found that she would forgo about a fifth of her lifetime income. Even though she's only gone for about an eighth of her entire career. And even those assumptions that we made in doing those analyses were pretty conservative. In other words, we assumed that the woman who left the workforce when she came back in came back into the same seat as the comparable man. It doesn't always happen.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who sets standards for success and for promotion and compensation and leadership opportunities, how those are determined and how those are allocated and also how they're judged. And in this we turned to a lot of behavioral science research to look at ways that workplaces may intentionally or unintentionally be biased towards men who have perhaps more time in their schedules and less to do outside.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we looked a lot at what drives women either to downshift voluntarily or to be downshifted effectively. And we tried to stress that in some cases this is a woman's choice and should be entirely respected. In some cases, it seems to be less so more driven by the dynamics of the institution. So as Amanda said, there's this question of juggling work and home, and you see, again, just in the data that women have much more of the responsibility for home care, childcare than men do. Women do more hours and they do more things that tend to have to be done every day like cooking dinner rather than, say, washing the car. So there's that, but there's also a lot of factors about the workplace itself that we think may push women to choose to downshift or in some cases actually to leave when it gets to a certain point. And this has to do with the environment in the workplace and things like expectations around male and female behavior and questions of”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Holistically, and again, you take a data-driven approach to this problem, you realize that you need more than one solution. And one thing where we think companies should focus is on ensuring that women who have either downshifted or exited the workforce on a temporary basis are able to come back in and still have the opportunity to get catapulted up and to get higher profile, higher value seats, job assignments, work assignments, client lists, things that are relevant and that matter in terms of progressing your career. If we can do a better job of reintegrating women after a downshift or after a temporary leave from the workforce and coming back in, we think that's going to make a big difference in terms of driving some of those pay gaps and seniority gaps.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The entire spectrum women are better educated than men today So what could possibly therefore still exist that are driving these gaps? And that's where we came to this terminology around downshifting. And the idea here is that there may be periods of time in women's lives where either voluntarily or involuntarily they find themselves in a position where they've chosen a job, a seat, where it may be lower profile, less time consuming, and they're really at the edge of juggling the issues that relate to the balance between work and home and that relate to some of the stigma associated with family-friendly policies, particularly when only women take advantage of them and not men, and a host of other factors, which I think Sandra should talk about, but essentially what we said was there just isn't one dynamic at play here. There's actually a couple of factors at play. And I'll jump to the punchline and then we'll go a little bit more into what's underneath. At the end of the day, when you look at it and think about it,”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We said to ourselves, if hiring is an element, but it can't be the only issue, and attrition for women has declined from what it used to look like, and those numbers are starting to narrow, and more women are working, more women are better educated, actually women today are far better educated than men, which is an important point.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Attrition is what people usually cite. They say women leave the labor force in their 30s or early 40s, and that's why there may be a lot of women at junior levels, but not at senior levels. That's true to some extent that women are more likely than men to leave the workforce earlier in their careers. But it's much, much less true than it used to be. If you compare the data today to the 60s, the gap has not closed but narrowed remarkably. And it's also true that women tend to go back into the labor force. So where their participation rates decline in their early 30s, mid-30s, women start coming back into the labor force in their 40s. And so that too can explain some of the story, but not the whole thing.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And only 6% of CEOs. When you look at those figures together in the math, you say to yourself, it can't really just be hiring. That's the issue. Hiring could definitely be improved. It's an important element. We shouldn't overlook it. And I think it's important to dedicate efforts there. But that can't be the only issue at play based on the data. And so that's when we shifted and we said, okay, let's talk a little bit.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, I'll start with hiring. There are some industries where there's a natural skew in terms of hiring right out of the gate, where the hiring tends to skew either in one direction or the other in terms of gender. And teaching is a really good example of a field that tends to aggregate more women. Science, technology, and engineering and math degrees tend to aggregate more men. So there are some fields where instantaneously out of the gate in terms of folks' educational background, they tend to select into a certain type of field and those fields have pay differentials. And so we looked at hiring and thought about that and what role that could potentially play. But again, when we went back and said, what are some of those things that we can control for in the labor market data? Education is one of the things that we could control for because one underlying point here that's important to make is that the data disclosures are fairly limited. We do know that women are roughly 40% of those S&P 1500 employees.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's really why we chose to look at closing the gaps, plural the gaps in pay and the gaps in seniority because they don't work separately. They are very intertwined. And so when you focus on this 20% gap, it sounds as though women make 20% less than men and that's the end of the story and it's not clearly. But it really drove us to look at these questions of the things you find harder to measure like seniority and like position”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so what we tried to do as researchers was say, let's not just talk about a generalized 20% number. Let's actually dig underneath that and say really if you tried to compare two people, a man and a woman, who are as similar as we can find them to be in the data that we have available, what is that actual differential? And that is the 17.5%. And again, there are some data that we just don't have and we can't capture. And some of that data we think is probably really important in terms of determining why women are actually earning less than men. And Sandra alluded to it, but probably principally its seniority title and position, years of experience, things like that that aren't available in labor market studies. And it's very hard to imagine there's a world in which you could divorce those elements from pay.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This twenty percent pay gap is an economy wide gap, and so it's not to say that every woman is paid 20% less than the man who sits next to her who does the same job. A lot of factors go into pay things like industry, occupation, position, seniority. And we try to control for as many of these factors as we can to say if you had the same man and the same woman with the same background, what explains the difference? And this is where What we can see and what we can't see really collide in the sense that we can control for education, we can control for occupation, we can control for industry, but we really can't measure the impact of seniority and time in the position and title because that data is just not there to have, not there in the labor studies. And so we think that that is really what's contributing to the vast majority of this 20% gap.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was quite mixed. Sometimes you have to talk about things that are slightly uncomfortable, and you have to talk about them because if you don't talk about them, you can't resolve problems. And sometimes when you go close to an issue and talk about things like downshifting and whether it's voluntary or involuntary, it's natural for people to just get a little bit uncomfortable around that. And so I think from our perspective, we wanted to be very clear that we weren't trying to take a view. We were never trying to say that women shouldn't feel like they can make choices in their lives. Of course they should, and those choices should be respected. But we wanted to be a part of the dialogue and demonstrate with numbers and facts what some of the issues are that are outside in the world and that are facing women, but these are not only women's issues. There are issues for society at large. There are issues for men, and they can't be viewed as only being women's issues. I would say feedback overall has been really positive.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny, I think there was a view that this could potentially be controversial. In fact, the feedback has been just the opposite. In other words, most of our clients, both on the institutional investing side and on the corporate side, have said to us, yes, we understand we're facing these issues. Thank you for talking about them. We want to actually be involved in a dialogue and in a debate. We don't want to be uncomfortable having these discussions. There's no stigma associated with it. We should be out there and in the dialogue. And if you're not part of the dialogue, you can't possibly understand what's going on. So for us, it was actually a lot less controversial and very well received by our client base so far.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no topic that is more front of mind today than gender equality and equality in general. It doesn't matter whether you open your newspaper, your Twitter feed, your inbox, you talk to your friends, you talk to clients, colleagues. This is a topic that people are focused on. And not only is it a topic that people are focused on, but our clients in particular have begun to ask us questions around how do they move the needle on the issue of gender equality and promote more women inside of their organizations and see better gender-related outcomes. And so really for us from an advisory perspective, the principal catalyst was demand from our clients. And then, of course, it's something that we find personally interesting as well and also happens to be one of the topics that is front of mind for our society at large today. Those were really the fundamental underpinnings for the reason to write the report.”
2018-11-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Closing the Gender Gaps: Advancing Women in Corporate America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT