Office Romance, Anyone?!!

"We specify the two years before cohabitation as the 'dating period' and define the first year of this period as the event year of interest when estimating the impact of forming a relationship with a coworker." 

"A potentially useful firm-level intervention based on our results is to prevent managers from having a direct influence on the career trajectories of their subordinate partners."

"Our  findings suggest that other employees dislike these relationships, particularly when they are associated with higher earnings for the subordinate partner."

"This means that regardless of whether the earnings gains obtained are due to favouritism, the appearance of favouritism should be curtailed as it can lead other workers to leave the firm." 

"Regardless of the cause, higher earnings gains for those in relationships with a workplace manager could lead to resentment among co-workers who might [rightly or wrongly] view this as preferential treatment."

Researchers: British Columbia/California/Finland

Photo: Liubomyr Vorona / iStock / Getty Images

 

Published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., the paper, The Impacts of Romantic Relationships With the Boss is an intriguing study of the development of intimate relations between an employee and that employee's supervisor, out of which rises preferential treatment seen in improved position, increased salary, and the offense such a situation draws from other employees recognizing the office romance as unfair and possibly injurious to their own aspirations toward upward mobility and recognition.

 

The conclusion of the study producing the paper examining links between relationships with an executive and an employee and increased salary concludes that  entry into such a relationship with a manager sees the subordinate's earnings increase to an average of six percent. On the opposite side of the relationship ledger, a sundering of the relationship has the effect of triggering an 'abrupt' 18 percent decline in earnings. As well, a side effect enters the picture...that of other workers' perceptions of such romantic relationships. To the extent that the greater the subordinate's wage gains, the greater the demoralizing effect on other employees. 

 

 Data retrieved from Statistics Finland were used by the researchers to analyze employment administration statistics of Finnish office workers over 3 decades in a variety of sectors. Salary information for 1,020 manager-subordinate workplace couples as well as 728 instances of relationship breakdowns were studied by the research team. The end of a relationship was identified as the moment the workplace couple stopped living together. Determining a relationship's inauguration proved more elusive.

 

 

 

"Understanding the economic impact of these interactions (of colleagues who begin a relationship but live separately) would be interesting, but it is beyond the scope of our data", they stated of the study that recognized mostly female subordinates dating male managers to discover that these women realized raw earnings growth of 22 percent between the year before the dating period began and the year following, in comparison to 16 percent growth in the same period among a control group. 

 

 A "clear and stark pattern" for women was found who broke up with a workplace manager, whose earnings fell by 18 percent the year following the breakup whereas women who broke up with a manager from a different workplace saw slower earnings growth yet no earning drop. The researchers attempted to determine whether the salary bump was related to favouritism or whether it was merit; the second likely if the subordinate was picking up new skills or being mentored by the new partner. 

 

"While it is challenging to distinguish between the two, we provide some suggestive evidence", they concluded. Salary increase dropped dramatically if either partner moved to a new workplace while the relationship continued. Workplaces where manager/subordinate relationships occurred, also were those where a higher number of workers departed, of both sexes. A workplace with 71 employees on average would experience an additional four departures linked to romantic entanglements. 

 

The conclusion was that a more direct intervention would be the banning of such relationships. McDonald's for example fired its CEO in 2019 as a result of a consensual relationship with a subordinate. "Yet such bans come with their own costs. If similar rules had existed at Microsoft or Sidley Austin Law Firm, Bill and Melinda Gates and Barack and Michelle Obama [respectively] would have been barred from dating." 

 

 Asia Business Daily

 

Workforce and Economic Recovery From COVID

"It was one of the most widely telegraphed risks at the onset of the pandemic: Women, who seemed to suffer less from the COVID-19 disease, would probably pay a steeper economic price than men. The clues wee hiding in plain sight."

"Women make up a larger share of workers in industries that ground to a halt, and they typically shoulder more of the unpaid labor at home."

"It would be a greater challenge for them to both keep their jobs and carry on working."

Elisa Martinuzzi, finance columnist, Bloomberg Opinion

Getty/Noam Galai    A woman and child in New York City, August 17, 2020

• The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a striking blow to a child care sector that was already failing to support all families, and 4.5 million child care slots could be lost permanently.
• There were nearly 10 million mothers of young children in the labor force in 2019. This report explores how insufficient child care could affect their work, their wages, their long-term economic outcomes, and the economic recovery.
• This report estimates that the risk of mothers leaving the labor force and reducing work hours in order to assume caretaking responsibilities amounts to $64.5 billion per year in lost wages and economic activity.
• Without both immediate and long-term action to shore up the child care infrastructure and establish more progressive work-family policies, the United States cannot achieve continued economic growth nor protect and advance gender equity.    Center for American Progress

"Some of the women who were laid off are actually not looking anymore, that's deeply concerning.""If we don't get women back to work in the types of numbers we saw before … we won't get the economic growth that we really need." "Certainly, child care is factoring into that. If we don't have child care, if we don't have children in schools, that work does fall predominantly, in most cases, to women."                                                                                                               "And, so those women don't really have a choice, particularly if they work outside of the home."                                                                                                              Jennifer Reynolds, CEO of Toronto Financial International

A mother works from home in northern England while her two sons complete home-school activities. As schools around the world closed last spring, parents who could work from home had to juggle remote jobs and sudden home-schooling responsibilities. In many cases, women were saddled with the latter. (Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images)

The United Nations' COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker outlines that government responses to the global pandemic has realized few policies being enacted to specifically target women in the workforce. Roughly 200 countries set up social-protection and labour-market measures which resulted in fewer than one in five out of the 1,300 enacted, being 'gender sensitive' such that they failed to include women's economic security and responsibility for unpaid care.

 

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus, equivalent to over ten percent of annual GDP in the larger European Union economies, employment slumped dramatically in retail, tourism and hospitality services, sectors where women comprise over 60 percent of the workforce. Where male unemployment in the EU is now 7.2 percent, for women it is now 8.1 percent. In those instances where women retained employment, many among them were forced by circumstances to peel back hours.

 

An increase in caregiving and tutoring school-age children have added to women's responsibilities. The International Labour Organization studied monthly wages across 28 European countries, and their analysis indicates that earning subsidies included, women on average experienced a 6.9 percent decline in wages resulting from working fewer hours as compared with a 4.7 percent decline in men's wages in the first and second quarters of this past novel coronavirus year. 

In Germany in the first half of 2020 women's wages declined 8.6 percent, close to twice that of their male counterparts, while in the U.K., women's earnings declined by 12.9 percent, almost double the drop men realized. The rate at which women have been slipping out of the labour force altogether is concerning. The U.S., Canada and Japan have seen the gap increase between active men and women in their labour force. 

 

Four percent of women who lost employment during the pandemic, according to one European survey, simply halted their search for work, in comparison to a mere one percent of men.

As an attempted antidote, childcare centres in the UK. were exempted from paying property taxes through 2021 with the government additionally granting childcare tax credits to families. Measures to prevent centres from closing, ensuring that families could find affordable child care did help women to maintain their employment, as per a study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 

 

Offering subsidies turned out particularly useful as pandemic-hit incomes declined, given the steep cost of childcare for preschool children.

In the United Kingdom, retail, hospitality and leisure businesses were eligible as well for cash grants up to 25,000 pounds, aiding companies to retain their staff. The government of Australia ensured that 16 of 36 policy measures were sensitive to gender requirements with the government taking to providing free childcare to approximately a million families. 

 

Norway realized its gender gap in labour force participation in decline during the pandemic and it proffered double paid time off for women caring for small children, to 20 days.

According to Simeon Djankov, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, governments should see to financing a further expansion of childcare to ensure that working mothers not continue to be forced by circumstances during the struggle to contain COVID to abandon their jobs when home urgencies force them to remain at home. A situation which would have a further impact on deepening gender inequality and ultimately slow economic recovery.

With schools, summer camps and daycare facilities closed because of the pandemic, working parents like Toronto law clerk Charlotte Schwartz are juggling full-time work with round-the-clock child care. More often than not, women are doing a disproportionate amount of the child minding, and some who have been laid off are not returning to the workforce. (Andy Hincenbergs/CBC)