E-mail a friendKatty Kay
airdate June 26, 2009
In a broadcast journalism career that has spanned more than 4 continents, Washington-based BBC News correspondent and anchor of the net's World News America, Katty Kay has covered U.S. presidential elections and wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. She began her BBC career in Zimbabwe and has worked as a correspondent in London and Tokyo and for the London Times' Washington bureau. Kay grew up in the Middle East, where her father was a British diplomat. She's also co-author of Womenomics and blogs at True/Slant.
BBC correspondent talks about companies that are starting to give their workers more flexibility and seeing good returns. (1:24)
Full interview. (10:29)
Katty Kay
Tavis: We continue our Road to Wealth series tonight with Katty Kay, chief Washington correspondent for the BBC. Along with Claire Shipman of ABC News, she's co-author of a new book, Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules for Success. She joins us tonight from Washington. Katty, nice to have you on the program
Katty Kay: Tavis, thanks so much for having me.
Tavis: Let me start by asking the obvious, the definition of womenomics is?
Kay: The definition of womenomics, Tavis, is really women power in the marketplace and their ability to change the way that we all work. For the last thirty years, women have really bought into the concept that they were gonna be men, that we were gonna do those sixty-hour weeks and climb that ladder, and you know what? It was a model that didn't really work for most professional women.
But what we found doing the research for this book is that women have a huge amount of power in the marketplace that they simply don't know about, that companies, for example, that employ more senior women actually make more money. Now what we argue is you can take that power and use it to negotiate for what model that really works for most women.
Tavis: Let's back up and address the notion of why the model that you spoke of earlier did not work specifically for women.
Kay: Most women, at some point, professional women at some point in their career, face that awful crunch between family and career. In 2003, Harvard Business School released a report showing that professional women were leaving the workforce in greater numbers than they were joining it for the first time ever.
So the economy was losing all of these incredibly well-educated women, lawyers, doctors, engineers. Women have more degrees than men. We have more post-graduate degrees than men. The economy simply can't afford to lose us in these numbers. But the workplace as it is doesn't suit most women. We're making that choice between kids and career and often the kids are winning and, faced with that crunch, the economy loses out and the women themselves lose out.
Now Claire and I got together over this book and we had our personal stories where we've tried to carve out our own work life balances. First of all, we thought we were just telling our stories. Then we started talking to women all across America and we found lawyers, doctors, engineers, insurance salesmen, accountants, saying the same thing. The workplace as it is, that old model, just doesn't work for us with our need for a family life as well.
Tavis: Is it really true, though, Katty, that women can write their own rules for success?
Kay: You know, part of this, Tavis, is making the mental decision about what you want and being prepared at some point in your career, as both Claire and I have done, to say we're going to do something counter-intuitive. We might take a step sideward. We may turn down a promotion because we want to keep that balance.
It's what Walton called plateauing, and the numbers are extraordinary that more and more women and even men, particularly younger men, are saying, you know what? We want less responsibility at work. We don't want that workaholic model that people have been giving us for the last twenty or thirty years. We want something that is more balanced.
That's what's really amazing, how Gen X and Gen Y just kind of get this idea about - when I was at college in England in the 1980s, I kind of assumed I was gonna do those seventy-hour weeks, be president of my company and have a fabulous husband and fit in a couple of kids, but no one really talked about them very much. Then I realized after I had my first child that wasn't having it all. It was just doing it all. It was a kind of drudgery and it just didn't work for me.
Tavis: Does that mean that you don't believe in the notion anymore that you can have it all at the same time?
Kay: We talk about something, Tavis, called a new all. It's a different type of all. It's not that grind of necessarily going straight for the corner office or straight for CEO of your company, not sweating your guts out to make partner by the age of thirty. It's more like seeing your career as a wave that sometimes you dial up and sometimes you dial down again.
Now when you have young kids or perhaps elderly parents who need looking after or that marathon or that community service work you want to do, you may decide that that's a time in your life when you want to dial down your career. You can always pick it back up again and it might take you longer to get to the end goal.
You may not get to the very, very top of your company, but we feel that it provides a balance in most peoples' lives. You know, all the numbers show that a majority of professional college-educated women are prepared to trade some status and some money for a bit more time.
Tavis: What you defined as balance for someone else, cynical or otherwise, might not call balance, but would call, Katty, settling. What's the difference between being balanced and settling?
Kay: Well, some of it is settling in a broader context if you define what settling means as a form of success. We talk about this in the book, that you have to tune out a lot of other voices.
I remember when I was offered a job as ABC's White House correspondent and everybody, my agent, my peers; my colleagues were all saying to me, "Of course, you've got to take this job. It's a huge step. They've never had a foreigner doing it." It was going to launch me in America as if was some kind of rocket that needed a fuel boost. But actually, you know what? In my gut, I knew I'd be miserable if I took that job because I have four kids.
It would have meant sixty hours a week in the office. I'd have been traveling with the president. I just knew it wasn't right for me. Well, if you can - then I see other people who are younger than me and, you know, do spend more time in the office. They've overtaken me. I'm not at the very top of my career, but it's okay. I feel happy and, to use your words, settled with the choices that I've made.
Tavis: How much of writing your own success honestly has to do with your annual earned income? I wonder if persons who make more really do have the opportunity to write their own success more than everyday people not at the level of a Katty Kay.
Kay: Yeah. You know what, Tavis? I mean, you're right. If you are poor in New York City or you are poor in New Delhi, you have fewer choices than college-educated professional women and men anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. Of course, that's true.
I mean, we hope that Michelle Obama coming into the White House with a work life balance is a big issue. She's lived it. It's a policy issue. We hope she's gonna be able to really address the kind of structural changes that need to take place - cheaper childcare, that kind of thing - so that women and men of all income groups can benefit from more balance.
But there are also studies that show that the companies that allow people to work in a more balanced way, companies like Best Buy, Marriott Hotel, Capital One Finance; companies you wouldn't necessarily think of, who started out needing to retain valuable talent, most of it women, and then decided to take the clock off the wall, throw open the system and say, "Okay, you can work a forty-hour week in four days."
You can come in late. You can work from Starbucks at three in the morning. You can leave early and pick up your work later on in the evening. All we care about is that we get the results. Those companies have found that what started out as a talent retention strategy has shown huge returns in productivity.
Best Buy has something called a results-only work environment. They really don't care when or where you work. They just want to know that your results are good. They have found that productivity increases by forty percent. Well, if you start seeing the workplace like that, there's no real reason that a lot of people can't benefit from a more alternative work schedule.
At that point, why have people sitting at their cubicles watching the clock, waiting for the boss to go home because they feel they can't leave before the boss leaves? If you measure people on performance and you measure them on results, you actually get better returns because people want to be treated like adults.
Tavis: Is there evidence that companies are starting to get that beyond the ones you listed?
Kay: Yeah. I mean, more and more companies are getting it. We had a conference call with a hundred U.S. companies last week. Two hours we spent on the phone with companies like Alcoa, you know, a big aluminum-making company. They are looking at ways to allow flexibility for their professional classes, but also down the line as well.
I think there's a real recognition that Gen X and Gen Y, they're not gonna want to sit in cubicles the way our parents did. They just don't. They do their friendships virtually, their texting, their own Facebook the whole time. To them, it's a complete [unintelligible]. Technology has made them much freer. They don't like the idea of being physically tied. That's a demanding generation.
The companies we've spoken to, many of them big and small across America, say, "We know we have to address these concerns. We know we have to free up the workplace to keep that generation happy, that generation and our generation of women who are saying this old structure doesn't work for us." We think there's a real shift going on in the workplace and most exciting is that the companies that get it are ahead of the curve and are seeing the dividends already.
Tavis: Just because I'm curious, as our audience can tell - first of all, we know your work, but for those who don't know your work, they can tell by the accent that you are from across the pond. I'm curious as to how the issues that you and Claire cover in this book differ from women in your homeland.
Kay: I would say, Tavis, that the concerns are the same. When I talk to my friends and colleagues who have kids back in England, they have exactly the same concerns. All over Europe, probably most of the Western world, professional women and increasingly professional men are dealing with this idea of balance. The difference, of course, is legislative.
I was speaking to a program up in Canada this morning and they were talking about childcare there which costs $7.00 a day, subsidized by the government. If you talk to people in northern Europe and Scandinavian countries where there is greatly subsidized childcare, of course, that helps people get that balance and stay in the workplace as well.
You know, legislative changes can make an impact on how easy it is to get balance. But I think the real shift comes when companies themselves stop seeing this as a favor, when they stop thinking this is something to be handed out like candy at a child's birthday party, but they start thinking this is a business strategy. This works for the people we employ and it works for us.
Listen, if my boss says to me that I can't leave my cubicle, I'm gonna sneak out to see my daughter's school play anyway, but as I go, I'm gonna feel resentful. If my boss says, "Of course, you can go, that's absolutely fine, just get your work done later," I'm gonna feel grateful and I'm gonna work better and be more committed.
Tavis: Her name, Katty Kay, the co-author of a new book called Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules for Success. She wrote the book along with ABC's Claire Shipman. Congratulations, Katty. Already on the best-seller list for The New York Times, so congrats on that.
Kay: Thank you.
Tavis: Nice to have you on.
Kay: Thanks, Tavis.
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