Last week,
HR Dive reported a
Yale University global study on the forces behind continued underrepresentation of women in business leadership. After surveying 5,000 individuals in 100 countries,
the study concluded that women’s careers are negatively impacted by the perception that women are less available to work 24/7 because of responsibilities at home. Sixty-five percent of survey respondents reported that senior management believed women were responsible for most of the childcare duties in the home. Regardless of whether this is accurate, and whether 24/7 availability is an accurate measure of productivity, the study suggests that these perceptions impede women's advancement even when their performance merits promotion.
Discrimination
CNN Money shared
advice from EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum and other experts on the importance of HR’s role in any harassment investigation.
A
New York Times Op-Ed argued that
private settlements of sexual harassment cases allow harassment to continue.
The EEOC announced that a subsidiary of U.S. Steel agreed to pay
$150,000 to settle a religious discrimination and retaliation lawsuit that alleges the company violated federal law by revoking a worker’s job offer because of his religion and in retaliation for the worker’s request for accommodation of his religious practices.
Technology
An SHRM report on the tension between workers’ desire for remote work and executives’ commitment to a traditional workplace concluded that
technology is key to bridging the divide.
McDonald’s is now recruiting via
Snapchat in Australia.
Quartz published an excellent analysis of the importance of managing the apparently inevitable
age of robots at a societal level.
In Other News
SHRM reported on
legislation recently proposed in California that would increase the state’s salary threshold for employees who are exempt from overtime pay to $47,476, the same threshold that the federal government attempted to implement last year.
Online food-delivery service DoorDash agreed to pay
$5 million to settle claims by delivery workers that they were illegally misclassified as independent contractors.
Eric B. Meyer wrote for SHRM on a couple of
new bills in Congress that employers should pay attention to.
Harvard Business Review covered best practices adopted by some employers to help reduce the stress of
childcare for employees.