I think what we found when we at looked at developing our piece of the report is that today we have a situation where 57 percent of college grads are women, and that creates a fundamentally different proposition for business in terms of the talent management perspective. At one time, women were seen as somebody who maybe played a small percentage of roles in businesses, and as a result, businesses could choose to or not choose to accommodate the special needs that women experience as workers.
But today, when they represent 57 percent of our college graduates, it's not an accommodation to think about how do you keep those folks engaged, how do you hire those folks, how do you retain those folks, and how do you keep those people engaged in an organization. It's more a situation of saying, that's the vast majority of the potential labor force that we are looking at. So, it's become a woman's nation because they've now become the dominant players in a knowledge-based economy.
In the Shriver Report, what we tried to do is look at some of the barriers that women face and some of the ones that obviously called out to us were--first of all, women face a barrier because they have about two--especially when they have children--they have about two times the care-giving responsibility that a working man does. So, as a result of that ,they still have responsibility for the "second shift," which is a term that was coined in 1989 about the fact that when women finish their work day, they have significant care-giving responsibilities and domestic tasks to take care of. So, that's certainly become a barrier to women advancing up in the organization.
A second thing is that career development systems within organizations often times follow very rigid paths that were oriented toward the way men worked when they had a stay-at-home spouse to take care of all the child care and domestic kinds of activities. So what you have is a situation where women are working in cultures that have been created and perpetuated by men for men. And I think that one of the barriers that we looked at was the fact that unless people were willing to accommodate the new demographics and look at different forms of leadership as maybe being more effective for today's diverse workplace, we're going to be in a situation where women are forced to either try to adopt male-related behaviors in terms of leadership or they're going to have to face the fact that their leadership style might be scrutinized as new and different, and therefore not as appropriate as the more male-dominant leadership style that most organizations are dominated by.