Planet Money - Two Indicators: Women And Work

Episode Date: September 18, 2021

Women start a lot of businesses, but when it comes time for them to grow, many hit a wall, or the women founders end up losing control. Why? We bring you two indicators on women and work from our daily podcast The Indicator. Also, Amanda and Stacey go on a picnic to prove a point. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. Amanda Aronchik! Stacey Van Exsmit! We are in the park! We are in the world! So, recently, Stacey, the host of our daily podcast, Planet Money Indicator, invited me to a breakfast picnic. Thank you so much, by the way. It was really fun! But this was not just for fun, Amanda. This was a picnic with a purpose. Right. As all the best picnics are. And I had challenged us both to go to the grocery store

and to try to pull together a picnic using only products made by companies that were owned or run by women. And then I thought we could meet and sort of see what we ended up with, see if we could put together like a decent picnic. Do you want to go first? Sure. Okay. I brought Land O'Lakes butter. Simple Mills is owned by a woman.

It's almond flour crackers, rosemary and sea salt. All right. You know, we didn't do terribly. We each managed to find seven or eight items. Vermont Creamery. I also brought some Vermont Creamery Gochis. Oh yeah. Well, we can, mine comes in a crate though. Yours is gorgeous, but it's a little bit sad that we brought the same product. Amanda, we did have to be a little bit flexible, I would say about like what our definition of picnic food was. Also the strict definition of breakfast.

Okay, I brought for our breakfast picnic a six pack of Heineken for you. And also ownership. Heineken International is not run by a woman, but Heineken USA is. Oh, okay. Are you a coffee drinker? I am. Okay, I brought us some coffee. Oh, good. Okay. It is owned by a couple. Okay. But one of the members of the couple is a woman. Okay. And

it was the best I could do. And I was like, we cannot have a breakfast picnic without coffee. Okay. So there are lots of companies out there that have women's names. Yes. Annie's run by a man. Yes. Amy's, run by a guy named Andy Really? Amy's? Amy's, but you know who does own and run the company of their namesake? What? Stacey! Stacey's Pita Chips! Oh, that makes me happy

I like to see a Stacey doing well in the world And so do we So Stacey has a new book out this week. Congratulations. Oh, thanks, Amanda. Today's stories come from all of your research. Yes, they do. So, you know, crack open a breakfast beer and get ready.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. And I'm Amanda Aronchik. Today on the show, two stories about women and the economy, courtesy of our daily show, The Indicator, featuring Stacey and Darian Woods. First up, a woman tries to buy from female-led companies not just for one breakfast picnic, but for a whole week. And we'll learn why it is so hard for women to create and retain control of their own companies. And why maybe, just maybe, this moment we're in provides a unique opportunity to tame a major economic force standing in the way of millions of women crying babies. Quick note and a correction about our picnic purchases.

After we originally published this episode, we learned that the Stacey we mentioned, the one who founded Stacey's Pita Chips, she no longer owns or runs this company. Well, buying only from women-led companies was even harder than we thought. Enjoy the episode. It's coming up after this break. this break. Stacey, you've got a new book out this week. Yes, I do. It is called Machiavelli for Women. I love the title. Thank you. It was very fun to write. It's all about women and work and a lot of it's sort of based on some of the economic data that's kind of frustrated me for a long time. Yeah, no, that's right.

One of the big ones has to do with company leadership. So, Darian, nearly 80 percent of CEOs are male. Nearly 90 percent are white. And these numbers haven't really budged in a decade. And I could never understand quite what was going on, especially since some of the other numbers in the economy were so promising and exciting. Things just seem stuck in this area. And as I was doing research for my book, this article caught my eye. It was written by Alana Samuels. She is the senior economics correspondent for Time magazine. And apparently she had been noticing these numbers as well.

I was just feeling very frustrated and thinking, you know, what can I do about this? And the only thing I could think of is to stop giving my money to all these businesses that are run by men and giving them instead to businesses run by women. Alana decided to buy only products from companies that were owned or run by women. That does not sound that hard, like a week, right? I did not think it would be that hard. Famous last words. Right. Alana Samuel started out her week-long journey to buy only products from female-owned companies feeling really optimistic.

After all, about 40% of small businesses in the U.S. are owned by women, and that should mean a lot of options. The main thing she needed was food, groceries for the week. Most immediately for Monday dinner. She's got a new baby and didn't want anything too elaborate. Yeah. So Monday dinner was spaghetti with turkey ragu. Very simple. She headed to her neighborhood Safeway.

So just kind of start going up and down the aisles. And I would see, you know, there's a pasta sauce has a woman on the cover. I Google it and then it'd be like, nope. And so I was getting so frustrated. Every single company is either run by a man or owned by some giant conglomerate like Johnson & Johnson or P&G that's run by a man. So you're like in front of, in the pasta aisle, like in front of all the pastas, like Googling all the companies. Right. So finally, Alana decided to bail on Safeway

and she went across town to a co-op grocery store and she figured like they focus on local products and smaller brands, maybe there's some hope there. But there still was no pasta. Really? So I found one on the end of aisle and it turned out the CEO was a woman. But this pasta was like $13 for a box of penne, which would usually cost like $3. That is some pricey penne, for sure. For your pretty penne, it's a very pricey penne.

Back to the story, Alana was relieved she could find anything at all. And she also scored with the tomato sauce too. I found some pasta sauce that had a woman's face on it in the business. It was a female celebrity chef. But ground turkey? That was a bust. She couldn't find any women-owned companies selling meat. Is it surprising to you that she had so much trouble? No, it's not surprising.

This is Julia Pollack. She is a labor economist and the chief economist at ZipRecruiter. She says most of the businesses in the U.S. are not, in fact, started by white men. Women start fully 40 percent of the businesses in the U.S. Black women right now are starting businesses at a record pace. But most of these businesses are tiny. Many have no employees. They're like Etsy stores and eBay stores. And the reason that they are so tiny, says Julia, is money. If you look at

some of the figures, they're really quite dramatic. Like women-led startups received just 2.3 percent of venture capital funding in 2020. That's according to Crunchbase figures. And black women, just 0.34%. So it's a pretty staggering imbalance. 0.34%. So like not even a half a percent, like a third of 1%. Like a rounding error. Yes. And it's not just venture capital.

Women are about half as likely to receive a small business loan. And if they do get a loan, that loan tends to be a fraction of what male borrowers get. And it's not for lack of entrepreneurs. Right now, in fact, the number of women going into business is rising really fast. In fact, around 17 percent of Black women are starting a business or running a new business right now. That outpaces white women and white men. The thing is, says Julia, most of these businesses will probably fail. And the reason, Julia says, that comes back down to that lack of money. What happens to people when their access to money in an economy is restricted?

It means that whenever there's rapid, dramatic growth and the stock market is hitting new highs, they are missing out on those gains. And it means that whenever a crisis hits, they are the hardest hit. We saw this at the start of the COVID pandemic. Women and minority-owned businesses closed at far higher rates than businesses owned by white men. These businesses have much smaller financial cushions. And when there is a recession and they aren't able to draw down on savings or to borrow, many women-owned and minority-owned businesses that did not have that ability and were forced out of business. And when women and minorities do get funding, says Julia, it often comes with a lot

of strings, like higher interest rates or stricter terms. Alana Samuels, our women-only shopper, found this when she started examining some of the products that she did find. Remember the fancy $13 penne? It came from this company called Semolina Artisanal Pasta, based in Pasadena, California. I mean, it was amazing pasta. It was extremely delicious.

Alana tracked down the pasta maker, Leah Ferrazani, and Alana says that Leah told her at one point things started taking off and Whole Foods were interested in carrying her pasta. That would take her company into the big time. If she wanted to get into these national grocery stores, she was going to have to get investors and just make her company a lot bigger. But for Leah, getting those investors was going to mean basically handing over control of her business, giving them the reins. I did find a lot of companies that had been founded by women, but then when they had to scale and grow bigger, they were either acquired by companies run by men or a male CEO took over, or they had to take on a bunch of male investors

who were basically calling the shots. Many women that Alana spoke to sold their businesses off or just chose not to grow. That's what Leah Ferrazani decided. She said no to Whole Foods, and she kept control of her pasta company. One of her friends was like, why don't you just stay small? And that's what she did. But I think a lot of women-owned businesses have that choice to either stay small and keep control or go big and get investors and kind of seed control. Julia Pollack says that this has long been the situation, but she thinks that things are now changing. Like a lot of women and minorities started businesses during the pandemic, and that led to a lot of demand for venture capital and loans. And now there's a bunch of startups catering to that demand for loans

with names like Lindio, Fundbox, OnDeck, and Cabbage with a K. Do not forget the K. In other words, Darian, startups that are probably mostly founded by white men are raising all of this venture capital to create companies that will fund businesses that are started by women and minorities because they can't get access to venture capital. It's like the great circle of capitalism. And as for Alada Samuels, our activist with the wallet,

just looking for women-owned companies, she says she discovered some products she loved during her week and they were very delicious. But she decided that one week was long enough. It was just so time-consuming and so expensive that it was a relief. And we have this store across the street from us. So I just went in and bought some tortilla chips and a hunk of cheddar and, you know, went home and made nachos in my microwave. You didn't have to Google anything. Exactly. It was very freeing. And I felt both disgusting and very satisfied,

both because of the nachos and because, you know, I'm sure all those companies were run by men. Well, Darian, you know, if you can't win, at least you can eat your feelings. And I feel like there is nothing that is more American than that. So that story focused on one obstacle to women growing their own businesses. But lack of money is not the only thing standing in between women and economic power. No, Amanda, it is not. There is another mighty obstacle in the way of women and economic power.

And it is crying babies. We'll hear all about that after the break. Child care. This is probably one of the biggest issues that we saw during the pandemic. Parents were not only trying to work from home, a lot of them were also trying to help their kids set up Zoom school, do homework, and, you know, deal with child care full time in addition to going to work. And, you know, everybody's lives kind of converged. And in a lot of cases, it became like very chaotic and noisy. Yeah. Mine are upstairs right now stomping around doing I don't even want to know what. I don't want to go look. Don't make me look. Probably reading about economics.

The thing is that the child care, I mean, a lot has changed in our economy, in our society, but child care still falls disproportionately to women, even in mixed gender couples where both people work full time. And the tragedy over the past year and a half is that we have seen millions of women get pushed out of the workforce to go care for those kids because it's often not possible to do both at the same time, work and child care. Now, Stacey, you and Darian Woods will take it from here. So, Darian, I wanted to talk with you today about an issue of great economic importance. That's what I'm here for. I knew you'd be into it. Here it is, crying babies. Crying babies.

Carry on. So, a little bit of context. This came to me while I was watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy. I have been hardcore binging Grey's Anatomy for weeks. No shame. And in the clip that I'm about to play in this moment, there are two female surgeons talking in the operating room. And one of the female surgeons has a baby in tow because her child care fell through. Grey, you know why men think they can run the world

and women can't? Because of crying babies. I was hoping no one would hear it. We can all hear it. It's pulling your focus. Okay, this is about world domination. If we're going to take over, we need to have our babies crying

somewhere other than the ICU. Not sure about the whole world domination thing, but this moment really stuck with me because truly the economic impact of crying babies is enormous. Child care shapes our economy and the careers of working parents in so many ways. This is especially true for women. And in fact, child care is one of the main reasons that women cite for hanging back from taking really intense jobs like CEO or surgeon or law partner. It is also a big part of the pay gap. Women will often choose a particular job or choose to work full time in order to accommodate child care. I mean, don't get me wrong. Women have seen enormous progress in the workplace. The share of women who work has been growing at a pretty fast clip.

In fact, a couple of years ago, women hit this workplace milestone. By December of 2019, women held the majority of jobs where there's an employer. This is Betsy Stevenson, professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan. Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. And I will never forget doing an interview in January of 2020 and saying, I can't imagine what could happen that would lead women to fall behind men again anytime in the next decade. Turns out, what I couldn't imagine was a global pandemic. Right. That would cause all children to be sent home from school. I mean, I'm going to give her a break for that one.

I know. And look, the pandemic was extremely hard on parents, but especially hard on women. Millions of women dropped out of the workforce to care for children and family, to educate their kids. Thirty years of progress was lost in terms of the share of women in the workforce. So to be clear, women have started going back to work, especially as schools have reopened. But the pace has been pretty slow. In fact, at the rate that we saw last month, it will take nearly a decade for women to gain back all of the jobs they lost in the pandemic. a decade for women to gain back all of the jobs they lost in the pandemic. But this is a lot of these women have basically been forced to make a really difficult choice to leave their jobs and careers. You know, and a lot of people are like, look, this is the choices families were making.

Of course, their choices, their choices in terrible circumstances. And there are a couple of main issues that come into play around child care and the economy. And one of the big ones is cost. Child care can be really expensive, and that's getting worse. Over the last year, more than 100,000 jobs were lost in the child care sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that has been pushing up prices for child care. because women tend to earn less than men do, it will often just make more economic sense in a mixed-gender couple for the man to continue working

and for the woman to stay home. In a world where they don't have control over a lot of things, they don't have control over the fact that the man in the household is earning more or that the man in the household can't more easily take time off. But money, of course, is not the only issue when it comes to women leaving the workforce for child care reasons.

Another big one is flexibility. Julia Pollack is a labor economist with ZipRecruiter. She's been working from home with two kids, a toddler and a new baby. And Julia says during the pandemic, millions of women were also juggling work, housework, setting up kids with Zoom school. And for a lot of them, it just became too much. But a lot of the reason for this, she says, is because of the culture of the workplace, which doesn't like to make those particular accommodations. I find that in my life, I'm actually able to get as much work done as I was before the birth of my children. Just now and again, I need to jump up for a couple of minutes when the baby wakes up,

maybe an hour or so and put her back to sleep. And then she's asleep for another three to four hour block and I can actually get a ton done. The problem is it's very hard to find a work arrangement where that kind of flexibility is available. Julia says it sounds a lot better to say you're in another meeting or you had a long call with a client than it does to say, hey, I need to feed my baby, put it to sleep, and I'll call you back in 30 minutes.

We all know of situations where huge rooms of people have waited 30 minutes, an hour for a male CEO. So we are flexible with all kinds of situations. We're just not so flexible for childcare. Yeah. Oh, I think I hear is a little. Yes. What's her name? Just handed me the baby.

She woke up Amira. Amira. Hi, how's she doing? I was like, it sounds like a little baby, like the little like. He handed her over to me and she just started eating right away. So I'm like, oh, no.

Is this her first broadcast interview? This is her first broadcast interview. Yes, it is. I mean, is there also an effect in that way that the businesses are less? Sorry, let me put this baby down. She's making too much noise in the background here. No, I actually kind of love it. I feel like it's like a really beautiful metaphor. But yes,

take your time. Do what you need to do. And just because of little moments like these, little 5, 10, 30-minute interruptions, Julia says, mothers end up being paid less, promoted more slowly, and their work is viewed far more critically than that of women without children. People assume mothers are not serious about their work or dedicated to their jobs. Well, I can understand why so many women, when they are in that situation, even though it'll only be a 30-minute interruption and they'll be able to get right back to work, just give up on the whole enterprise of work altogether. Still, Julia points out that right now is a huge opportunity for women in the workplace, Because not only are many companies a

lot more open-minded about working from home or making more flexible work situations, but also workers have a lot more power right now. So employers are more willing to talk to parents and work out situations that will help them. Economist Betsy Stevenson says she's hopeful. I've seen just a revolution in how managers are thinking about providing workplace flexibility and about helping to reduce discrimination against parents. Betsy says Congress proposing things like the child tax credit and free pre-K, these are all signs that the government is starting to address these issues as well. She points out that in Europe, government initiatives like free child care and months of guaranteed parental leave have increased the number of women in the workplace.

Betsy hopes that the conversations that have been started during the pandemic will translate into some solutions and options for women so they won't have to choose between having a career and having a family. You know, I do think there's a big question here. We're at a pivot point. Are we going to do something different? Is child care a personal issue or an issue that we should think about as being essential to a modern, you know, 21st century developed economy? Betsy says there is just a huge opportunity right now for policymakers

and companies to address these issues. And hopefully Darian make the economic impact of crying babies a little smaller. These stories were originally reported by Darian Woods and Stacey Vanek-Smith for The Indicator, and they are based on Stacey's research for her new book, which is out this week, Machiavelli for Women. These episodes were produced by Jamila Huxtable, Julia Ritchie, and Brittany Cronin. They were fact-checked by Caitlin Nicholas. The Indicator is edited by Kate Concanon. Today's episode of Planet Money was produced by Audrey Dilling and edited by Dave Blanchard. I'm Amanda Ronchik. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

So I have a couple more savories, but I also have a dessert. Very good. I'm nothing like a breakfast picnic without dessert. Tate's. Tate's Bake Shop. I love those cookies. You may notice that some of them are missing. The bag is open. There are still half of them left. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,