The real reason why professional women are difficult to get promoted

Why aren't there many women in the United States who are in power? They have no lack of ambition, skill or professional qualifications. The real hurdle to stopping more women from rising to the top is time, and while it doesn't seem "sounding", it's a tricky one: today's top jobs in big companies require more than 60 hours a week. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, Cherille Sandberg in his hot-talk book that aspiring women should be more "enamored" of work--that is, to show themselves. Her advice was good, but she didn't find the real crux of the problem. A large number of Harvard Business School (Harvard Business parochial) female graduates quit the workforce not because of lack of motivation, but because senior positions mean consuming every waking moment. More and more good women choose not to work because they don't like the world that calls them to join. Ms Bloomberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, could change the situation. Just a little imagination about the organisational structure, coupled with support from top management, can pave the way for ambitious career women to be more healthy and happy with life and work. Now is the time to confront the controversy. I know it works because I run a growing start-up. More than half of the employees in the company choose to work less than 40 hours a week. These are top school graduates who have worked in prestigious companies like General Tepco and McKinsey, most of whom are women. The key point is that our position design allows employees to choose a different length of work to complete the task while still achieving the company's overall goals. This is not advanced physics, but it does mean thinking about how to organize the work of a company through math. It's also an iterative process; we don't always do the right thing. However, for those companies and reformers who genuinely want to help women break the glass ceiling of their real existence-while enabling their companies to attract large numbers of Americans still outside the country-there are four options to start. First, reconsider the concept of working hours. Abandon the assumption that high-level work can only be done by people who work more than 10 hours a day, work more than five days a week, and work 12 months a year. Why can't you work three days a week, work six hours a day, or work 10 months a year? That sounds simple, but the only key is to quantify the work that needs to be done and have the right resources to get the job done. Senior positions should actually be easier to achieve because highly paid people have the ability and usually want to give up a certain amount of income in order to reduce working hours. The flexibility of work and the Home Office of course can weaken some of the contradictions, but still not solve the overall length of work problems. Second, the work is broken down into small projects. Once the work is quantified, it must be decomposed into individual parts to accommodate different time input requirements. Companies need to define important positions with specific, measurable tasks, rather than broad functions such as marketing executives, finance supervisors, business development or sales executives. Once the work is treated as a series of projects, it is easy to see how people should choose the workload. Consulting and outsourcing services are developed when companies realize that they can divide their work into projects and outsource them more efficiently. Its next step is the refinement of internal functions. For example, an experienced marketing person in a pharmaceutical company could be in charge of a large drug promotion program, rather than being responsible for all drug promotion. Senior staff can manage projects that include five products instead of 10. If a customer service executive who works five days a week has 10 transactions per month, the person who chooses to work three days a week has only six deals. The task has been reduced, but the quality of work and the qualifications of the executive staff will not change. Management laziness has led to a failure to implement this approach more widely: it is easier to find a "superwoman" in charge of the market (and unlimited overtime) than to work on specific projects. But even Superwoman has a limit, and when she gets to the limit, the company can only make adjustments by decomposing jobs and expanding its staff. Why not do it before you hit the South? Third, "Working hours" is critical. It is important to distinguish between "working time" and "absolute working hours". As long as there is a limit to the total length of work in a year, many professional women are even willing to check emails seven days a week and, if necessary, quickly get into stressful projects. Management needs to be clear about what the company wants: 7 days 24 Hours is "free" and 7 days 24 hours of work is different. The goal is quality, not quantity. Leaders need to create a culture that judges good people by the quality of work rather than by quantity. This is not a useless empty talk. Employees who work 20 hours a week, who are highly qualified in terms of performance, should qualify for promotion and should be considered as good performers. American companies need to abandon the notion that people who want less work are "second-rate employees." When companies look increasingly like puzzles rather than pyramids, promoting this innovation is bound to be part of the new feminist agenda. This is the only way that millions of of excellent women can adjust their working hours at different stages of their lives. Since 40, when psychologist Matina Hona Matina Horner published his famous "Fear of success" study, we have been encouraging smart women to come into the workforce. But there are still few women in senior positions. This is the irony of Sandberg's ambition to encourage women to remain ambitious: she did not see her own ideas at all ambitious enough. "Devotion" may help a relatively small number of excellent women who can endure the current structure of senior positions--and if that is their choice, we should encourage it. But only a handful of women will choose this path. Unless the rest of us start thinking seriously.Change the way American businesses work, otherwise we're doomed to howl at all these injustices, but in reality nothing can change. (Greenstone Miller, co-founder and CEO of Business Talent Group consulting company, Greenstone Miller)