【管理辞典】泄漏管道 / Leaky Pipeline

「释义」

“泄漏管道”的比喻描述了女性在科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）领域成为代表不足的少数群体。在数学和工程领域，这种不平衡在本科之前就开始了，选择这些领域做专业的女性人数较少。相反，在生物和生命科学领域，女性占获得博士学位学生的一半以上，但大多数女性未能在学术界获得终身教职。

研究表明，科学界的女性比男性同行更可能强调生活与工作的平衡。此外，男性博士后比女性博士后更希望自己的伴侣为自己做出事业上的牺牲。麻省理工学院最近发表的一篇文章列举了这些原因以及更多的原因，来描述为什么女性会从学术界“泄漏”到其他职业道路上。

「应用场景」

这不是唯一解决之道。当公司发现两性整体成功率差异，或影响效率的关键行为差异时，它们可以积极在组织中寻找可能导致这些差异的因素，然后通过实践来改变这些因素。

Things don’t have to be this way. When companies observe differences in the overall success rates of women and men, or in behaviors that are critical to effectiveness, they can actively seek to understand the organizational conditions that might be responsible, and then they can experiment with changing those conditions.

例如，某睿智的常务董事为她所在职业服务公司的“泄露管道”（leaky pipeline，指组织高层越往上走，女性越少的现象——译者注）感到忧心。她对女性在生育后“选择性退出”表示怀疑，因此进行了调研，她发现女性离开公司的原因之一是绩效评估体系。管理者在为直接下属评分时，必须参考强制正态分布标准。因为绩效与那些工作满全年的同事进行比较，因生育请假的女性不太可能获得最高评分。

Consider the example of a savvy managing director concerned about the leaky pipeline at her professional services firm. Skeptical that women were simply “opting out” following the birth of a child, she investigated and found that one reason women were leaving the firm stemmed from the performance appraisal system: Supervisors had to adhere to a forced distribution when rating their direct reports, and women who had taken parental leave were unlikely to receive the highest rating because their performance was ranked against that of peers who had worked a full year. Getting less than top marks not only hurt their chances of promotion but also sent a demoralizing message that being a mother was incompatible with being on a partner track. However, the fix was relatively easy: The company decided to reserve the forced distribution for employees who worked the full year, while those with long leaves could roll over their rating from the prior year. That applied to both men and women, but the policy was most heavily used by new mothers. The change gave women more incentive to return from maternity leave and helped keep them on track for advancement. Having more mothers stay on track, in turn, helped chip away at assumptions within the firm about women’s work/family preferences.

以上文字选自《哈佛商业评论》中文版2018年6月刊《男女差别的普遍误区》

凯瑟琳·汀斯利、罗宾·艾利 | 文

马冰仑 丨编辑