Millennial women join workforce with much clearer pathways in mind

Millennial women are joining the workplace with much higher levels of ambition than past generations.

Shayla Owodunni, 27, has her sights set on becoming a chief financial officer one day.

Recruiting manager Casey Miller noticed something different about the intern presentations at Enterprise Holdings this summer.

In previous years the proceedings at the car rental company followed a similar pattern: male interns typically organised, delegated and spoke on behalf of the groups, says Miller.

This year, in many cases, ­female interns took the lead and the men played supporting roles. “The male interns weren’t concerned or giving it another thought,” Miller says. “It was very natural.”

The recruiter was witness to what researchers say are changing attitudes and behaviours among the youngest entrants to the workforce. Young millennial women, those born from 1988 to 1995, are joining the workplace with significantly higher levels of ambition than older women. And though women still trail men in the desire to be a top executive, the gap in ambition appears to be narrowing.

More surprisingly, men and women under age 30 hold similar views on some issues concerning gender at work, according to a large study of women in the workplace conducted by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Co.

Women’s growing assertiveness may stem from their formative years, which coincided with the 2008 recession, says Lisa Walden, a researcher and communications director at the research and consulting firm BridgeWorks.

Younger women “have seen how tipped the scales are and are showing up a little more guarded, but more ready to fight for that equality on day one, whereas the early millennial women had to ­readjust”, Walden says.

Shayla Owodunni, a 27-year-old finance manager at Expedia, was finishing high school in the Minneapolis suburbs when her ­father was laid off from his engineering job at Northwest Airlines. She originally wanted to study law and “fight for the underdog”, she says, but the recession prompted her to change course.

Taking her father’s advice to consider financial security in her career choices, she went into ­accounting. Her sights are now set on rising to chief financial officer of a company, she says.

Like Owodunni, other so-called recessionist millennial women are expressing more ­ambition than other age cohorts. The McKinsey and LeanIn survey, which asked 70,000 men and women about their experiences at work, found that 60 per cent of younger millennial women — those under 30 — said they want to be a top executive, compared with 37 per cent of older women. Those figures compare with 69 per cent of young millennial men and 50 per cent of older men.

Throughout the hiring process, “they ask questions like, ‘Show me how women within the company have the same opportunities to achieve that men do’ ”, Miller says. These women are also asking more questions about benefits such as  adoption assistance and ­maternity leave that they may want down the line, she says.

Younger millennial women are also speaking up more about discrimination and inappropriate ­behaviour, says Becky Roth, senior product marketing manager at Expedia. Roth, 31, is what generational researchers call an “early millennial”, and works with many younger millennials.

Roth recalls having male colleagues at other companies early in her career who would rest their hands on her leg during meetings.

“I talked to older (female) mentors who started their careers when that stuff happened all the time, and they wouldn’t say anything,” Roth says. “They didn’t want to ruffle any feathers.”

Now the younger women come into the workplace with the expectation that they will be heard, she says.

Young millennial men, meanwhile, show signs that their attitudes on some issues are converging with those of their ­female peers — even if they ­remain far apart in other areas.

The biggest divergence: young millennial men are the least likely workers to say that gender diversity is a top priority for them, while young millennial women are the likeliest of all age groups to say it is important to them.

At the same time, young men share with women scepticism about company efforts to support women.

For example, the McKinsey and LeanIn survey found that 29 per cent of young men and 22 per cent of young women think managers address biased language and behaviour when it happens. The gap is much wider among older men and women — 38 per cent to 23 per cent.

These younger women and men are also likelier to say they split home duties 50-50 with their partners, and young millennial men are far likelier than their fathers and brothers to take on a larger share of domestic work.

The youngest millennial men are now asking about paternity leave and other work-life policies earlier than past job candidates have done, Miller says.

“I think that these recessionists saw that there wasn’t a gender ­divide between who was impacted by the recession,” Miller says.

“They saw that their parents’ roles at home had to change … and began to see the importance of both genders” in sharing family responsibilities.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL