MBiz | November 2014

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT HOW WIDESPREAD IS THE OSCAR CURSE?

T he Academy Awards inspired a potentially epic stream of research for academic Alyson Byrne. The so-called Oscar curse was a starting point for Byrne, who joined the I.H. Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba in July as an assistant professor of organizational behaviour. “Women who win the Academy Award for Best Actress are 1.68 times more likely to experience divorce following their win than their nominated counterparts,” Byrne says. “Men can win or lose the Academy Award — it really has no bearing on their marriage — but for some reason women who win, it’s like they can’t have success in both their work and in their personal lives.” There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence for the curse – it’s befallen everyone from Bette Davis to Sandra Bullock — and it’s supported by empirical evidence, including a study conducted by researchers at the University of Toronto and Carnegie Mellon University. Byrne wondered if a similar phenomenon was at play in the corporate world. Along with more prestige, money and respect, do high-status positions come with higher personal costs for women? “With all the pressure that I think women are experiencing right now to climb to these senior-level leadership roles with things like (Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s campaign) Lean In and the quest to break the glass ceiling, I started to think, we know there are struggles to get into those roles, but what happens when they get there?”

However, there was a major mitigating factor: Marriages were more stable among women whose husbands provided high levels of tangible support — doing housework and taking a role in child care and elder care, for example. “They had no problems in their marriage regardless of how they felt about their husbands’ lower-status positions. Their marriages were perfectly fine.” Byrne says it appears that you can have it all, as long as you have a good partner — make that a great partner. “The common saying used to be, ‘Behind every great man there’s a great woman,’ and I think that maybe we just need to flip it — behind every great woman there might be a great partner,” she says. Byrne’s dissertation provides a fertile foundation for continuing research, and she’d like to flip its focus to study the male perspective. “We’re seeing a real increase in men who maybe want to lean out — spend more time with their kids and not be at their job 12, 14 hours a day,” she says.

While her study demonstrates that there has to be compromise within relationships, there also has to be a cultural shift in the way we think of men and women in leadership and domestic roles. “We could do a much better job of treating everybody equally,” Byrne says. “I think there’s something wonderful about a man who recognizes that he wants to be a family man just as much as he wants to be a business man, because women have been dealing with that issue for years.” ■

Byrne decided to dig deeper as part of her PhD dissertation work at Queen’s University with supervisor Dr. Julian Barling. While women are scarce at the top levels of corporate leadership — there are only 24 in the 2014 Fortune 500, and 51 in the

Fortune 1000 — Byrne was able to survey more than 200 women in a variety of high-level positions, along with 60 of their husbands. She found that women with a higher job status than their mates were more likely to experience marital

Above: Sandra Bullock at the Oscars. Photo by Paul Smith / Featureflash. Left: Alyson Byrne, assistant professor at the I.H. Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba. Photo by Darcy Finley

instability — not because the men were bothered but because the women were less satisfied if they were disappointed in their husbands’ lack of success, or if they felt it detracted from their own standing.

20 MBiz | November 2014

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