Elgin Area Chamber Of Commerce: How The Pandemic Shifted Priorities For Women In Commercial Real Estate

Elgin IL

11 January, 2022

2:30 AM

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Press release from the Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce: January 10, 2022 If the pandemic had never happened, Elena Cutshall probably wouldn't have landed her ideal job: a position she helped to create after identifying the most rewarding parts of her career. Cutshall was laid off in April 2020 from a global architecture firm in Austin, Texas, where she had been a senior project manager for three years. In a matter of weeks, the self-described Type A executive went from a packed schedule with clients and events every day to trying to figure out how she would spend the next several months without work. With school openings in limbo and no vaccine rolled out yet, she knew it would be months before anyone was hiring, so she dove into virtual networking and thinking about her next steps. The downtime gave her space to re-imagine where she would take her career — and a chance to spend the summer with her son for the first time since he was born more than 11 years ago. After about four months of networking and searching, Cutshall in late summer 2020 went from having zero job prospects to having three offers in one week, all positions she created based on her conversations with prospective employers. She was hired in August 2020 at architecture firm STG Design as an associate, and she was promoted a year later to associate principal. Related: When Life Handed These Five Women a Pandemic, They Used It To Advance Their Real Estate Careers "Every day when I come to this job, I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. ... There is not one thing that I would be doing differently. I feel like I'm contributing to the firm. I'm learning, they're learning, we're growing together," Cutshall said. Cutshall is one of many women in commercial real estate who turned the crisis of the pandemic into an opportunity to redefine careers and what's most important in their lives. About 90% of women, compared with 62% of men, said the pandemic changed their personal priorities, according to a 2021 survey from the Commercial Real Estate Women Network, an industry group of more than 12,000 members globally. So despite the initial pain of being laid off, "in retrospect, it was a blessing in disguise," said Cutshall, who was also president of CREW's Austin chapter in 2021. Career or Caregiving? CREW surveyed more than 1,000 commercial real estate professionals of both sexes across the United States, Canada and United Kingdom in July 2021. Of the 12% of respondents who left or lost their job as a result of the pandemic, 22% left voluntarily. Among the reasons: They felt they had to choose between their careers and caregiving. An estimated 4.2 million women dropped out of the U.S. labor force between February 2020 and April 2020, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, largely because of an unexpected caregiving burden, compared to about 3.7 million men who left the U.S. labor force during that time. Across the globe, an estimated 13 million fewer women were in the workforce in 2021 than in 2019, while the male workforce has returned to pre-COVID levels, according to the International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency whose mandate is to advance social and economic justice. Even with a recovery underway by mid-2021, CREW's survey found 24% of respondents said women at their company left voluntarily during the pandemic. Some left to focus on new career opportunities, some to start their own businesses and others to focus on family. Other women took the lessons of the pandemic to refocus and recommit to their current roles. Millions of women who left the workforce during the pandemic have not returned. Women in commercial real estate reported work-life balance as their top barrier to success, followed by a lack of access to promotion opportunities and a lack of access to decision-makers, according to CREW's 2021 survey. In a separate CREW survey before the pandemic, female respondents reported a lack of promotion opportunities, gender discrimination, and a lack of a company mentor or sponsor as their top three barriers for advancement in commercial real estate. Switching Companies Out of the respondents in CREW's survey who left the commercial real estate sector because of the pandemic, 97% were women and 68% plan to return to the industry in the same role at a different company. To support and advance women in commercial real estate and help restore the workforce, CREW suggests company leaders create a culture where women feel confident reporting noninclusive behavior, commit to gender representation at the senior level, normalize flexible working and enable a better work-life balance. While men may be assuming more parenting responsibilities than previous generations, many mothers are still the primary caregiver. In CREW's survey, about 83% of female respondents said they managed most or at least half of family care responsibilities. The challenges of full-time work and caregiving for young children pushed many women to a breaking point during lockdowns. That was the case for Kim, a project manager for a commercial interior design firm in San Diego who asked to use only her first name for privacy concerns. Like many couples with young kids and full-time jobs during the pandemic, Kim and her husband arranged a complicated schedule during lockdowns. Her husband worked from 4:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. while she watched the kids, then she worked from 1 p.m. to midnight with a break for dinner and homework help. The couple never saw each other, and their two sons, then age 7 and almost 3, were starting to act out. Once during a day of back-to-back Zoom calls, her patience wore thin when her first grader refused to do his schoolwork. She raised her voice at him, shouting, "Are you kidding me?!" The participants on the work call reminded her they could hear everything. She laughs about it now, but it was a wake-up call. "It's impossible for me to try to be their teacher, their mother and caretaker while working my full-time job or any kind," she said in an interview. Career on Back Burner After about three months, she resigned to focus on her kids and their schooling. She considers herself fortunate compared to others who lost their jobs or didn't have that financial cushion of savings or a partner's income. At the same time, she worried about how the break would affect her career progression. Now she is working again, although in a part-time, out-of-office position, and she isn't sure when she'll be able to return to full-time work. "I just feel that it is a hit on my career, because obviously I'm not advancing in my career right now. And I'm at a stage that it is important, I think, at this time to be advancing," Kim said. "It's really hard because you're picking between your career and who you are as an individual." For some female real estate professionals, having an older child and supportive partner helped, but wasn't without challenges. For Melissa Marcolini Quinn, a commercial mortgage broker in Orlando, Florida, the lockdown was spent reviewing a math problem with her daughter one minute and hopping on a conference call the next. Even when her daughter went back to school in person, there were still several instances when she was forced to unexpectedly stay home while her daughter, now 13 years old, had to quarantine because of coronavirus exposure at school. Her husband exhausted his paid time off to help out, but because his profession requires him to be in the office, when her daughter had to quarantine, she was often the one who stayed home.   Melissa Marcolini Quinn said the pandemic motivated her to work harder. She joined JLL in 2021 and is now senior managing director in Orlando, Florida. (JLL)   "It's challenging but in the end, you just roll with it and adapt," Quinn said in an email. "I'm fortunate enough to work in a field that allows for that flexibility. There are a lot of industries that don't afford people with that same level of flexibility. That being said, there was no real work-life balance." In spite of the challenges of school closures and quarantines, Quinn, who specializes in originating debt, joint venture equity and structured finance, said the pandemic motivated her to work harder even when she was working remotely. "I was working all the time. I would wake up in the morning and I would be having my cup of coffee in bed, open up my computer, literally in my pajamas, and starting work and hadn't even brushed my teeth yet," Quinn recalled with a laugh in a Zoom interview. She ended up having one of her best years in business in 2020 in terms of deal volume and fee collections. The disruption spurred by the pandemic, coupled with personal changes in the wake of her parents passing away, made her reflect on the direction of her career. Earlier this year, she left NorthMarq, where she had been for 17 years, to take on a senior managing director role at larger brokerage firm JLL. Pandemic Pay Increases The recovering labor market and broader economic rebound may explain why some women in commercial real estate saw pay increases in 2020 despite the crisis. Overall, about 40% of women in CREW's survey said their compensation levels increased in 2020. "Even though there was a pandemic, there's still a good percentage of women that felt like they did OK business-wise and financially over the past year," said Wendy Mann, CEO of CREW, in an interview with CoStar News. As mostly high-income, highly educated workers, women in commercial real estate often do not face the same barriers to work during the pandemic that women in the services sector or industries that require face-to-face interactions do. Research from the Federal Reserve Board found that highly educated, high-income earners were less likely than lower-income women with less than a high school degree to leave the labor force. Overall, about 5% of women left the workforce because of caregiving, with Latinas in particular naming caregiving as a reason why they exited, representing 9%, compared to Black and white women. However, even when controlling for education, occupation and other factors, the Federal Reserve found that women with children under the age of 6 were more likely to leave the labor force during the pandemic than women with older children. Meanwhile, women in commercial real estate still face a pay gap compared to their male peers, making about 90 cents for every dollar a man makes in the industry, with wider gaps for women of color, according to CREW's 2020 benchmark survey. In CREW's 2021 survey, people of color were less likely to see compensation increases and more likely to report a decrease in salary in 2020. "I do hear where women [in commercial real estate] have said, 'I just had to try to stay one step in front of all of the men to try to make sure I didn't get left out of meetings, or I didn't get left out of client discussions,'" said Mann. In a separate 2021 study of 5,000 women globally across multiple industries by consulting firm Deloitte, more than half of women reported experiencing noninclusive behavior at work, even in a virtual environment. "Culture trumps everything going forward for companies that want to attract and retain female employees," Mann said. "And that culture has to include both diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as flexibility, access to opportunity and a supportive environment through a variety of ways through benefits but also feeling like you belong." Source: www.CoStar.com This press release was produced by the Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce. The views expressed here are the author's own.