Achieving Work-Life Balance: Gender or Economic Issue?
Judith Warner reaches back out to the women Lisa Belkin interviewed over a decade ago after they left their high powered careers in favor of full-time lives at home, and these former working mothers reflect on the choice they made and what it cost them in The Opt Out Generation Wants Back In. She found that “[n]ot a single woman I spoke with said she wished that she could return to her old, pre-opting-out job — no matter what price she paid for her decision to stop working. What I heard instead were some regrets for what, in an ideal world, might have been — more time with their children combined with some sort of intellectually stimulating, respectably paying, advancement-permitting part-time work — but none for the high-powered professional lives that these women had led.”
Ms. Warner further found “[m]en, too, are feeling the crunch of excessively demanding work. They now report more work-life stress than women do, according to the Families and Work Institute. They also may be penalized more than women if they try to accommodate their work schedules to the needs of their children, as research appearing in the June issue of The Journal of Social Issues shows.” It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that some husbands find themselves eyeing their wives’ lives at home with envy. “Men want to say we’re more than a paycheck,” Ted Mattox told me. “There has to be something more than going to work for 50 years and dying.”
Ms. Warner offers “[t]o find time for that “something more,” husbands would need to join with their wives in rejecting nighttime networking sessions and 7 a.m. meetings. They would have to convey to employers that work-life accommodations like flexible hours or job sharing aren’t just for women and that part-time jobs need to provide proportional pay and benefits. At a time when fewer families than ever can afford to live on less than two full-time salaries, achieving work-life balance may well be less a gender issue than an economic one.” Read the entire article here.
In Real Lessons of the Opt Out Generation, Ann Friedman shares that it is no surprise that the “struggle to reconcile children and career continues to transfix us. What’s shocking is that, even though the recession has made the workplace less flexible and more hostile to everyone, this dilemma remains one that is boiled down to women’s choices. When it comes time to cobble together solutions, most couples still seem to foist the burden of finding a solution onto mothers alone, rather than making realistic joint plans for raising children, paying bills, and seeking professional fulfillment.” Perhaps what it surprising is that “women who don’t yet have children but want to be mothers someday don’t see this as their problem. A new survey from LinkedIn shows that 69 percent of childless women don’t think that starting a family is going to hurt their career. According to the survey, “Sixty-two percent of respondents defined success as having the right balance between work and personal life today, nearly doubling the number of respondents who defined success in these terms five to 10 years ago. It sounds eerily similar to what one of the women told Lisa Belkin a decade ago: ”It never occurred to me that my choices would be proscribed. I could have anything I wanted.”
In Opt Out, Lean In…Two Sides of the Same Coin, Cindy Chang Mahlberg posits “[w]hether opting-out or leaning in, both paths run the risk of leading to disappointment and disillusionment.”
