Women and the life/work balance | Managing Leadership

The life/work balance: who needs it?

Buried under all the dross churned out about this topic is an age-old canard about women: basically, they’re expected to cover the life side of the balance, and men the work. Women are the nurturers, after all (even many women buy into this, arguing that their special virtue as managers is the nurturing mindset).

It’s an argument that carries a lot of emotional force. When all the other attacks on women at work or - heaven forfend - in management wither before the onslaught of experience, out comes the trump card: you (women) can’t have it both ways. Pick work, or pick family. Pile on the guilt - program it in - and we (men) have solved our problem of women in the workforce, cramping our style (whatever that is).

But maybe it’s time for women to reject even that argument; and maybe they’re beginning to. Consider the following quote from a senior female executive taken from a recent WSJ In the Lead column:

No one will die if you don’t show up at every business meeting or every school play.

Now, that places the issue in perspective, doesn’t it? Who does this sentiment apply to? Just women? If a man can skip a school play now and then, why not a business meeting? If, on the other hand, an executive who is a mother is expected to miss a business meeting on occasion in order to attend the school plays, why can’t one who is a father skip a school play - every now and then?

One reason is that women tend to buy in to the argument that they are solely responsible for this aspect of life. Read the linked article to see how even young women who have yet to graduate from college are self-constraining their careers by burdening themselves with responsibilities that even they fail to consider ought to be shared by all.

A key point of the article is that women shouldn’t expect to have it all, and will need to make sacrifices in one sphere of their lives for advances in others. Pick one and place the weight of your efforts behind it, without completely ignoring the others. But, what’s new about this - for women or men?

Maybe there’s something to this balance thing - as long as it’s practiced by both men and women. As discussed in previous posts (see here and here), it will make managers - male and female - more rewardingly productive in all aspects of their lives.

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Integrating the worlds of women and management | Managing Leadership | Managing Leadership on Sunday, June 1, 2008 at 5:26 pm

[...] tend to leave the workforce for a variety of reasons, ranging from a sense that, in one way or another, they don’t fit in - or don’t care to, to a peculiarity in the way women generally [...]