In its annual survey of the year to come, the Economist argues that things are going to get harder for women who want to have it all. Flex-time, job-sharing, tele-commuting – the whole work-life balance movement is on the wane. Women will still have opportunities to make it in business, but they’ll have to do it the way men do, argues the magazine: they’ll have to put in the hours and stay the course.
Do women really have to make a choice, then: work or home? According to Sue Shellenbarger, as she writes in her latest WSJ column, the business world hasn’t abandoned the effort to keep women, regardless of their other commitments, in the workplace just yet. Indeed, she reports that not only are businesses continuing to find ways to accommodate the non-work related needs of their valuable employees, but businesses are even springing up to help workers meet those needs while they are at work.
The driving factor here isn’t that efforts to keep women with work-life balance needs in the workforce have had an imperfect record in the past decade – it’s that they are increasingly necessary to maintain quality and growth in the economy, in the US no less than in demographically more slowly growing economies. The age of women in the workforce – and in the corner office – is yet to arrive, and it is in the interest of all of us to persevere in helping it along.
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Technorati Tags: Flex-time, job-sharing, tele-commuting, work-life balance, Sue Shellenbarger, WSJ, The Economist, Women in Management
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[...] As we have noted here before, women 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 identify and assess risk in the context of how they want to live their lives. Indeed, a recent item in Business Week cites a study demonstrating that fewer than 2 in 5 of women MBA graduates of 15-25 years ago are still working full-time. [...]
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