At the end of last year I attended and spoke at the APAC Women in Leadership and Management Summit in Sydney, which was a wonderful opportunity to listen to and connect with fantastic women sharing their insights and strategies into how they have achieved their career success.
One thing which struck me in particular as being very different from any corporate conference I have attended previously was the willingness and openness of all the women to discuss their personal lives. There was a real understanding that no-one operates in a vacuum in their corporate role and that it truly does take a village to raise a child or build a community. I have never heard a male speaker say that his success was attained because his wife was a full-time mum, or that he was expected to forego or slow down promotion because he was working part-time for a period, or that he took leave because he wanted to support a teenage or adult child who was going through troubled times.
When I started my career most of the senior men leading organisations had full-time wives at home and there was never any discussion of work / life balance – the work environment was entirely set-up around the “ideal worker”, who would be entirely committed to the company, work all hours of night and day and travel anywhere at the drop of a hat. As an ambitious woman you bought into that paradigm and adopted the same approach as the men, which completely compartmentalised your work and personal lives. You could “lean in” as Sheryl Sandberg so eloquently encouraged us to do, and you could choose yourself a partner who supported your career and that worked up to a point. Indeed, at the 2015 Summit the importance of having a supportive partner was truly evident.
However, life takes many twists and turns, and as we mature, get married, have children, our priorities change, and it seemed to me that Sandberg’s book was only giving two options: lean in or get out! Surely there is a middle ground? Don’t I still have a valuable role to play in the corporate world, even if I want to spend time with my family as well? Working part-time never really addressed that question because of the attendant stigma attached, with flexible or part-time working seen as the “mummy track”. And what is the role of fathers in that equation? And why should the issue of who raises the children be solely a women’s issue?
Regardless of whether you choose to have kids or not, everyone needs fully engaged relationships to thrive – a sense of connection is inherent to well-being so why are we so determined to try and separate work and family into two completely separate domains, one ostensibly female and one ostensibly male?
Over the last few years huge progress has been made in regard to enabling flexible work arrangements to accommodate family care, however as last week’s Bain & Co report showed it is still regarded as a female requirement. The report found that women working flexibly generally view their employer favourably but that men working flexibly still felt the stigma and felt that they were judged harshly for using the policies. This shows that we still expect men to make a full-time commitment to their work and for women to be the ones who change their life to care for the kids.
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book “Unfinished Business” (my summer reading, which was fabulous!) identifies the central issue we are facing here as one of balancing competition and care. Competition being “the impulse to pursue our self-interest” and care, being “the impulse to put others first”. As a society we undervalue care – the minute you leave or reduce the time spent in a paid role to care for children or elderly parents you disappear, and until we encourage men to be fully engaged in the care part of the equation we will not achieve equality in the workplace.
I was delighted to hear senior women at the summit address these issues of family and community commitments so openly because when I was coming up through the ranks we were still trying to prove ourselves as capable as men by not talking about that stuff. It is also terrific that men are now more involved as fathers than most of their own fathers were and now we need to ensure that we bring these discussions into an open forum, not just at women only events.
Interestingly Slaughter quotes from the work of Mendelberg and Karpowitz which shows that when women are the majority in the group men will also speak more about caregiving issues, however when women are in the minority men do not speak about these issues and they become women’s issues rather than everybody issues. And this for me is at the crux of why we need greater female representation both in politics and in the boardroom! It is time to shift the whole dynamic of the conversation!
If you would like support re-balancing the priorities in your life, or working out how to challenge the status quo in your organisation please contact me at [email protected]
One thing which struck me in particular as being very different from any corporate conference I have attended previously was the willingness and openness of all the women to discuss their personal lives. There was a real understanding that no-one operates in a vacuum in their corporate role and that it truly does take a village to raise a child or build a community. I have never heard a male speaker say that his success was attained because his wife was a full-time mum, or that he was expected to forego or slow down promotion because he was working part-time for a period, or that he took leave because he wanted to support a teenage or adult child who was going through troubled times.
When I started my career most of the senior men leading organisations had full-time wives at home and there was never any discussion of work / life balance – the work environment was entirely set-up around the “ideal worker”, who would be entirely committed to the company, work all hours of night and day and travel anywhere at the drop of a hat. As an ambitious woman you bought into that paradigm and adopted the same approach as the men, which completely compartmentalised your work and personal lives. You could “lean in” as Sheryl Sandberg so eloquently encouraged us to do, and you could choose yourself a partner who supported your career and that worked up to a point. Indeed, at the 2015 Summit the importance of having a supportive partner was truly evident.
However, life takes many twists and turns, and as we mature, get married, have children, our priorities change, and it seemed to me that Sandberg’s book was only giving two options: lean in or get out! Surely there is a middle ground? Don’t I still have a valuable role to play in the corporate world, even if I want to spend time with my family as well? Working part-time never really addressed that question because of the attendant stigma attached, with flexible or part-time working seen as the “mummy track”. And what is the role of fathers in that equation? And why should the issue of who raises the children be solely a women’s issue?
Regardless of whether you choose to have kids or not, everyone needs fully engaged relationships to thrive – a sense of connection is inherent to well-being so why are we so determined to try and separate work and family into two completely separate domains, one ostensibly female and one ostensibly male?
Over the last few years huge progress has been made in regard to enabling flexible work arrangements to accommodate family care, however as last week’s Bain & Co report showed it is still regarded as a female requirement. The report found that women working flexibly generally view their employer favourably but that men working flexibly still felt the stigma and felt that they were judged harshly for using the policies. This shows that we still expect men to make a full-time commitment to their work and for women to be the ones who change their life to care for the kids.
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book “Unfinished Business” (my summer reading, which was fabulous!) identifies the central issue we are facing here as one of balancing competition and care. Competition being “the impulse to pursue our self-interest” and care, being “the impulse to put others first”. As a society we undervalue care – the minute you leave or reduce the time spent in a paid role to care for children or elderly parents you disappear, and until we encourage men to be fully engaged in the care part of the equation we will not achieve equality in the workplace.
I was delighted to hear senior women at the summit address these issues of family and community commitments so openly because when I was coming up through the ranks we were still trying to prove ourselves as capable as men by not talking about that stuff. It is also terrific that men are now more involved as fathers than most of their own fathers were and now we need to ensure that we bring these discussions into an open forum, not just at women only events.
Interestingly Slaughter quotes from the work of Mendelberg and Karpowitz which shows that when women are the majority in the group men will also speak more about caregiving issues, however when women are in the minority men do not speak about these issues and they become women’s issues rather than everybody issues. And this for me is at the crux of why we need greater female representation both in politics and in the boardroom! It is time to shift the whole dynamic of the conversation!
If you would like support re-balancing the priorities in your life, or working out how to challenge the status quo in your organisation please contact me at [email protected]
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