Management Professor Notes II

What Women (and Men) Want: Flexible Workplaces

In my previous entry about how young women's expectations regarding work and family roles, and what it will take to level the playing field for mothers and fathers in the workplace, I suggested that Louise Story's New York Times article suggesting a new trend toward full-time at-home motherhood might have some flaws. This new Alternet commentary by Linda Basch, Ilene Lang, and Deborah Merrill-Sands encourages other writers to correct the bias in Louise Story's reporting by refocusing public attention not on the anecdotally-documented preferences of elite women, but on the statistical patterns evident in the American workplace as a whole.

Some of the statistics in the commentary spoke particularly eloquently to me, so I am quoting them here:

* Families with two parents but only one wage-earner are in the minority: "In 2003, 58% of married-couple families were composed of two earners."

* The great majority of teen girls expect to provide for themselves financially: "According to a Simmons College School of Management study from April 2003, 97% of the over 3,000 teen girls surveyed expected to provide financially for themselves and/or their families."

* Younger women report greater professional ambitions, whether or not they have children: "Another Simmons study of 570 professional women found that 55% of women under 34 aspired to top leadership, a higher percentage than the 45% of their older female colleagues. Notably, there was no statistical difference in the ambitions of women with or without children across the board."

* Both men and women crave greater workplace flexibility: "The Next Generation: Today's Professionals, Tomorrow's Leaders, a Catalyst study of 1,263 men and women born between 1964 and 1975, found that 55% of men and 64% of women report coming home from work "too tired to do some of the things I wanted to do." Catalyst's study also found that .. over half of both men and women would like to telecommute (59%) or work a compressed week (67%)."

The last issue is the big punchline, really. Flexibility is not a women's issue, nor just a mothers' issue -- it is something that more and more valuable employees are seeking in earnest. I believe that the slow response to this major generational trend is driving individuals to exit corporate cultures where their needs and desires are downplayed, in favor of smaller organizational settings and entrepreneurial opportunities which allow employees to work flexibly.

This is a more insidious challenge than the relatively simple questions of how to ensure equal employment opportunity. It involves challenging the glorification of business leaders like Donald Trump, who expects his employees "to work long hours and be available whenever" he needs them.

While Trump thinks it's a bad thing that men sometimes put their jobs ahead of their families, he also recognizes that "sometimes women have more family obligations than men". What he does not put front and center is the social process which leads women to accept more family obligations than men. If research which challenges those social norms and more accurately depicts men's and women's needs and preferences can be recognized in the media, the social norms may begin to change.