“….and I can tell she has work-life balance (whatever that means :-))”
Hmm, this person does not perhaps understand or just ridicules the concept of work life balance. You guessed it – obviously a male writer!
Or just on second thoughts, we all talk about it a lot right? But do we really understand it completely when we want work-life balance in our lives?
We have the whole colony of working females around the world and some males as well (hey, Click – the movie, was a good one where the work-life balance features through a male perspective!) discussing this topic, at work, at discussion boards or just about everywhere. Note again – mainly females.
What do you have to say about this report?
In a survey of 2,443 women college graduates released by her center and the Harvard Business Review, 35 percent of respondents thought they would be penalized for taking advantage of their employer’s work-life policies.Citing other research, Ms. Hewlett says about two-thirds of professional women who stop working would stay if they had a “recognized and respectable” way to scale back.
Is it because women are talking about it and are demanding the same as well, the men are largely shying away from it – is it because demanding a balanced lifestyle (well again what it means to you) does not show professionalism? Or is there something else? Why are men not talking about work-life balance as much or even as much as a fraction of how many women are?
Read this recent interesting report on this topic in the WSJ by Jaclyne Badal.
Companies pitch flextime as ‘macho’ to retain women. Here’s a novel approach to keeping women in the work force: Focus on men….. Many of the ideas aren’t new, but it’s the first time they have been aggressively pitched to men. Encouraging men to consider flexible work arrangements is a way of “making it legitimate,” says Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president of the Center for Work-Life Policy, a New York research and advocacy group.
And interestingly in the search (or rather Googling) for the correct definition of work-life balance to Email this guy, I did find a website by this very domain name! Let’s see how it defines this issue:
Meaningful daily Achievement and Enjoyment in each of my four life quadrants: Work, Family, Friends and Self.
So if I may ask again the readers of this post:
What does work-life balance mean to you?
And we will follow-up again with a compilation in the New Year.