Kathleen Dolan, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who specializes in women in politics, says this isn't an issue of gender. "Low boices are just more pleasing sounds--think Barry White versus Pee-wee Herman," she says.
Source: The New York Times Magazine, June 30, 2013
There’s no work-life balance in the office of Vice President Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the HBO (TWX) comedyVeep.
But there’s truth in Veep’s depiction of the massive time commitment it takes to be a leader, something that, surprisingly, gets overlooked in the conversation about parents and high-level work. In Lean In, Facebook (FB) Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg gripes about the leadership-and-ambition gap between men and women. She says this is, in part, because women want families and think they can’t move up the ladder after they have kids the way men do. Sandberg blithely advises other parents to do as she does—she often leaves work for a 6 p.m. dinner with her family.
Veep, on the other hand, hilariously shows how often the conflicts between work and life can’t be resolved.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State, famously wrote about the total lack of flexibility in vaunted government positions in an article for the Atlantic last summer. As she pointed out, this is not just a woman’s issue, and Veep is evenhanded in showing that the men who sign up for this life find it as difficult as the women do.
Clearly, not everyone wants such an all-consuming career. But that doesn’t mean we should pretend that people who do can make family a priority.
The National Association of Professional Women (NAPW) has awarded Phyllis Greenberger, MSW, President and CEO of the Society for Women’s Health Research (SWHR) their prestigious Woman of the Year award.Headquartered in Garden City, NY, NAPW is an exclusive network for professional women to interact, exchange ideas, educate, and empower.
Greenberger has been the President and CEO of the Society for Women’s Health Research since its establishment in 1990. Her leadership, focus and advocacy on the importance of including women and minorities in clinical trials, and understanding sex differences in health has revolutionized women’s health. SWHR focuses on all conditions that affect women differently, disproportionately or exclusively leading to more appropriate and better health care for both women and men.
An internationally respected advocate, Greenberger has won numerous awards including being named one of Washingtonian’s 100 Most Powerful Women by Washingtonian Magazine. Additionally, Woman’s Day magazine awarded Greenberger the 2006 “Red Dress Award” in recognition of her work in leading the way in the fight against heart disease in women, and in 2010 named her one of 50 “Women Who Are Changing the World.” Greenberger was also awarded the 2007 Clinical Research Forum Public Service Advocacy Award for her role in bringing the issues of women’s health and sex differences to the forefront of basic and clinical research.
NAPW selects its annual Woman of the Year Awardees through nominations of their peers, colleagues, and associates. They refer women to NAPW based on their individual character, commitment to professional and philanthropic service.
Everyone loathes Paltrow. Or loves her. She’s so divisive that in one week in May she was People’s World’s Most Beautiful Woman and Star’s most-hated celebrity.
She’s an Everywoman—a working mom who takes her two kids to school, cooks them dinner, and holds down a day job—who just happens to be in movies that have grossed more than $3.9 billion. And she’s married to the lead singer of Coldplay. She’s 40 and yet boasts that her butt isn’t “so bad for a 22-year-old stripper.” She eats a lot of tofu but smokes one cigarette every Saturday night. It’s difficult to make those contrasts feel authentic. But there are many who buy it: Her new cookbook, It’s All Good, made its debut at No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller List, and her website, Goop, has more than 150,000 subscribers.
Goop.com is an online newsletter that turns her exclusive existence into a how-to for readers by sharing vacation destinations, workout tips, and recipes for the best corn vichyssoise. According to Alexa, a company that provides Web traffic data, the site draws hundreds of thousands of well-educated women, most of whom make more than $60,000 a year.
Paltrow’s reach is growing rapidly. She’s written three best-selling cookbooks that advocate various forms of gluten-free, dairy-free, low-carb, vegan, and macrobiotic diets.
Mary Barra, GM’s first female chief product officer, is responsible for the design and quality of all GM cars and trucks. Barra, 51, comes across as measured and standard-issue corporate, the opposite of swaggering. Rather than brag about the awesome torque of the new Corvette, she talks about “driving an organization that’s customer focused.”
“Mary Barra has probably the hardest job in the global auto industry right now,” says Morgan Stanley’s Jonas. “If she can really knock the cover off the ball, she deserves to be CEO of GM.”
Her big break came when GM put her in a program for high-potential workers and gave her a scholarship to get an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She became an executive assistant for then-CEO Jack Smith, a perch that gave her a window into how the company worked.
Barra’s most high-profile moment came in 2009 after then-CEO Fritz Henderson put her in the HR role to help groom a new generation of leaders as the company worked to come out of bankruptcy. She allowed employees to wear jeans. “Our dress code policy is ‘dress appropriately,’ ” she announced in a memo. Barra had been attacking GM’s bureaucracy, slashing the number of required HR reports by 90 percent and shrinking the company’s employee policy manual by 80 percent. But loosening the dress code drew a flood of calls and e-mails from employees asking if they could, in fact, wear jeans. One manager was upset about the image this might send to company visitors. “So you’re telling me I can trust you to give you a company car and to have you responsible for tens of millions of dollars,” Barra responded, “but I can’t trust you to dress appropriately?”
It wasn’t a fashion issue. Barra saw the dress code, along with other changes, as an opportunity to have a conversation about responsibility. “There was a culture in the past where the rule was the rule and when you weren’t empowered to make the decision you could all just complain about the rule. Well, now we were really empowering virtually every single person,” Barra says. “We had a lot of HR for HR.”
That’s about as negative as Barra will go. She won’t be goaded into criticizing her colleagues and refuses to take shots at former executives. She stays on message: Her job is to make cars and trucks people want to buy, and to do so efficiently.
GM now has five female plant managers in North America. Four of its 14 board members are women, as are four of its 18 officers. “I’m not blind to the fact that sometimes it’s probably helped” being a woman in the car industry, Barra says. “Sometimes it’s probably hurt.”
According to a survey conducted by financial services firm Edward Jones, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of Americans believe women in the workforce today face a barrier to career advancement.
The survey of 1,010 Americans underscored that women represent an attractive applicant pool with 67 percent of respondents – men and women alike – citing that women are the more ambitious of the two sexes when it comes to acquiring leadership positions in the workplace. When asked the top factor impeding these ambitious women from advancing, a male-dominated environment was cited by 83 percent of respondents.
When asked which part of a career is most important to them beyond compensation, nearly half (49 percent) of women cited an entrepreneurial work environment.
Methodology:These results are based on a national probability sample of 1,010 telephone interviews conducted among adults 18 years of age or older (503 males and 507 females) living in private households in the continental United States, conducted from May 2-5, 2013. The margin of error for data based on total sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points. The survey was conducted by CARAVAN®, an omnibus service of ORC International for Edward Jones.
Alpha Dads are married to full-time professionals. None of them have illusions of achieving perfect harmony. The biggest thing for sure is time management.
An Alpha Dad is being proactive with his calendar-weeks out, planning his schedule meticulously, moving in-person meetings to conference calls when he needs to and being blunt and in-your-face about it. Even when he’s in the office, he sometimes has to leave at 3:30 p.m. to drive his son to his hockey games, a fact he broadcasts to help dispel the stink that can trail people when they sneak out early. “Everyone knows my routine when I’m not there,” he says. “Between 3:30 p.m. and 7 p.m., I’m available by e-mail. If there’s anything I have to review, it’s well into the evening.” In other words: It’ll get done, but on his time. Most people understand that if he leaves for the day, he will just change his work location.
After the Globe and Mail newspaper published an article about the "Deloitte Dads" in March, Deloitte consulting group’s chief diversity officer started getting calls from other companies wanting to learn how to do the same thing. “Welcome to Deloitte Dads, the Fraternity of Paternity,” reads one of their leaflets, followed by a quote from President Obama from Father’s Day, 2009: “I know I have been an imperfect father. I know I have made mistakes. I have lost count of all the times, over the years, when the demands of work have taken me from the duties of fatherhood.”
As a Lean In circle for guys, the Deloitte Dads lack their own demi-celebrity in the mold of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, whose best-selling book urges women to pursue their careers aggressively and not be put off by worries about how they’ll balance their work with their families. Sandberg touches on men and how important it is to choose the right one to procreate with—“She actually suggests that if men want children, they could also raise them!” says Gloria Steinem—but she’s primarily focused on women and what they can do to push their way further up the ranks of corporate America.
That’s a fine agenda for Sandberg’s book, but, asks Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University who studies families and work, “Why do we continue to focus on this as a women’s issue, when the evidence makes it so clear that it’s shared by men?”
A March 2013 Pew Research study about modern parenthood found that nearly equal proportions of parents were twisted up in knots trying to “do it all.” Fifty percent of working fathers and 56 percent of working mothers found it “very” or “somewhat” difficult to balance work and family, according to Pew, while 48 percent of working fathers and 52 percent of working mothers responded that they’d prefer to be home with their children, but needed to work for the income. Men spend three times as much time with their children as their grandfathers did. Yet most employers haven’t acknowledged this shift.
Roger Trombley, a research engineer at Ford Motor who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich. When Trombley was expecting his first child, he and his wife, who also works at Ford, weren’t thrilled with the child-care options available, and she wasn’t eager to become a stay-at-home mother. Trombley remembered that a colleague from several years back had worked out a novel solution with her husband, with both taking part-time schedules to allow them to split the week up and each be home with their kids for half of it. Ford didn’t offer paternity leave, but it did offer a part-time track so long as an employee’s manager approved it. When baby Dylan arrived, Trombley went to his bosses and told them he wanted to drop down to 70 percent and work from home two days a week.
“Knowing there was potential backlash wasn’t going to change what I was doing,” Trombley says. “There was some nervousness. If I go on this, will it affect my performance reviews; how people view me at work; my potential to get promoted? But none of those concerns have come to fruition, at least in my situation. I’ve gotten great feedback.”
Initially, Trombley could get some work done on his days at home, dealing with email when his son was napping. “Once he stopped the nap it became a little trickier,” Trombley acknowledges. When Dylan was old enough—he’s now 3—he started going to preschool a few hours a day, allowing his parents more time to dent their workloads on the days they were home with him. After school, Trombley takes Dylan to the park or the zoo. There are now three other men in his department with similar part-time setups; there were none when Trombley started. “Each and every one of them came to me and asked for recommendations on how to create the situation for themselves,” he says proudly.
Farrell believes that white-collar jobs, especially high-level ones, can and should be shared between two or even three people....with the freedom and flexibility that new technology makes possible.
The idea that men are more fulfilled when they spend less time accumulating corporate pelts and more time roughhousing with their toddlers is generally still more mocked than celebrated.
Yet, wives are now primary earners in 23 percent of U.S. married-couple households, according to Breadwinner Moms, a May 29 Pew Research study. The share of couples in which the husband outearns the wife has dropped 20 percent since 1960.
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