There’s a lot of talk about how to create a family-friendly workplace, and I’ve been mulling over one of the concepts in The Feminine Mistake for a while. Some of this is hers and some of it I think is mine.
We often talk about women getting to the top and then changing things, but the problem is that most women who’ve gotten to the top have had to act like men to do it. And once there, they’re not really that interested in helping other women to get to the top without paying the dues/making the same personal sacrifices that they have had to make.
Consider, on the other hand, men who have wives who work full-time, serious jobs. Two things happen (theoretically, at least): One, they have an intimate understanding of the challenges faced by a working mother. And two, without a wife taking care of everything on the home front, they themselves have more responsibility and thereby require a more flexible, humane work environment.
By this theory, the answer to developing a more family friendly work environment is not so much to have more women at the top as to have more men at the top with wives who work. (At least for the first generation. Once a generation of women who didn’t have to sacrifice everything gets to the top, they’d theoretically be more flexible for the next generation, too.)
Looking back on the senior men and women with whom I’ve worked, I’d say there’s a rough (by no means 100% consistent) alignment with this idea that men with working wives are more sensitive to the need for balance whereas the women think other women need to either sacrifice like they did or slow down their career development, at least for a while. What are your thoughts and experiences?
