Word: tracked
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Schwartz, who heads Catalyst, a Manhattan research organization that focuses on work and family issues, offered the two-track plan as a way to help companies make the most of the vast numbers of women entering the managerial ranks. The author contends that women managers cost companies more to employ than men do. Turnover is greater among women managers, she says, because some of them quit high-pressure jobs when they cannot reconcile the conflicting needs of work and family. As a result, Schwartz claims, companies lose the time and training invested in such managers...
Critics of the Mommy Track fear that employers might accept the notion that it is a bad investment to groom working mothers for high-level jobs. In fact, such corporations as Corning Glass and Merck have found that the costly career-track disruptions of parenthood can be reduced when companies help their employees balance the demands of work and family life. Thus the emergence of a formal Mommy Track strikes many people as archaic, especially at a time when companies are offering working parents a helping hand in the form of flextime, parental leave, day care and other programs...
Many major employers have been quick to reject the Mommy Track idea. Says James Cohune, a spokesman for McKesson, the San Francisco-based pharmaceutical and health-care-products distributor: "I can't imagine a company keeping someone down who wanted to move up, just because she had a family. That's the Stone Age." Another California giant, the Chevron oil company, offers flexible work schedules for working mothers but does not shift them to a slow career lane. Says Dave Hufford, manager of employment policies for the firm: "We all have to balance our personal lives with our career demands...
What particularly grates about the Mommy Track is that it hews to the old- fashioned notion of singling out women rather than men for complete parental sacrifice. Another problem is that the system could put a woman on a slow track for a whole career, even though the critical child-rearing years constitute only one brief phase of her life. Says Jayne Day, mother of a six- year-old daughter and a partner in the Manhattan office of the accounting firm Peat Marwick: "How, at age 25, is anyone going to make a personal decision about what track...
...speaks from experience. At Peat Marwick, Day worked part time for two years, starting in 1984, when her daughter Jacqueline was one year old. After Day resumed her full-time duties in 1986, she was promoted to partner. Says Day: "If the Mommy Track becomes a slower track for certain periods in your career, well, I am willing to accept that. What I am not willing to accept is that it totally turns off my options later to get back on track...