Word: womens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...what does that mean in practical terms? Some of the needs are obvious. There is no balancing the demands of work and family life -- for men or for women -- without a national consensus on family policy. Part of this is guaranteeing employed parents the right to take time off after the birth or adoption of a child without risking the loss of their job; more than 100 nations ensure such rights for women workers, according to Sheila Kamerman, a social-policy professor at Columbia University. Equally essential is some sort of financial aid or subsidy to help the working poor...
...dinner table. And * being there is getting harder for full-time workers. Since 1973, Americans' average workweek has grown six hours, from under 41 hours to nearly 47, according to a Harris survey. Earlier this year Felice Schwartz, president of Catalyst, a research and advisory group that focuses on women in business, proposed a now infamous solution. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, she proposed that professional women who prefer not to sacrifice family to ambition be relegated to a slower career path that would top out at middle management. They would get by with shorter hours and schedules flexible...
Schwartz's "Mommy Track" idea unleashed a torrent of condemnation. Critics asked why women, and for that matter men, could not make a temporary switch to a slower track. Why couldn't workers slow down and speed up depending on the changing demands of their personal lives? Author Sylvia Ann Hewlett foresees a "sequencing" pattern in which dual-career couples would alternate the times in which they focus heavily on their work. A mother or father might be intensely involved in a project for a period of time and thereby earn credits for time off to spend with the family...
Today many major law firms have a slower Mommy Track, but women who choose to switch to such "part-time" positions (as many as 40 hours a week instead of 70) generally do not have the option of picking up speed again; they are out of the race for partnership. Other fields are even less accommodating. "In academic science, the granting situation is so tight that even if you are very creative, if you divert your energy to a child, it will be extremely difficult to compete," says Lola Reid, a research biologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine...
...will take a good deal of pushing and prodding to bring about such developments. But around the U.S., that pushing and prodding is slowly taking place. "There are 600 women's business organizations in America," says Wendy ^ Reid Crisp, director of the National Association for Female Executives, "from women in film to women in construction." Most of the groups were born in the 1980s, says Crisp, and their main focus is changing the workplace, battling the glass ceiling and pushing for child-care benefits. Labor unions are also playing a role in these struggles. In any given month in cities...