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Preventing the Work/Life Collision
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PROVOCATIVE INSIGHTS FROM
NOT
YOUR MOTHER’S LIFE By Joan K. Peters
1. Equality in today’s workplace
means that anyone who wants can be a workaholic.
· professionals
average 60 hour weeks
· average
vacation, 13 days, is less than any developed nation
· stress
as a cause of absenteeism has tripled
· a
norm of 8 hour of sleep has vanished along with 8 hour day 2.
Where to go with the triple threat of deadly work hours, driving
debt and discrimination on the job? The answer is not, as my mother
believes, to find a rich husband. It’s to know the playing field, your
worth within it, and the kinds of work most likely to promote women, to
cultivate perk smarts and a life strategy, and to know how to negotiate,
beat discrimination, and develop a strong sense of entitlement – at
work and in relationships. 3.
The dirty little secret of today’s version of equality is that
men and women have very similar lives – and options – until they
have children.
4.
Most women, because they are mothers, don’t remain major
players in a work world that demands body and soul. As they cut back to
care for children, they free their husbands for a 24/7 economy that
prefers unencumbered workers to people with personal lives. 5.
This is the first time in history when the majority of women can
have both work and family – or balance of any kind - if they choose.
With wise choices, women can
live up to their full economic potential and implement politics based
on the conventionally female values of caring and concern for quality of
life, children’s welfare, and the safety of communities. 6.
Maternal privilege is dangerous. Women have the greatest
motivation to humanize the workplace and, thus, press for changes. But
if they do it alone, based on maternal privilege, the workplace will
continue to marginalize them, creating separate work tracts, paying them
less, maintaining the glass ceiling. Employers will prefer hiring men,
who are prepared to work till they drop, to hiring women, who will take
costly leaves, demand childcare, flextime, and part-time options. 7.
Discrimination begins at home. It is nurtured in those first love
relationships, which often create the kinds of men who leave real life
to their female partners while they mogul on. 8.
Know this: homemaker/provider; earth mother/cowboy, femme/macho
man is our default mode. It’s what’s programmed in there whether we
like it or not. But it’s as easy to love a nurturing man as it is to
love an egotistical one. 9. What often passes for a mother’s “choice” to stay home with her child are the unexamined assumptions and expectations that lead women to respect male ambition more than their own. A woman will ask more sacrifice of herself than of her husband. 10. Work/life balance is not for women only. When women work and do all the caretaking or hire undocumented aliens to run their homes while they work 12 hour days, or reluctantly quit work in order to take care of their kids – that is, when women accept the status quo – society won’t change. Mothers will rarely get into public office or the Fortune 500 or the winning Genome team. But the cumulative effect of each woman demanding decent work hours and flexibility – and insisting their spouses do the same – will restore sanity to the work world so that everyone gets to have a life.
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