30 August 2001 -
It seems that managers find juggling successful careers with caring
responsibilities more difficult than other professionals such as doctors. A new ESRC-funded
cross-national study compares bankers and doctors in Britain, France and Norway and highlights
a need for further policies to help both male and female employees attain a satisfactory
work-life balance.
Professor Rosemary Crompton, a researcher from City University, London, considers that
Equal Opportunities and ‘affirmative action’ policies help women to
achieve equality in the workplace. She says that: "Our study shows that we might now usefully shift
the focus away from ‘women’ as such and instead address the broader issue of how caring
responsibilities might be combined with employment."
Work-life balance is harder for managers to achieve than professional workers even in
Norway, which is renowned for ‘family-friendly’ policies. The study indicates that many women
bankers - if they had children at all - restricted themselves to just one. But women doctors
had more children (wth 65% having two or more children compared to 37% of women bankers).
And male doctors in the survey also had more children than male bankers.
"All bankers, male and female, emphasised the difficulty of achieving individual success
alongside substantial caring responsibilities - even in ‘family friendly’ Norway,"
Dr Crompton says. Only a few men with major caring responsibilities were interviewed but all reported that their careers had taken second
place to their family life.
"Clearly the general argument relating to the possibility of flexibly combining
professional employment with family life applies to men, as well as women," suggests
Professor Crompton. "And perhaps the major contrast in debates relating to gender and
careers should not be between masculine and feminine career paths, but rather between
‘carer’ and ‘non-carer’ careerists and how to combine a career with caring."
She argues that the difference between the experience of doctors and managers in the study is
due to the nature of professional qualifications. "Whereas professional qualifications bestow
a ‘licence to practice’ which can be used flexibly over employment and family lives,
managerial careers are subject to organisational constraints that hinder such flexibility."
Doctors have 'substantial occupational power' and can work out their own ways of combining
employment with family life. But this is more difficult to achieve in market-driven jobs such as banking, find it more difficult.
"As managers of both sexes face similar difficulties and since society’s caring needs
are unlikely to be met simply by the re-domestication of women, then policymakers need
to address the issue of how caring can be combined with employment," she advises.
A possible policy initiative would be to allow employees of both sexes the right to work
part-time if they have caring responsibilities, instead of allowing the decision to
an employer’s discretion. The lesson from Norway is that ‘family-friendly’ policies must
force private companies into action. "What we see even in Norway is that family friendly
benefits are very well taken up in the state sector, but not in the highly competitive
atmosphere of private companies. What we need is policies which regulate the behaviour of
private companies," she concludes.
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book ` published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel
and Development (CIPD).
