Yahoo’s making workflex news again with its announcement today it’s beefing up paid maternity leave for men and women.

It’s heartening news from the tech company whose CEO Marissa Mayer came under fire recently for announcing a telecommuting ban.

As you can imagine, social media was all a twitter with Yahoo’s leave decision today with some employees seeing the move as further proof that working parents get special treatment when it comes to flexible work arrangements.

Here’s a tweet from @DickTracyOrlndo, who retweeted my tweet about Yahoo’s announcement:

Kidless people hosed again. MT @careerdiva: Yahoo expands maternity leave after banning telecommuting

The feeling of being hosed at work in this regard haunts not only employees but employers, who often wonder if these types of workflex programs can ever truly be seen as equitable. No good supervisors wants to be perceived as caring more about one group of employees than another. And no worker wants to think they’re not getting the same treatment as other works, especially if they work just as hard. (more…)

Only when jobs involved making ethical compromises did women report less interest in the jobs than men.

That’s one finding from a series of recently released studies titled: “Who Is Willing to Sacrifice Ethical Values for Money and Social Status? Gender Differences in Reactions to Ethical Compromises.”

More from the studies conducted by Jessica Kennedy of Wharton and Laura Kray of Berkeley:

* Study 1, when reading decisions that compromised ethical values for social status and monetary gains, women reported feeling more moral outrage and perceived less business sense in the decisions than men.

* In Study 2, we established a causal relationship between aversion to ethical compromises and disinterest in business careers by manipulating the presence of ethical compromises in job descriptions. As hypothesized, an interaction between gender and presence of ethical compromises emerged.

The research points to the very good possibility that women may have more integrity than men.

What does this mean? (more…)

A while back I tweeted this to my nearly 16,000 followers on Twitter and I got an avalanche of responses and retweets:

#1 issue facing women in the workforce today: How we topple the 1950s-company-man sustained model, where women have no say.

Why did it get so much attention? Because women are sick and tired of trying to fit their lives into an out-dated workplace model that no longer fits for today’s realities. Women are juggling children and careers, caring for aging family members, and all the while penalized for it with less pay and little to no representation the nation’s leadership ranks, in everything from Corporate America to the halls of Congress.

That’s why I’m calling for a working-woman revolution. And I don’t mean only waging war against the male-dominated management model, but battling our own fears and baggage when it comes to fighting for what we want and need. Working gals are finally poised to launch an offensive because we are at “the tipping point” of a female revolution. Women now make up the majority of the workforce in America, and many working gals are starting to think the out-dated career template based on the 1950s “Company Man” needs an overhaul.

For too long women have had to accept token work-life changes bestowed by male-dominated workplaces. And moms have become too obsessed with battling the mommy wars, working moms against stay-at-home moms. But now women are realizing they need the keys to the executive bathrooms, not just the lactations rooms; and all that mommy infighting has meant women took their eyes off the prize – a workplace, a world, with women leaders who truly understand family responsibilities.

Family and love trumps egos!

Christine Lagarde, the first woman to head the powerful International Monetary Fund, gets the realities of life.

She understands the global economy and what needs to be done, but her most moving words come when she discusses the egos she confronts in her job, mainly the egos of men who control money and power around the globe.

“When my father passed away and then when later on I gave birth, those are sort of ground-breaking experiences that put everything else into perspective. You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, ‘Come on, you know, there’s life and there’s death and there is love.’ And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.”

Only women can carry this torch.

We need to focus on what we women can bring to the table, and what we need to do, and what many working women pioneers are already doing, to make the nation’s offices, factories, congressional halls, etc., work for us. It’s not shoehorning your way into the existing anti-family, anti-woman workplace structure. It’s about how to go about changing the workplace to better fit the lives of today’s woman.

It’s about the two co-engineers at Ford who share a job so they can spend more time raising their kids, and even so, they’re credited with being the brains behind the success of the auto giant’s Explorer SUV. It’s about the lawyer who left a high-powered law firm for academia because she wanted flexibility for her family, and is now the head of a renowned women’s leadership institute. It’s about the applications engineer at Intel who went part time when her kids were young, and is now a high level manager at the computer chip giant. It’s about a Congresswoman from Illinois who missed votes on the House because she wanted to attend her daughter’s concert and is serving her third term.

A growing number of working women are defining success on their own terms, and while they’re career trajectory seems atypical and they’ve made job decisions based on their family — something which would have doomed most corporate climbers in the past — it works for them.

Almost every story about working mothers lately has focused on how they just haven’t been able to accomplish as much as their male counterparts in the workplace. I’ve just started reading “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, and she’s right, we desperately need more women leaders and we as women have to stop being afraid to stand up and speak up.

But I don’t think the lives women live today are that dire, especially when women go after what they want, just like Sandberg has done. Women who know what they want and go after it don’t feel like they’re getting the shaft.

That’s the biggest lesson women need to learn. Being bossy and demanding what you want isn’t bad gals, as Sandberg points out. My own daughter Circe was given a book by a good female friend of mine when she was around 2 years old titled “Little Miss Bossy.” Hopefully Circe will some day be proud of that!

Indeed, there are many proud and happy working women out there. A survey by Kenexa Research Institute looked at whether women thought their futures looked promising, and 62 percent said: “I can meet my career goals and still devote sufficient attention to my family/personal life.” That compares to 59 percent among men who feel that way.

For women, said Brenda Kowske, a former research manager and at Kenexa, “having a fulfilled or satisfied personal life is an aspect of achieving a promising future at an organization for women in the U.S.”

Women are in a keen position to reshape the linear ladder upward. For the first time, women represent 51 percent of the total U.S. workforce; and the number of working moms as sole family breadwinners hit a record high last year. Many women are realizing they just can’t shoe horn their family lives into an arcane work model.

But one big question remains: “Are we being pioneers, or simply giving in?” asked Pamela Stone, associate professor of sociology at Hunter College and author of “Opting Out: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home.”

If women are just changing their idea of success because they’ve given up fighting a society that deprives working moms of opportunities to advance, then it’s not a good thing, said Stone. But, if working moms are essentially transforming the work dynamic to meet their needs, then it’s a great thing.

The growing power of working moms may alter the landscape once and for all. “When you get a critical mass of women in any professions you do get changes,” said William Doherty, professor 
and director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program in the Department of Family Social Science, College of Education and Human Development, at the University of Minnesota.

“Women are reshaping the workforce, and I think a cultural change is underway,” he continued, pointed to the healthcare industry. “You have 50 percent or more of the young doctors today are women and as a result there is much more part time work available. You don’t have the expectation of 90-hour weeks anymore.”

Rewriting the rules, however, has not been easy because so much of meshing child rearing and career rearing is unknown.

“We have no clue what it’s going to be like when we become a working mother,” stressed Susan Wenner Jackson, one of the founders of the website, Working Moms Against Guilt, because few women do any preplanning. “It completely blows your mind and you have to put the pieces back together.”

We need to build a template for how many working women were able to put the pieces back together and climb their definition of the ladder of success. It would be like a “Fast Food Nation” for working women everywhere. No more being force-fed the metaphorical career chicken McNuggets by “Da Corporate Man,” who says women need to be penalized for being mothers, daughters, and wives. We are going to rethink how we live and breath at work and in our careers. It’s time for women to demand a new, emotionally healthier workplace and a road to the top that takes into account a more organic approach to success and a balanced life.

Here’s the plan I propose we think about: (more…)

There’s been all this hoopla over companies such as Yahoo and Best Buy slashing telecommuting programs, but what about companies that embrace having their employees work from home?

Those employers are reaping the benefits. Here’s one great example from Pixar, and of course it’s animated:

In the last 50 years, a lot has changed in the nation’s households.

According to a report released by Pew Research Center today,

Fathers now spend more time engaged in housework and child care than they did half a century ago. And the amount of time they devote to paid work has decreased slightly over that period.

This is further evidence, that the responsibilities of the home are not just a women’s issue people, and we have to stop framing the argument for changes in the workplace as something just mommies need.

I blogged about how 2013 would be The Year of the Working Dad at the beginning of this year, and with that distinction comes a lot of pressure to find equilibrium when it comes to work and family life.

Research from Families and Work Institute (FWI) has found that men are feeling this pressure more and more. The Institute’s report titled “The New Male Mystique” affirms the fact that young men, in particular, “are realizing they have to do more at home than their fathers did, and today’s young men want to do so.”

But FWI’s report also found that “men are under increasing pressure to do it all in order to have it all—be dedicated employees in increasingly demanding jobs, good financial providers and involved family members.”

Thus, the “ideal” man is still seen largely seen as the “breadwinner,” while also being involved in the family more.

Indeed, Dads want to spend more time with their kids.

The Pew study found men more than women thought they were spending too little time with the kids:

Clearly, mom still pick up most of the work at home. But Pew’s data shines a light on how much things have changed.

From the study:

Fathers have by no means caught up to mothers in terms of time spent caring for children and doing household chores, but there has been some gender convergence in the way they divide their time between work and home.

Pew calls it gender convergence, I call it the way it should be, and finally it almost is.

Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, to few to mention.

You’ve got to love Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

Frank Sinatra, My Way (Live at the Royal… by waytoblue

The guy didn’t regret a lot, and why should he? You live your life, make mistakes along the way, but in the end, you’ve got to leave regrets behind, right?

Not if you’re a woman!

Regrets, we have a lot.

It seems we can’t do anything right, and at every turn, especially lately, we’re told we’re either screwing up because we’re letting our desire for a good family life stand in the way of our career success, or we’re delusional to think we can have it all.

No matter what line we decide to accept, in the end, we could end up regretting it all.

One former top female executive shared her regrets in an opinion piece in the New York Times this past weekend.

“Sometimes young women tell me they admire what I’ve done. As they see it, I worked hard for 20 years and can now spend the next 20 focused on other things. But that is not balance. I do not wish that for anyone,” wrote Erin Callan, the former CFO of now defunct Lehman Brothers.

Women are so consumed with regretting their work-life choices, or making other women regret their work-life choices, that they spend little time on regretting other important things, like making stupid business decisions while you were an executive at a company that ended up crashing and burning, and contributing to the biggest economic meltdown this country has ever seen. (Callan didn’t mention that in her regret oped, as the astute reporter Matthew Cooper pointed out in his must-read National Journal piece today.)

On the flip side, my mother recently told me she had regrets that she focused so much on children and family and very little on herself and her career.

Women can’t get a break in this country, or anywhere else in the world, my mother said when I asked her about why women on both sides of the spectrum have regrets.

Women, she said, “have a lot of responsibilities and we’re responsible people. Men don’t think about all these things, they just think about their koukou.” (This means penis if you couldn’t figure that out.)

OK, she added, not all men are like that, but women just put the weight of the world on their shoulders. Men tend not to, she stressed.

So I suppose in the end we can’t win this work-life game. If we accept that we may have fewer regrets and just say “I did it my way.”

The CEO of Bank of America is a man.

The CEO of Yahoo is a woman.

That’s the only reason I can find for why the media went crazy this week over Yahoo’s top dog Marissa Mayer deciding to cut telecommuting for her employees; but barely covered Bank of America’s CEO Brian T. Moynihan doing something similar.

Yes, you didn’t hear that in the mass media this week. There actually was another company — Bank of America — that did this and made it public, and that company has way more employees than Yahoo, about 300,000, compared to Yahoo’s 11,000 or so.

I wrote about it for Families and Work Institute late last year, and I was sort of surprised back then that few reporters, beyond local media in North Carolina where the mega bank is based, gave it any ink.

This from the Winston-Salem Journal in December:

Bank of America is preparing to add more restrictions to its popular work-from-home program, meaning more employees across the company will be sent back to the office more often.

The program, known as “My Work,” had grown significantly since it was introduced in 2005 and was widely touted as a cost-saver. It also has proved popular with employees who say it saves on commuting costs and helps them balance work and family.

In addition to scaling back telecommuting, Bank of America also announced they were shuttering their child care centers. Where was all the outrage hurled at Bank of America’s CEO?

I know, people expect a female leader to get the whole work-life thing. But maybe it’s time we accepted that women won’t lead a certain way just because they’re women.

That’s probably what’s held women back from leadership.

Some career experts (and I use this title lightly) tell people to work for free as a way to get their foot in the door. This is a stupid suggestion so I was heartened to read a story on FastCompany.com encouraging workers not to work for free.

“If you’re busy doing free work because it’s a good way to hide from the difficult job of getting paid for your work,” Seth Godin exhorts, “stop.”

Godin is a branding guru, and people tend to listen to what he advises. That a great thing because adult internships for for-profit corporations is a dumb way to climb the ladder of success, as Godin points out.

It also can be illegal, which the article fails to mention. (more…)

What do you call the process by which an employer who offered flexible work arrangements to employees for years suddenly decides to retrograde flexibility?

Unflexing.

I decided to give it a name because it seems to be a small but growing trend in Corporate America. First Bank of America announced late last year it would be scaling back its flexible work arrangements; and just last week Yahoo threw its hat in the unflexing ring by sending out a memo to employees saying telecommuting is soon to be a perk of the past.

The memo was included in an All Things D article. Here’s an excerpt:

We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.
Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo! offices.

It’s a disturbing trend that doesn’t seem to make a lot of business sense if (more…)

Until we move beyond the notion that work-life and workplace flexibility is a women’s issue we’ll never bring the workplace into the 21st Century.

Creating a new workplace, one that’s not based on the 1950s Company Man model, is about blowing away all the preconceived notions we have about gender, culture, and what really matters in this life.

Men are also feeling the pressure of balancing work-life issues, as Families and Work Institute’s research shows:

* Spending more time at work significantly increases the potential for work-family conflict. Among men who work 50 or more hours per week, 60% report experiencing some or a lot of conflict, compared to men who work 40-49 hours a week, 39% of whom experience conflict. In fact, the amount of time men spend working is more important in predicting their work-family conflict than the time men spend on child care, chores, and leisure.

* Men who work in demanding jobs are more likely to experience more work-family conflict (61%) than men whose jobs are moderately demanding (44%)

* Fathers in dual-earner couples are more likely to experience conflict as well. Interestingly, these fathers work three hours more per week than men their ages without children.

* Many fathers would prefer to work less, but they work long hours to earn money for their families.

An article in the New York Times today does a good job of addressing the realities of the U.S. workplace and it’s failure to keep up.

The piece is titled “Why Gender Equality Stalled” and is written by Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family history at Evergreen State College and the author of “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Today the main barriers to further progress toward gender equity no longer lie in people’s personal attitudes and relationships. Instead, structural impediments prevent people from acting on their egalitarian values, forcing men and women into personal accommodations and rationalizations that do not reflect their preferences. The gender revolution is not in a stall. It has hit a wall.

Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders.

Clearly, many women still have to carry most of the weight of parenting, but until the issue is seen as a business imperative and not just a gender issue, women and men won’t get the workflex they need to survive in today’s workplace.