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.

During the State of the Union address last night, President Obama made some key statements that could impact many employees, and future employees, across the country.

* “I propose a Fix-It-First program to put people to work soon as possible on our most urgent repairs, like the 70,000 deficient bridges.”

* “Let’s declare no one who works full time should have to live in poverty and raise minimum wage to $9 an hour.”

* “I ask this Congress to declare women should earn a living equal to their efforts & pass Paycheck Fairness Act.”

* “Create H.S. classes focused on science, technology engineering and math, the skills today’s employer are looking for.”

* “Now is not the time to gut investments in science and innovation, we need to make those investments.”

* “I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions to reduce pollution and prepare for climate change” and speed to development of alternative energy such as wind and solar.

Jobs created as investments are made in the nation’s ailing infrastructure. Wages finally boosted so that workers who work full time aren’t among the ranks of the poor. Equal pay for women. Training for employees and kids in STEM careers so the United States can compete globally for jobs. And employment opportunities spurred by investments in alternative energies.

These proposals seem to all make sense, no? The question is, how much of these ambitious proposals will become a reality?

By Kelly Sakai

We’re all for the lastest gadgets to help employees get their work done faster, but this may be pushing the work-life envelope a bit too far.

I heard about a new product coming out that’s supposed to solve that pesky problem of juggling chopsticks, a soup spoon and your iPhone all at the same time that you’re trying eat a bowl of ramen noodles. The Anti-loneliness Ramen Bowl (the name already makes me feel a little sad) makes it possible for you to check your email, read your books, check in with social networks and presumably FaceTime with someone without actually taking a lunch break.

But if your employees feel compelled to check email while risking choking on noodles at lunch, (more…)

Most of the career advice out there cautions employees from saying anything negative about their managers or company out in cyber space. But there are times trashing your boss on Facebook or Twitter is OK.

For the past few years I’ve been writing about how the government was pushing back on employers who fire employees for saying bad things about them online. A story I wrote for TheAtlantic.com in 2010 looked at how the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an independent federal agency that defends employee-organizing rights, was beginning to step up and take complaints from workers who felt they were fired unjustly.

The NLRB felt companies were beginning to violate a long-existing provision of the National Labor Relations Act that provides protections to employees who get together and complain about a host of workplace issues - everything from conditions to benefits. Just because the discussions occur in cyber space doesn’t make a bit of difference, Jonathan Kreisberg, the NLRB’s Regional Director in Connecticut, told me then.

Well, it looks like the agency has solidified it’s standing on this topic. (more…)

As the economy improves, many workplace experts are predicting a mass exodus of disgruntled employees who’ve been treated unfairly during the economic downturn.

There are early signs of a slight uptick in workers saying “goodbye” to their employers. “The number of quits was 2.1 million in November compared to 1.8 million at the end of the recession in June 2009,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent data.

But I’m here to tell everyone to think before you say “f__k you” to the boss.

After so many companies were laying off workers, slashing wages and benefits, it’s not surprising that some employees feel no obligation to be nice when they head out the door, says David Kaplan, management professor for Saint Louis University. “It’s understandable,” he adds, “because they feel the employer has violated the psychological contract with employees, and they don’t feel they owe them anything.”

Whether it’s giving notice, training your replacement or abiding by noncompete agreements you may have signed, these post-employment niceties that were expected once upon a time are not a given in today’s workplace.

Yes, it sucks to be treated badly but you don’t want to burn your bridges when you leave. I know that sounds like an old-fashioned concept. But I suggest you take your anger out on management privately, after you’ve written a formal letter announcing your departure.

That’s what a good friend of mine did many years ago. (more…)

The Career Diva posts that got the most people reading in 2012 were all about the stupid things employers do.

Here are the top ten posts of the year:

Turns out many of you are upset about performance reviews, and you have good reason to be. The experts say such reviews are arbitrary and utterly useless.

And quite a few of you agreed some human resource departments can be clueless, especially when it comes to employee benefits such as family and medical leave.

Another workplace problem that gets under everyone’s skin is the rise in employers trying to get under your skin and find out how healthy, or unhealthy workers are.

A disturbing trend during 2012 was the growing number of employees holding multiple jobs.

It turns out if you’re a tough white woman or tough black man you can’t get a break.

What got job seekers angry this past year was the endless amount of interviews hiring managers think they need to decide on a candidate.

And women are still facing the perpetual problem of not supporting each other. Who cares how much Kelly Clarkson weighs? Quite a few of us, it turns out.

Employers are still asking job candidates how old they are, and they’re not always breaking the law when they do it.

My standing desk is still my back’s savoir, and a popular topic for many of you.

And finally, the Diva post that got the most readers reading was actually about a story I didn’t write. Lesson for 2013, don’t believe everything you read, especially work-at-home success stories.

Happy New Years everyone!! Looking forward to hearing from you all in the new year with your job/career questions. (careerdiva@verizon.net)

I recently heard Anne Marie Slaughter, the author of the controversial The Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, speak at an event and she admitted to a feminist reality check.

“I’m a proud feminist,” she said. “What was shifting under my feet was my own assumptions about myself. Not about feminism. I always assumed I wouldn’t choose work over my family but I would never choose family over work. I would somehow make them work.”

So can you be a feminist but still quit a job for your family?

Women have to exist in the work world as it is today, unaccommodating to working mothers and working fathers. The workplace just wasn’t designed with us in mind. And it’s also not only about raising children. Many of us will end up caring for elderly family members and let me tell you, the workplace isn’t loving you guys either.

That means men and women are going to come to realizations that they may not expect.

What’s your take? Have work-life issues been a surprise for you? Did you have to rethink your ideas?

I’ve decided to dub 2013 “The Year of the Working Dad” because I’m sick of all the focus on working mothers.

Seriously, men have children too and it’s about time we started accepting this fact as a society. Just yesterday a story appeared in the Wall Street Journal about how women now make up one-third of all the doctors and lawyers in the country, and the reporter saw it fit to ask a female attorney about her plans to raise a family.

A Miami based lawyer, Lindsey Lazopoulos, the article states,

graduated from the University of Miami School of Law last year and now is a commercial litigator. Two partners in the Florida firm where she works are mothers raising children, she said. Ms. Lazopoulos said she isn’t focusing on raising a family yet. “For me, and for other women we’re kind of just trying to get a start on our careers and focus on that,” she said.

What about the guys!? I may be going out on a limb here, but I’m thinking Josh Mitchell, the reporter who wrote the story, would not have asked any male lawyers such questions.

Of course not. We don’t think about men as working dads, as a recent blog post in the New York Times written by a working dad pointed out. (more…)

Finally someone said it!

One of the most disturbing stories following Hurricane Sandy was about a nursing home in Rockaway Park, Queens, that “failed to provide the most basic care to its patients,” according to a story in the New York Times.

“As waves slammed against the building for hours, patients remained inside in the dark, growing steadily more hungry and cold,” the article stated.

That’s the kind of scenario that worries anyone who has a mother or father in a nursing home, and it probably had many wondering how they can better care for their parents.

To often as a society we only focus on how young parents are able to deal with issues of work and children, giving little thought to elder care. But caring for mom and dad will become a major issue for many of us.

I remember interviewing a female top executive at an insurance company for a New York Times story I wrote many years ago, and she told me she never had to worry about having a flexible schedule because she didn’t have children. But now, in her late 50s, she confided in me, she was suddenly taking time off for an aging parent, and it was impacting her career. (more…)