Researcher and author Sylvia Ann Hewlett found that women don’t necessarily want to leave work forever to raise families. Sometimes they don’t want to leave at all. Employers need to find new ways to retain a valuable part of their employee population.

Read this excellent article

Feminist Law Professors blog has a good write up about the opt-out revolution and how it has evolved over the past five years. It’s a summary of a keynote speech by Lisa Belkin, the author of the original article about this controversial phenomenon. Here’s the opening line: “It’s not just that the workplace has failed women. It is also that women are rejecting the workplace.”

Take a look…

Alpha Mummy blog writes: “Everybody wants it, nobody has any clue about how to get it. That’s because the idea is all wrong, according to Dr Steven Poelmans, co-founder of the International Centre of Work and Family at Madrid’s IESE Business School. “I don’t like the word balance,” he says, since it means if you put more into one side (say, work or family responsibilities), there’s less time for another. Instead companies and employees need to think about harmonising work life, prioritising things in the various parts of life as you need you to. “Work-life balance is about having a sense of meaning and purpose in life,” says Poelmans.”

Full posting

Cathy Arnst of BusinessWeek.com writes about the 20% rule for women in leadership:

“Seems that the glass ceiling hasn’t budged in years, no matter how many women enter the workforce. An upcoming report from The White House Project, a non-partisan organization set up to promote women in politics, finds that women occupy around 20% of leadership positions in business, journalism, politics and law firms. The rate is much lower in Fortune 500 firms and higher in non-profits (where salaries are typically low). And it’s been that way for years.”

Arnst has some compelling ammo in her article, click here.

Joyce Rosenberg, AP, writes in SFGate for the San Francisco Chronicle that tele-commuting has its pros and cons and requires a different management style. As I read the posting, it seems to me that most of the adjustment needs to come from the employee, to stay in touch and connected. The manager interviewed freely admits most of his on-site employees communicate primarily by email anyway, so why he feels phone calls are more necessary with his tele-commuting staff is not understood. Possibly a trust issue? He also says his tele-commuting still does the same good work. That, readers, is the bottom line.

Read article

Carolyne Zinko, for SFGate from the San Francisco Chronicle, writes about the plethora of websites springing up for women. Working professionally or stay-at-home, either way. Websites that appeal to all facets of being female. Are they good? That’s up to each individual woman, it seems.

Check it out

The HR site changeboard writes:

“There is a recognition that this group are clearer about what they want and they are more likely to go for it and take action to ensure they get it. For example they are more concerned about work/life balance – it’s important to them and employers have to respect that. There is no way employees can cut them out – they are their new pool of potential employees.”

Full posting

PersonnelToday.com writes in the Work Clinic that many female entrepreneurs, like most women, want to employ people they trust. That includes their spouse!

“Since 2000 the number of women running their own businesses has grown by almost 20% to around 1 million. A large proportion of these female entrepreneurs left traditional roles in order to have more freedom and flexibility, and to develop a better work-life balance. And for some of them, employing someone familiar and trustworthy - their husband - was an obvious next step.”

Full posting

Erin Abrams writes for PWC’s The Glass Hammer - professional women are not opting out as much as previously thought, and are hit by recessions more deeply. Abrams writes:

“Last week, we posited that women are being hit harder by job loss than men in this recession. This week, we bring you some compelling evidence for that theory. On July 22, 2008, the Majority Staff of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, led by Senator Charles Schumer and Rep. Carolyn Maloney issued a report with their findings. Called “Equality in Job Loss: Women Are Increasingly Vulnerable during Recessions,” this report argues that women began losing jobs in the recession of 2001 and never fully recovered in the labor market, making this downturn all the more painful.”

Full posting

Sharon Jayson for the USA Today reports that men are happier than women later in life. She writes:

Researchers analyzed decades of national data on 47,000 men and women to create a statistical model that shows women’s happiness decreases, while men’s increases, exceeding women’s by age 48.

Read article