Article about work/life balance issues

[speedymama]

Recently received my copy of Management Today and its leading feature is about work/life balance.

It states that research from the Institute of Education preditcts that a third of UK women graduates will never have children.

One of the women featured was a City lawyer who was interviewed by the magazine back in 1998 when she was a pioneering 4 day a week worker at her law firm after having two children. She says that the reality was it was 7 days down to 4 days and it did not work out because of the lack of career progression despite working very hard. In 2000 she stopped practising as a lawyer and switched to a firm where she became head of training.

She says that the profession is fighting to retain its lawyers and that this generation have a different attitude to work. They have more choice and are exercising it.

She also says that if she knew she would not have the dilemma about childlessness, she would have tried to get her partnership before having a family because it would have given her more professional and personal choices. It would have been a gamble but it was one she was not prepared to take.

The article also features a man who recently became a father and he is now struggling with the dilemma of balancing work with his desire to spend more time with his new born son.

[Twinklemegan]

I'm not in the same league as a City lawyer, thank god, but since I had DS I am struggling to keep up with my full time job. It is the norm in my line of work to do whatever overtime is necessary to get the work done, and since a colleague was made redundant I'm pretty much doing two people's jobs. But I'm not prepared to stay in the office all hours until the work is done - my priority is my DS and I'm prepared to do 5 hours overtime a week max. My view is that the organisation got themselves in a pickle by making someone redundant to save money - that shouldn't have to be my problem, should it? It's so hard to know what to do - I know I can't complain that's for sure or they'll think I "can't cope".