Many policies promote work-family balance, i.e. a balance between work and personal life. What has more effect, however, is not the policies, but the leadership. Going back to what we saw in the July 2024 seminar, the most important thing is human relations and the links we develop: whether or not we trust our bosses, whether or not we can tell them about our challenges.
When François Rabelais said, “Laughter is man’s attribute”, he was of course talking about mankind… But the question still needs to be asked: are men and women equal when it comes to laughter?
To find out, let’s take a look at the figures and the scientific literature on the subject.
In fact, when we talk about the “situation of women in the past”, we’re referring to a specific situation: that of bourgeois women in the 19th century.
Bourgeois because in other environments, women have always worked outside the home or in family businesses.
The bourgeois idea we’re referring to was that of the “devoted mother”, the “obedient daughter”, submissive to the man and with no aspirations other than marriage and little else.
From the second half of the twentieth century onwards, women began to change this idea and feminisms were born.
Just as I like to talk about feminisms in the plural, I prefer to talk about women in the plural.
Women participate more actively in society, in politics, in their professions, because they also have a lot to say.
In that sense, I think we’ve won.
Research has definitively shown that overwork isn’t good for employees or their companies — and yet, in practice, it can be hard to overcome unhealthy work habits and reach a more sustainable work-life balance. To explore what it takes for busy professionals to make a change for the better, the authors conducted a series of interviews with mid- and senior-level managers at two global firms. They found that while the majority of respondents assumed working long hours was inevitable, a significant minority of them were able to resist this pressure and achieve a healthier balance through a process of increasing awareness, conscious reprioritizing, and implementation of public and private changes.
Workload is one of the top barriers to working parents progressing their careers up the ladder. Solving this is a social justice issue: there are consequences if employees cannot fit their other commitments into their week, be that caring for children, taking care of their disability or something else.
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