Struggle For Balance Continues Working Parents Still Juggle Career Demands, Family Needs

The ad in a recent Business Week shows a woman seated on a couch, laptop open. Her daughter lies absorbed in a book, head resting on mom’s leg. The ad for Compaq notebook computers is Gauguin-esque - muted colors and soft, blurred lines - and the pitch tugs at the heartstrings of every working parent in America:

“You can make sacrifices for your career,

“You can make sacrifices for your family.

“Or you can choose not to make sacrifices.”

It’s a warm and fuzzy thought, but quaintly naive in its suggestion that we’re only a high-speed modem away from fixing the central dilemma of work life for most Americans today: how to balance career demands with family needs.

The cold reality is that, despite the proliferation of policies designed to help workers balance demands of job and family, the war for a family-friendly workplace is far from won.

At companies where such benefits as flexible scheduling and paternal leave have been in place for years, their use remains limited. And even the use of telecommuting, once considered a panacea for solving work/ family conflict, has stagnated in recent years.

What’s happening? It’s one thing, experts say, for employers to adopt family-friendly policies. But changing the attitudes of managers and employees is far more difficult.

“I think the biggest issue is the cultural issue, and I think it’s died,” said Karen Geiger, a former manager of work/family programs at NationsBank and president of Karen Geiger & Associates, which helps companies design their own programs.

Geiger recalls how NationsBank Chief Executive Officer Hugh McColl Jr. vowed to “personally waste” any manager who didn’t support the bank’s flexible workplace program implemented in 1988. But even at companies like NationsBank, which has been singled out by Working Woman magazine as one of the nation’s top family-friendly companies, it’s hard to change the hard-driving corporate ethic that, in Geiger’s words, dictates: “This is war … you gotta be here all the time.

“You can have a flexible workplace policy that allows somebody to leave early, but if that person walks out the door at 3 p.m. and gets a comment, the culture’s not there.”

Nobody disputes that employers have made strides toward a family-friendly workplace. A survey of human resources executives at 1,500 major U.S. employers by Hewitt Associates found that 68 percent offer some kind of flexible scheduling. Child care and/or elder care referral services and unpaid leaves of absence are also becoming more common.

At IBM in Charlotte, flexible schedules help new parents Michael and Lynn VanAmburgh cope with the demands of 7-month-old Meghan. Michael, 34, works a later schedule so that he can take care of Meghan in the mornings and drop her off at the day-care center a few minutes from IBM’s University Research Park complex. Lynn, 40, works an early shift that allows her to leave as early as 4 p.m. And Michael totes a laptop home in the evening, allowing him to catch up on e-mail and other work.

But how many employees are actually eligible for or taking advantage of work/life programs offered by their employers? Those impressive statistics on the growing availability of such programs come from studies of very large employers - the NationsBanks and IBMs - that have been leaders in developing alternative work arrangements.

But a new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey including much smaller companies - down to employers with as few as 100 employees - found that only a tiny slice of the work force is even eligible for what the BLS calls “family” benefits. For example, only 2 percent of employees were eligible for flexible workplace programs, according to the study, which was released in July.

One reason corporate culture is slow to change, experts say, is that the struggle to balance work and home life has for too long been considered solely a women’s issue - a notion fostered by the silence of men with similar work/family conflicts, and still perpetuated by images such as the Compaq laptop ad.

In a 1986 survey of IBM employees, one in five men reported problems balancing careers with family or other needs; a decade later, nearly one in two said they were struggling with the balancing act. In his new book, “Working Fathers: New Strategies for Balancing Work and Family,” author James Levine quotes a 1992 study by Mass Mutual in which working fathers, asked what they struggle with most, identified work/family conflict as the central dilemma of their lives.

But most men, raised with a work ethic that told them to keep their personal problems to themselves, have been slow to speak up about their needs and seek solutions. After all, aren’t fathers, the family’s traditional breadwinners, supposed to work?

“Men have done it for years, quietly leaving to take their child to a softball game,” said Geiger. But many men balk at more formal scheduling arrangements - especially extended leaves.

At Kennedy Covington Lobdell & Hickman, a Charlotte law firm, a parenting policy that includes a liberal paternity leave program has been in place for many years. So far, men have been reluctant to take advantage of it.

“That’s where the real gender gap is,” said Alice Richey, a partner who has been instrumental in shaping the law firm’s work/family policies. “I think it wasn’t until the last four years or so that we saw men even taking one or two weeks off. … That’s just not the image.”

The numbers tell the story. In 1979, women taking unpaid parental leave outnumbered men by a ratio of 400-to-1. The gap has closed dramatically, but it’s still 18-to-1 in favor of women.

Male associates are asking for accommodations, but in most cases they are minor ones, said Richey. Joe Moss, a 31-year-old associate who became a father in June, approached Richey, his supervisor, about adding some flexibility to his schedule to allow him to help with son Will once his wife, Beth, returns to her job as a manager at Deloitte & Touche. Moss could have asked for up to three months of parental leave - and then a part-time schedule for up to two years - but so far only female associates are asking for reduced hours, said Richey.

At Charlotte-based First Union, use of the bank’s parental leave programs is heavily skewed according to gender, said Vice President Joan Hope, a member of First Union’s work/life team. But male voices are starting to be heard.

“Men are raising their hands and saying, ‘Hey, I want to be part of this,”’ said Hope. “We know it anecdotally that they’re beginning to talk to each other about it, and they’re beginning to call and ask us more questions about taking time off.”

Geiger agrees that real change will come when “two-career couples who want to spend time with their children move into the executive suites.

“That’ll make a huge difference because they get it,” said Geiger. “Then it’ll be in the water.”