Both she and others frame her decision as selfish, which contrasts with a father in the movie who has also left his children (played by Ed Harris), seemingly without much judgement. The film, based on the novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante, zooms in on actress Olivia Coleman playing the role of a mother who leaves her children with her husband for three years to pursue her own career goals. The recent Netflix production of The Lost Daughter has shined a light on this kind of response to mothers who live separately from their kids. “ mothers are spoken of as if they are defective, like something deep within their core is broken.” “Even if both parents are doing a brilliant job of raising happy, healthy kids, they happen to live away from their mum, the women are still vilified,” says Melissa, who lives an hour and a half drive from her two children, and administers an online support group for women in similar situations. But what if the choice she makes is to leave her kids?ĭespite improving gender equality, mothers who make the difficult decision to live apart from their children are often anything but celebrated. Women made remarkable progress accessing positions of power and authority in the 1970s and 1980s, but that progress slowed considerably in the 1990s and has stalled completely in this century.Quitting a job because she doesn’t like it, leaving a city that no longer suits her needs or ending a relationship with someone she’s no longer in love with – in recent decades, Western society has championed women who make these kinds of empowering choices. Only by recognizing and addressing the problem as one that affects all employees will we have a chance of achieving workplace equality.Īs scholars of gender inequality in the workplace, we are routinely asked by companies to investigate why they are having trouble retaining women and promoting them to senior ranks. This culture of overwork punishes not just women but also men, although to a lesser degree. The problem, they found, was not the work/family challenge itself but a general culture of overwork in which women were encouraged to take career-derailing accommodations to meet the demands of work and family. The authors conducted a long-term study of beliefs and practices at a global consulting firm. But the data doesn’t support that narrative. To explain why women are still having trouble accessing positions of power and authority in the workplace, many observers point to the challenge of managing the competing demands of work and family. To solve this problem, they argue, we must reconsider what we’re willing to allow the workplace to demand of all employees. The real culprit in women’s stalled advancement, the authors conclude, is a general culture of overwork that hurts both sexes and locks gender equality in place. Women were held back because they were encouraged to take accommodations, such as going part-time and shifting to internally facing roles, which derailed their careers. Women weren’t being held back because of trouble balancing work and family men, too, suffered from that problem and nevertheless advanced. Although virtually every employee the authors interviewed related a form of the standard explanation, the firm’s data told a different story. Not so, say the authors, who spent 18 months working with a global consulting firm that wanted to know why it had so few women in positions of power. Ask people to explain why women remain so dramatically underrepresented in the senior ranks of most companies, and you will hear from the vast majority a lament that goes something like this: High-level jobs require extremely long hours, women’s devotion to family makes it impossible to put in those hours, and so their careers inevitably suffer.
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