Beyond Work-Family Balance: Advancing Gender Equity and Workplace Performance
Beyond Work-Family Balance, by academic researchers Rhona Rapoport, Lotte Bailyn, Joyce K. Fletcher, and Bettye H. Pruitt, grew out of a decade-long search for ways to restructure business life that would "enhance organizational effectiveness while making the workplace more equitable and improving the quality of working people's lives." While few would oppose such goals at face value, their full attainment has nonetheless remained elusive as business pressures increase and unrealistic gender assumptions--like institutional refusal to acknowledge the increasing emergence of women as primary breadwinners--remain entrenched in our corporate cultures, structures, and practices. This book advances a conceptual framework for appropriate organizational change that is tied directly to the dual agenda spelled out in the two-pronged premise of its subtitle:Advancing Gender Equity and Workplace Performance. With no one-size-fits-all solution possible for such complex issues, the authors draw on related studies in a dozen different workplace settings to instead present a starting point "so that organizations so inclined and the people in them can embark on a similar journey" of exploration and solution. The result will be of interest to anyone who agrees that such change is badly needed and long overdue.--Howard Rothman