Squaring the circle around work and family
Work-family balance as a concept and as a policy is the subject of many controversies. Perhaps the most important one is whether people prefer to address the problem by integrating their work life with their family life or keeping them separate. My Wharton colleague Nancy Rothbard and Katherine Phillips and Tracy Dumas asked nearly five hundred employees in the United States about their preferences. They found that people who prefer keeping work and family separate are less satisfied and less committed to the company when they are offered integrating programs such as workplace child-care. But they are more satisfied and committed when the company offers segment programs such as flextime, which allows employees to shift the start and end times of their workday.
Another useful way of thinking about the issue is to note the benefits to the economy from greater labor force participation by women. If by 2030 more women in the developing world are gainfully employed, the economies of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia will go through a phase of more rapid growth, accelerating the expansion of the middle class.
Does working increase women’s mortality rate?
Women’s advantage in life expectancy over men peaked in the early 1970s at 7.7 years, but in 2019 it hovered around 5 years, and by 2030 it will be 4.3 years. What exactly is responsible for this decrease? To answer that question, we need to understand why females live longer than men in the first place. Men experience higher mortality rates than women at every age. Female hormone and the role of women in reproduction have been linked to greater longevity,” observes Scientific American.
Historically, another reason women have lived longer than men has to do with their lesser exposure to what’s called “man-made diseases,” including “exposure to the hazard of the workplace in an industrial context, alcoholism, smoking and road accidents, which have indeed increased considerably throughout the 20th century.” But women are now increasingly exposed to those same conditions, especially in the most developed countries. Overall, mortality continues to increase rapidly among Americans ages twenty-five to forty-four.
2030 by Mauro.F.Guillen: 112–117
