Right about now, juiced up on all of that power you didn’t know you had, you probably feel like grabbing your bayonet and heading for the boardroom. Some of you may want to seize—finally—that CEO’s chair, or grab other ruling positions. Most of us, though, are after something even more elusive—freedom, time, control. A sane work life.

It’s something we’ve long been afraid to demand. Afraid because we didn’t know we could demand it—we didn’t know all that stuff about our market power. But also afraid because even discussing the subject seemed risky—we’d look like slackers for raising it. And afraid because of what the lack of discussion implies—that women of our sentiment must be few and far between.

Well—guess what? You are not alone. The X chromosome natives, in really really big numbers, are restless. All across America women are making radical decisions about their careers—rattling the traditional workforce structure, which just doesn’t fit with our enlightened mind-set. Some are emboldened by an understanding of their increased power. Others don’t even feel that power but have reached a breaking point and are forging ahead on their own. We are forcing our work to suit our lives, not our lives to suit our work. We’re determined to craft a New All for a new era, a formula that relies on sanity and control over struggling and juggling.

Robin Ehlers was happily on the fast track, eager to work hard and move up. The thirty-eight-year-old sales representative traveled the country for thirteen years building client relationships and winning stellar reviews. She was on her way to the challenging management position she’d always wanted. But she had two young children, and it wasn’t always easy to meet the demands of both her job and her children—day care drop-off was often at 5:30 A.M. She and her husband even decided to move the family from California to Kansas City at one point so they would be closer to the nurturing help of in-laws. Even then, the stress was a killer. “You’ve got so much work to do, and you feel like you’re neglecting your family, and especially your child. I remember most days picking up the kids and being too exhausted to be a mom.” But her life worked, she told herself. On paper anyway. Until she was home on maternity leave after the birth of her third child and had time to really examine her priorities.

Wired for Sanity

French feminist Simone de Beauvoir could have really used the help of a few brain scans. “One is not born, but rather one becomes a woman,” she valiantly postulated in 1949.²⁴ She thought she was defending her sex by asserting that our more masculine side was forced out of us by societal forces. She was right that women have spent much of their existence stripped of power, but she was wrong on the nature-versus-nurture argument. Sixty years later, we all know now it’s pretty much Mars versus Venus from birth, and these days, according to science and scans and studies, it looks as though Venus is rising. Sure this is still politically sensitive stuff—the president of Harvard got dumped over his musings that women may have different strengths. But we think we’re on safe ground: we’re not saying different—we’re saying better!

You see, we noticed something the intrepid researchers at the Families and Work Institute kept tripping across as they conducted survey after survey about what employees want. We women experience our jobs quite differently from the way men do. We think about the future. We anticipate consequences more. We spend more time mapping out the potentially negative impact of taking bigger assignments. We have much broader concerns about the way demanding jobs might disrupt connections to family and friends. The researchers knew they were on to something big, but they couldn’t really figure out how to quantify it. Were women’s different attitudes rooted in scientific differences or something less tangible?

We took the anomaly to some brainiacs and discovered that those female instincts, those thought patterns, are hardwired into the female DNA. And in a superior fashion, say some. “There is no question about it,” says Dr. Fernando Miranda. “Women. have much more sophisticated, much more evolved brains.” Miranda, a neurologist who studies these differences, echoes what much of the cutting edge research shows—women really are able to use both sides of their brain more easily than men. Men live mostly on the left side, or in the analytical sphere. But our left and right sides, the analytical and emotional spheres, are more connected, which explains, for example, why women tend to feel more ambivalent about hard-charging careers than men do. We’re constantly weighing two competing brain inputs. But it’s the same process that makes us consensus builders and valuable employees! “I’d much rather hire women than men,” Miranda confesses. “Men are wired to be oppositional by nature—more argumentative.”

The science is even redirecting the most militant women’s libbers. “Above all, the hormones women receive in the womb mean that, by nature, they do not want to be manic, one-dimensional workhorses who invest all their energies in one thing: their job (or hobby). Overall, they are less extreme than men,” writes British journalist and ardent feminist Rosie Boycott, at the same time admitting those words would have made her blood boil a decade ago.²⁵

Bottom line? We are constantly in touch with our emotions, even when we’re not conscious of it, and we act accordingly. The pathways that let us focus on the future are simply more available. In addition, we’re not distracted as much by testosterone, that hormone of instant gratification and domination, which, according to Miranda, not to mention thousands of years of life as we know it, can really muck things up.

No, we women are instead heavily under the influence of the hormonal secretions of the hypothalamus. That’s the mysterious stuff that lets us smell a tiger at thirty feet and take him on if he threatens our young, or, in Womenomics-speak, lets us sniff out claustrophobic corporate culture from blocks away and jump ship if it threatens our family life. We viscerally understand from the start what the ladder represents—a grim, Kafkaesque climb that could cripple our relationships. Men, less neurologically able to project the future, focus more happily on the next rung.

Imagine the arguments Mme. de Beauvoir would have marshaled with that data.

What Women Want

So what were we thinking years ago, as we were drawn, lockstep, into those masculine, career-driven ranks? What made us defy our genes and bend our natural wills to the unnatural corporate structure? Certainly after centuries without power we were after status and achievement, not to mention the ability to make a difference and make some money. (Remember—we are only partially right-brain driven!) And we still have those desires. But we’ve also achieved a certain amount of wisdom from our years in the testosterone jungle—wisdom about what works for us and what doesn’t. Even the once all-mighty motivator—the dollar—doesn’t stack up against our new, more gratifying incentive—time. We have discovered we’d prefer a New All; a tapestry of family and work in which we define our own success in reasonable terms.

It’s because we are, well, who we are, explains Kathleen Christensen of the Sloan Foundation, one of the biggest funders of studies on families and the workplace. “But it’s not about the tasks, the cooking and the shopping,” she says. Christensen has actually coined a new phrase for the modern women’s role in family life: the meaning makers. “It’s the women who basically cultivate and sustain the rituals in the family. Whether it’s when a child loses a tooth, birthday parties, or major family celebrations, it’s the women who see that as what they want to do.”

 

CLAIRE I somehow always imagined that I and my husband, a thoroughly spectacular and modern guy, would simply split child-rearing duties. I envisioned some sort of postmodern utopia, in which we both worked, but both made equal career “sacrifices” in order to be home with our yet to be conceived child. It would clearly just be a matter of scheduling. Needless to say, reality intruded in an unruly but ultimately genius fashion. About eight months after our son Hugo was born, I was struggling with the unpredictable demands of my work. After getting another last-minute call to come to New York for an assignment, I spent an angst-ridden few weeks. Should we hire a second nanny? Should I keep pushing my husband to carve more time out of his schedule to be home? It finally hit me. I was on the floor with Hugo, who was, as always, chortling as he tried to eat his toes, when I suddenly understood that this was bigger than a scheduling problem. It wasn’t about more help, or even my husband’s participation. I wanted the luxury, the joys, of time with my son. Even if my husband were home full time, I could see that wasn’t the solution. I wanted—and needed—that balance in my life. It was a liberating, almost euphoric realization. I had to sort things out with my company.

 

So—let’s get back to the hard numbers again, because these will surprise you as much as the stats about your power.

Work-life conflict is the top factor cited when “high-potential, high-talent” women leave their jobs. A Harvard Business School study conducted by Myra Hart found that 62 percent of the school’s female graduates with more than one child were either not working, or working part time just five years after graduation.²⁶ Lack of balance is what pushes us to the brink of quitting.

In survey after survey, flexibility—work-life control—is essential, say women, to our professional satisfaction. It’s ranked right up there with compensation. Four out of five of us say we need more flexibility at work, according to the Family and Work Institute.²⁷ Ten years ago 48 percent of working women surveyed thought part-time work was the answer. In 2007, 60 percent of us now say we’d prefer to work part time. And companies barely have to dig to get this information out of their high-heeled masses.

In Richmond, Virginia, Capital One had its eyes opened in 2003 to this growing demand. The financial services company surveyed its female associates to find out what was really critical in their work lives. Overwhelmingly the answer they got back was flexibility. And the demand for it increased the more senior the women became. “People said ‘I need to be able to go and see a soccer game or I need to go and do what I need to do,’” says Judy Pahren, director of human resources for Capitol One. “In fact we saw it across our entire workforce, not just with women.”²⁸

And when General Mills decided to check in with its female workforce recently, it asked which factor women thought was most important in bringing more balance to their lives: outside help (someone to do grocery shopping, yard work, etc.), a more flexible schedule, or a shorter commute. Flexibility trumped the other categories.²⁹ As a result, 53 percent of the women said a flexible schedule was the key to making their lives better. Fully 61 percent said flexible work arrangements were critical to continuing to work at the company.

But here’s the rub—most women don’t think they get enough support for flexibility where they work and worry that if they do work flexibly it will make them appear less committed.

The Downshift

Look—having been shoehorned into an inhospitable, male-created work environment for all these years, it should be no surprise that our attitude toward work is so conflicted. But the real headline isn’t that women are quitting in droves, as was the big news ten years ago. It’s how much we’re modifying our professional goals and work habits in order to stay in the workplace.

A watershed Family and Work Institute study put in bold what until recently sounded sacrilegious: women often don’t want that promotion. Most of us are happy where we are, thank you very much. In 1992, 57 percent of all college-educated women said they wanted to move to jobs with more responsibility. (We could hardly admit otherwise—weren’t we all supposed to want that?) Well, ten years later, only 36 percent of us wanted to take on more responsibility. And in 2007, it was down again—only 28 percent of us want more responsibility.³⁰ This thirty-point drop in fifteen years shows that 59 percent of us don’t want another ounce of work or worry on our desks, no matter the reward.³¹ Whether we’re finally coming clean, or we’ve simply learned the perils of top jobs (or some combination of the two), most women clearly don’t aspire to make that straight climb to the summit anymore.

And this downshift in career ambitions is just as true for the top dogs among us. The same Family and Work Institute social scientists picked out ten top-tier companies (think IBM, Citicorp) and talked with the top one hundred women in leadership positions at those firms. They kept after them for weeks, determined to get an accurate read. In the end, one third of those high-flying women admitted they’d voluntarily scaled back their career aspirations. Why? Not because they weren’t up to the job—but because the sacrifices they would have to make in their personal lives were just too great.

In her twenties, Christine Heenan could clock the hours with the best of them. As a senior policy analyst in the Clinton White House, the long days, the challenge, even the stress were challenges she was happy to take on. “I loved being in the office at 7, working with smart, fast thinking people till 10 at night, going out after work, talking about work, and getting up and doing it again.”

In 1995 she moved to Rhode Island, where she took on another challenge—head of government and community relations at Brown University. It was slower than the White House and there were days when she missed the old pace. Until she got a wake-up call, literally, hours after her first child was born.

“I got a call from my boss in my hospital room as I was holding the baby! There was a major thing happening at the university and she needed to talk to me about it. I told her, ‘There’s a doctor walking into the room, I’ll have to call you back.’ And she said ‘All right. Well, try to call me by 10 A.M.’”

In retrospect what shocks Christine more than that request was her own response.

“I said, ‘Okay’!” remembers Christine, chagrined. “If I look back, it’s one of the conversations I would most love to have a do-over on, and say…‘I’ll call you when and if I can.’”

A few years later, after trying to work “flexibly” at the university, and with a second child in her family, Christine quit to start her own company, a company where she offered her employees the same freedom she gives herself.

“Plateauing” is what Wharton Business School calls this growing lack of appetite for the climb. “Women are no longer willing to step into the ‘high-potential’ pool of employees in part because they want to be sure they have time for their families,” explains Monica McGrath, a professor at Wharton. “These women aren’t lacking in ambition and they want to make a difference in their jobs. It’s a question of ‘how much more responsibility can I take on.’”

Women simply don’t have linear career trajectories anymore. Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg, executives with financial consultants Deloitte and Touche, say that’s exactly what prompted them to craft a groundbreaking program called Mass Career Customization at Deloitte. It allows all employees to easily adjust the pace and flexibility of their careers over time. “Women have noncontinuous careers. And if we hire twelve thousand people a year in the United States alone, not to mention globally, and many of them are women, that matters,” says Benko. They say the ladder construct is out, lattice is in, for men and women. “We saw that the general trend line was more sideways than straight up, even for men, and even if you are the chairman of Deloitte.”

Of course the fact that most of us haven’t been able to take advantage of programs like that in recent years is why we’ve fled to smaller firms and the start-up market in search of friendlier terrain. Nearly half of all privately held U.S. businesses are now owned by women.³²

Bottom line? Many women have to work, and most of us want to work. We enjoy being part of the challenging, captivating grown-up world. Even many of those who’ve quit altogether, unable to strike a reasonable deal to stay on the job, want back in. But Wharton recently followed a group of women who left and wanted to get back in and found that half of them reported the experience frustrating, and 18 percent found it depressing. We so don’t need frustrated or depressing. We’ve got more than enough challenge in our emotional lives. What we do need to do is renegotiate the rules, reset the playing field, and get off that damn ladder, which, as it turns out, is not very stable anyhow.

The Ladder—It Is a’ Crumbling

Even without your iPod you can hear echoes of Bob Dylan around every watercooler these days. The hot currency in office boasting sessions is quickly moving from the number of power breakfasts under your belt to the number of school plays you’ve managed to make. Women may be driving this workplace revolution, but make no mistake, men are realizing the benefits of flexibility too. We are simply the canary in the corporate mine.

At Capitol One Judy Pahren saw flexibility was no longer just a “women’s initiative” when they did a follow-up to their survey and included the whole company. “We realized that flexibility was actually a need across our entire associate base. We had thought that maybe it was gender-based, but it was actually true of the men who worked here too,” said Pahren. A few months later, the Flexible Work Arrangements program was moved out of the women’s initiative and implemented for the whole company.

And no wonder—America is changing. “We are very much a time-famished nation. People want more control over their time,” says Kathleen Christensen of the Sloan Foundation.

look at these stats:

bottom line?

Not a very satisfied group! It simply isn’t our fathers’ workplace anymore. More and more workers of both sexes are willing to scale back their career goals, according to Family and Work Institute data.

Many of us certainly see that at home.

“My husband is absolutely as concerned as I am about family time,” says Robin Ehlers. “He runs his own business, so he’s lucky, but he’s always arranging his schedule to take three-day weekends for sports events, or even big chunks of the summer off to be with the kids. And I don’t even bug him or nag him or ask him to do it!” she laughs.

“Reduced aspirations does not mean employees are not talented or good at what they do,” explains Lois Backon of the Family and Work Institute. “Most do want to feel engaged by their jobs. But in focus groups they also say things like ‘I need to make these choices because my family is a priority’ or ‘I need to make these choices to make my life work.’”

Why the changing priorities? Burnout is key, say experts, and the fact that companies, even though they still long to discipline us, can’t really be decent father figures anymore. Benefits, pensions, other perks and protections are almost all a thing of the past. Not to mention job security, particularly in a downturn. Americans no longer believe they will spend a career at one shop, and they are right. The average American will hold ten different jobs over his or her lifetime.⁴⁰

With the insecurity of that new mobility comes an unexpected benefit—more freedom. And the fact that we don’t stay in one place for forty years anymore gives us enormous latitude to move sideways, backward, in and out—to define our own paths. We’re looking for our security and fulfillment and confidence elsewhere. Our employer’s definition of success is becoming meaningless, even suspect.

But—time for another reality check. We may want more freedom, but we’re still scared. We long to embrace this new mind-set, but we’re worried about the consequences. Almost half of working parents believe their jobs might be in jeopardy if they work flexibly, especially now.⁴¹ Not so, however, for the younger revolutionaries.⁴²

Oliver Phillips, a partner at Brunswick Group, a strategic communications firm that advises a range of corporate clients, says younger employees are starting to measure success with a new yardstick. “The millennials are influencing expectations for the entire workforce.”

The Naturals: Gens X, Y, and Z

If we’re increasingly frustrated by the sixty-hour office week, the next generation has no interest in it at all.

When it comes to demanding freedom from the office grind, these guys are the power players. Because while we’ve learned it the hard way and are still racked with guilt about our choices, the younger generations just get it instinctively. It’s as natural as texting and interacting on Facebook. Family and personal lives are critical for them. Old-fashioned pressure-cooker work environments send them screaming. They want to create unique, nontraditional career paths so that they can achieve all their life goals. They are impressively confident about their priorities, and they won’t settle for anything less than liberation.

“Generations X and Y do have a very strong work ethic, but they want more balance—a satisfying work and personal life. And that is not just the women,” notes Kathleen Christensen.

Remember, these alphabet-enders have grown up amid significant economic turbulence: the dot-com boom and bust, labor force shake-ups, corporate greed scandals, and the credit collapse. Coming of age in the era of 9/11 has clearly affected their priorities. They were raised by boomer parents who gave them self-esteem and a desire to have an impact. Consultant Bruce Tulgan, who helps companies work with younger generations, quips, “They are going to be the most high-performing civic-minded workforce in the history of the world, but they are also going to be the most high-maintenance workforce in the history of the world.”

“Generation Y is completely untethered. They’ve been utilizing technology for years, so when they get into the work environment and they’re a little more chained to their desk and to desktop computers, they don’t know what to do,” explains Cali Ressler, one of the cofounders of a radically flexible work program at retail giant Best Buy. “So rather than try to get them to conform to rules and guidelines from the 1950s, we should listen to them, and let them lead the way for what this future will look like.”

Indeed these are the folks truly forcing corporations to think change—or risk having no workforce to take our place. Gen X and Gen Y together are smaller than the boomer crowd, and their very scarcity drives up their value. To employers looking at a labor shortage, their wants and needs are critical. The War for Talent survey puts it bluntly: “These workers demand more flexibility, meaningful jobs, professional freedom, higher rewards and a better work-life balance than older employees do. Companies face a rate of high attrition if their expectations aren’t met.”

Young women are especially focused on a well-rounded existence. A University of Michigan and Catalyst study discovered that many of the country’s brainiest women are actively avoiding business school, their future-focused gaze honing in on the fact they won’t be able to balance work and home life in the corporate world.⁴³ Concerned about business schools’ inability to recruit some of the most talented women in the country, Wharton Business School makes a point of examining, in their program, how women can navigate the workforce in a savvy and family-friendly way. They know it’s a subject the students want to discuss. “These women, now twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, are saying ‘I have an MBA, and maybe it’s going to be a problem,’” says Wharton’s Monica McGrath.

Critical Mass

So what do you get when you have a workforce full of talented women who finally understand that what they want is to work differently, a substantial percentage of men who are starting to see they’d like the same thing, a much-in-demand younger generation that won’t be tied down, a looming talent shortage, and, most important, a staggering increase in the value of women in the marketplace? An explosive chain reaction. And what’s so remarkable about the process is that the change isn’t just coming in a slow wave, as savvy businesses start to open up their minds and company policies. It’s also coming in forceful ripples, as individual women everywhere—newly empowered and doggedly determined—negotiate for their New All. Every individual success and every act of confrontation chips away at the antiquated structure and adds to the momentum.

At the top end, there are victories like that of Brenda Barnes, the CEO of Sara Lee Corporation since 2004. Barnes quit her job as President and CEO of PepsiCo’s North America operation in 1998 to raise her three children. At the time she was wildly criticized for hardening the glass ceiling. Now, kids in college, she’s managed to become the nation’s most high-profile, high-achieving on-ramper.

“Today’s business world, where work can be done anywhere at any time, calls for a flexible environment that provides the opportunity for work-life balance,” Barnes explains. “This doesn’t mean employees work less; instead it means empowering employees to do their work on a schedule that works for them. So, if they want to work from their kitchen table at 3 A.M., as long as the work gets done, who cares when or where they are doing it? Companies need to recognize that this kind of flexibility offers employees the ability to manage and balance their own careers and lives, which in turn improves productivity and employee morale.”

And, by the way, Barnes is working hard to be sure others can have the opportunity for fulfillment that she had. Sara Lee offers a multitude of flexible work options, and Barnes has also launched a program called Returnships. It’s aimed at midcareer professionals who’ve been out of the workforce for a number of years, and offers them the chance to retool and retrain, with an eye toward a permanent, and probably flexible, job.

OK—maybe most of us aren’t going to be able to quit a CEO job and then get another, but the fact that it’s been done helps us all. And there are terrific, satisfying, and life-changing battles to be won that are well within reach. Robin Ehlers, now a sales rep for General Mills, works a full-time job based almost entirely out of her home, with only occasional travel. But negotiating this work life that works for her did not happen without a struggle. “After I moved down in status at Pillsbury, so that I could travel less and have a more manageable schedule, I was still working from the office,” she explains. “I was trying to get my office moved to home and there was no way my boss was going to let me, but to me it just didn’t make any sense in the world. I can remember kind of having a breakdown, and just thinking ‘I just have to be at home. I can’t waste the time on my commute when I could be with my new baby.’”

All of her work was by phone and computer with customers in other cities, and she felt she’d be equally, if not more, efficient at home. Her boss wanted everyone together, although “none of us even worked on the same team and we had plenty of opportunities to interact.”

Finally, thanks to Robin’s persistence—and a director who arrived and wanted her office space—her boss changed his mind. She got her deal, and when General Mills bought Pillsbury, managers saw no reason to change it. (Indeed, luckily for her, she’s now at a company that truly encourages flexible work arrangements. General Mills gets high marks from its female employees.) Robin’s negotiation, seemingly random and one-off, and the negotiations of millions of women like her, are having a collective impact by tearing down the old hierarchy brick by brick. But the savviest companies aren’t waiting for disgruntled women to do the work; they are trying to do the demolition themselves.

Creative, manageable work programs are taking root all around the country—even in once-inhospitable corporate climates. Here’s just a taste from the Family and Work Institute’s list of recent award winners—you’ll read about many more throughout the book.

• The Continental Airlines’ reservations department in Houston has managed to keep its annual turnover to 5 percent—in an industry that has a 40 percent turnover rate. How? They let six hundred reservations agents work from home, which the mayor also appreciates as he tries to battle traffic congestion. And a quarter of the staff gets an extra day off a week on a rotating basis.
• Kay/Bassman International, a recruiting firm in Plano, Texas, offers the opposite of standard benefits. Each employee simply asks for what they need—to be home with children in the afternoon; to work via laptop—and in almost every case, the request is granted. CEO Jeff Kayle says humane treatment gets productivity results back to him in spades.
• The KPMG accounting firm offers their staff work-compressed workweeks, flexible hours, telecommuting, job sharing, or even reduced workloads. And workaholics beware: the firm has implemented wellness scorecards to find out whether someone is working too hard, or missing vacation. If so, supervisors are in touch to urge a slowdown! Oh, and how about eight weeks of fully paid maternity leave, even for adoptive parents? And two-thirds pay if you need more time.
• Chapman and Cutler, a midsize law firm in Chicago, started a two-tier pay scale in September. Hard-chargers who bill 2000 hours a year are paid top dollar. For those who prefer to slow down and see their families and friends, they can bill 1800 hours and earn less. More than half of the associates chose the reduced schedule.

Companies everywhere are starting to retool; they have no choice. “The one-size-fits-all workplace doesn’t work,” explains Kathleen Christensen. “The idea that you will work full time year in and year out, that you will be on a career trajectory that is a straight line, is vanishing. Employees increasingly feel more entitled to say ‘I need and I want to work in a certain way.’”

A Win-Win

Here’s the bottom-line bonus about all of these changes. Bowing to our demands makes business sense not just because companies need to keep us, but also because we become more productive employees. The unintended consequence took Capitol One by surprise. “People in the workforce have specific needs, and if they feel like you’re going to work with them on those needs you can attract people and you can retain your best performers, which is probably the place we actually started thinking about this,” admits the company’s senior vice president Judy Pahren. “But then we found a much larger benefit. What we actually found is that it made people more productive. We discovered that this really helps productivity and job satisfaction at the same time.”

Across the Atlantic in Britain, the Cranfield Univeristy School of Management conducted a two-year study with seven blue chip firms, including KPMG, Microsoft, and Pfizer (no fuzzy firms these) to measure the business impact of allowing employees to work on alternative schedules: ⁴⁴

• The majority of flexible workers increased the productivity of their performance, both in terms of the quantity and the quality of their work.
• The majority of employees said they were less stressed with a schedule they could control and they were more productive.
• Employees working flexibly were found to be more committed and more satisfied.
• The alternative work schedules were found to make the companies more competitive.

It seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Employees who have the time to contribute to their communities, and who are heavily involved with their families, are actually better employees. We are indeed more committed and more productive and more loyal.

Certainly Geraldine Laybourne, who ran Nickelodeon and then the Oxygen network, didn’t need any studies to show her that. Over lunch in a corner office high above Manhattan’s East Side, she explained she was constantly experimenting with work practices, even decades ago, to encourage motivation, innovation, and loyalty.

“I had one guy in marketing who I thought was having trouble concentrating on big ideas. He was just coming in, spending terrible hours, and not producing,” she remembers. “I told him he had to stay home on Fridays. ‘You have to stay home and think. You cannot come in on Fridays!’” she told him, laughing. “So there were a lot of kooky things we did.”

And at Oxygen, years later, she could finally create with utter ease the environment that nurtured the handpicked female talent she thought was critical to the company’s success.

“We liked to hear about the kids. If you had to go to a play, you didn’t have to hide that.” She shrugs. “At one point at Oxygen we had twenty-four babies—twenty-four vice presidents out on maternity leave at the same time. And we had two senior vice presidents who were part time.”

You can probably think of a moment when you’ve been so well treated at work you were inspired to do even more.

 

KATTY I recently renegotiated my job at the BBC. A new boss arrived from an American network to shake up our evening news. The job I was offered was less prestigious than my previous job, and I was of two minds about whether to take it at all. I had a couple of other offers so was in the luxurious position of being able to walk away if I didn’t get the terms I needed. It’s fair to say I was a disgruntled employee! So I went into the meeting pretty militant; I would work flexibly or not at all. My specific condition was that if I wasn’t needed on air for that evening’s show, I wouldn’t go in to the office that day. I expected at the very minimum a mutter of resistance—but to my surprise, I didn’t even get a silent raised eyebrow. “That’s fine,” he said. And he kept to his word. No appearance on air, no appearance in the office. But here’s what’s interesting, and what I hadn’t really anticipated: it’s a freedom I am so grateful for that when I am needed I happily put in the extra effort. I win and the program wins.”

 

We’ve all heard those stories about women who sneak out of work in a blizzard to go to the school play but leave their coats hanging over their chair in the office so their boss won’t realize they’ve left the building. It’s tragic how pathetic the tyranny of the office can be. We slip out anyway, but we resent our employers for it. It is far better to allow people freedom, and win their gratitude, not their resentment.

The Power of One

You might be thinking: these are great statistics on women, fascinating new trends going on in the workplace, and inspiring examples of a whole lot of individual women who are making concrete changes. But how can I really benefit from all of that?

The demographics, trends, statistics, and stories certainly don’t amount to much if they remain unconnected to your life, your job, your level of day-to-day satisfaction.

Helping you make that connection is fundamental to Womenomics. And the first step, explains our former White House communications adviser, Christine Heenan, is to reexamine your priorities.

“I can say to myself I can wait until I’m 55 to try to learn piano,” she said. “I can’t say to my 8-year-old ‘Would you mind starting the first day of school again because I didn’t do it right the first time? I missed all of your games, so how about you be 8 again and I’ll come this time?’ It just doesn’t work that way.”

The rest of this book is devoted to helping you unearth your priorities, and then completely change your life at work and at home. You will have time, satisfaction, sanity. And as you make those changes and choices, know that you, as an individual woman, are contributing to a revolution that will carve out new possibilities—a New All—for all of us today, and for generations to come.

news you can use

1. You are not alone. Time is the new currency for all savvy women.
2. Even men want more of a life.
3. Watch your “youngers.” They won’t work any other way.
4. You may face a still rigid workplace, but you are on the right side of history.
5. Enlightened companies are already making work work better.
6. Balance makes you a better employee and human being.