Challenges for Women Leaders

If women are going to achieve balance in their lives and be able to have a career and a meaningful life outside of work, they will only achieve it with the good support around them, especially that of their partners. (I’m not even going to try and talk about those extraordinary superwomen called sole parents for whom my admiration has no bounds!) Many men are changing quite considerably around these issues. They are reassessing whether work is the be-all and end-all of everything. They have often learnt it the hard way after a relationship break-up because in the greatest majority of break-ups it is the woman who leaves. She leaves because her needs weren’t given sufficient weight in the relationship. There are also many young men today who saw their baby boomer fathers make absolute commitments to their jobs only to be retrenched in the later part of their lives by the companies to whom they had given their all. They have learnt from that – work isn’t everything. These men are much more team players with their women. They understand they are in a partnership and want to work on the work/family balance challenge together, taking their individual and respective needs into consideration.

There are, however, still men around with a 1950s masculinity, They are “happy” for their women to work if they can manage it around all their other commitments at home! They expect their working wives to do everything that their stay-at-home mothers did. They expect to have, outside of work, the freedom that their fathers had to do whatever they wanted to do – “because they’ve worked hard all week”. Their work is real work. They are the breadwinners. The work their women do is not real. It provides grocery money or school shoe money. When their women get overwhelmed by the responsibility of looking after everyone and everything, these men offer no support except to tell their wives that they will have to leave their job if they can’t cope.

Many women do because relationships are important to women. But there are other ways around this. We have to learn how to have those important conversations with our men about teamwork, partnerships and helping one another achieve our respective dreams.

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