Work/Life Balance Is Everyone's Issue

Pity the poor Wall Street investment banks. After decades of a human resource management strategy best summarized by Hollywood character Gordon Gekko -- "Greed is good!" -- the banks now find it harder to attract the best candidates and retain their most promising employees.

Highlighting this problem is an excellent story from Sunday's New York Times: "Wall Street's Women Face a Fork in the Road" (log in required), which goes into great anecdotal detail about work/life balance issues facing women working in the high-pressure world of international finance and the trade-offs they feel forced to make. What struck me while reading the piece was how often this topic is framed in terms of gender bias.

At the risk of putting my foot deep into the quicksand of gender politics, I don't think that's the case here. Employer gender bias is not the problem. It's a diversity issue. This employer behavior excludes not just women trying to balance work and family roles, but also older workers and employees from different cultures and traditions. No less than Lehman Brothers president Joe Gregory is quoted in the story: "You can't build a great company without great people, and great people are not just white, straight men aged 25 to 40."

When employers don't recognize that inflexible and too-demanding work environments are forcing out desirable employees and turning their replacements away at the door, everybody suffers. Not just women, but men, older workers and multicultural candidates of all varieties. And we're not just talking about the high stakes, Master of the Universe finance world satirized in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, either. Even in industries that have long had a somewhat more diverse and gender-balanced playing field -- the advertising, marketing, publishing and media worlds where I've spent my career, for example -- employer pressures are similar.

I'm guilty of not raising more Cain about this issue with past employers. Like so many men, I would knuckle under when employers expect 60- to 80-hour work weeks in exchange for promised riches. Happily, women are more outspoken in demanding a better deal for themselves in the face of extreme employer expectations.

So here's my modest suggestion: Let's all work a little harder to make sure this debate about better work/life balance is less gender-specific and more inclusive. More diverse. We all deserve it.

To learn more about work/life balance issues and what you can do, try these articles:

• "Negotiate a Flexible Schedule"
• "Reverse Workplace Depression"
• "What Older Workers Want from Work"
• "When Work No Longer Works" (Monster Podcast)
• "Working Fathers' Quest for Balance"

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