At the recent EURAM conference, a paper by Jennifer Tomlinson and Susan Durbin from the UK really resonated with us. The paper "Female Part Time Managers: work life balance and careers" presented research exploring the transition to part-time work of a group of female managers in the UK and the impact of this career decision on mobility, future career aspirations and work-life balance. The paper commented that part-time work is commonly requested - with 49% of working women seeking a permanent or temporary reduction in hours at some point in their career. However, women working in part-time managerial roles is very uncommon. In the UK, it sits at ~ 4% of women working part-time.
Part-time work at a managerial level enables women to continue to occupy challenging, high-status and well paid roles. However, the study highlighted a number of challenges for the women working in part-time managerial roles:
- a reduction in hours is accompanied by the perception and acceptance that career prospects are put on hold;
- women working in part-time managerial roles feel that they are overlooked for role and promotions despite having the experience and qualifications for the job;
- persistant negative perceptions of part-time workers exist, despite the women in the study being productive and highly focused at work and frequently working on excess of their contracted hours for no extra pay.
Some connected issues are emerging in some research currently in progress by our group at the Maureen Bickley Centre on women engineers and their journey to management. Feelings of frustration, of invisibility and of being discounted are experienced by highly talented and practiced women managers who shift to part-time work, often following the arrival of children. These feeling are exacerbated by company policy that, for example, does not offer management roles on less than four days per week, a culture of long hours and presenteeism that creates a sense of needing to be in the office for 50 hours a week to do the job and a lack of creativity in job design of management roles that discounts job share or formation of alternative look management teams. This results in part-time managerial roles being difficult to obtain and to sustain.
It is disappointing that organizations retain the inflexible mind-set of manager = fulltime / long hours. The number of women in part-time management roles and the feelings experiences by women seeking and occupying these positions indicate that organisations are severely limiting their choice of managerial candidates by not offering sustainable, well designed part-time management roles. What are your thoughts? Is your organization innovative in the design of roles at management level? Do you have examples of part-time or flexible contract managers that are successfully operating in companies?
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