Table Of ContentFemale Ambition
Female Ambition
How to Reconcile Work and Family
Nuria Chinchilla
and
Consuelo León
palgrave
macmillan
© Nuria Chinchilla and Consuelo León 2005
Foreword © Lotte Bailyn 2005
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-9178-2
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First published 2005 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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ISBN 978-1-349-54326-7 ISBN 978-0-230-50891-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230508910
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chinchilla Albiol, Ma. Nuria (María Nuria)
[Ambición femenia. English]
Female ambition:how to reconcile work and family/by Nuria Chinchilla
and Consuelo León.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-349-54326-7 (cloth)
1. Work and family. 2. Working mothers. 3. Women in the
professions. I. León, Consuelo. II. Title.
HD4904.25.C4613 2005
331.4′4—dc22 2005049815
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
To you, women, who struggle to be an agent of change
To you, men, who believe in women and share this ambition
Contents
List of Tables ix
Foreword by Lotte Bailyn xi
Preface xiii
Introduction 1
An agreement between two 3
Companies: a change of mentality 4
1 Being a Woman in the Twenty-first Century 7
The history of women and feminism 7
Men and women: personal complementariness 11
The family today 14
Women, work and family: a triangle in constant evolution 18
2 The Family: Current Situation and Legal Framework 25
New times: things have changed 27
The legal framework: aid, state policies and legislation 30
Some developments towards flexibility in Europe 38
Types of countries in terms of aid 39
3 Women: Agents of Change? 50
What gets in the way of female ambition? 53
The glass ceiling 66
...and the cement ceiling 69
Female values: more humane companies? 73
4 Work and Family: Can They be Reconciled? 79
A life trajectory with a professional career 79
Dual-income couples: problems and perspectives 80
vii
viii Contents
The family as a resource or problem 83
The family: a school of competencies 87
Work–family conflicts: who is responsible? 90
Talking with the stakeholders 95
5 Family-responsible Companies 107
Pro-family values, programmes and policies 108
The measures, one by one: case studies and solutions 111
Towards a family-responsible company (FRC) 121
6 The Secret of Personal Leadership 128
Emotional intelligence 131
Wanting is being able 132
Motivational conflicts and learning 134
Affective maturity 137
Success and personal life 139
The success of women and the family 142
7 Managing Personal, Family and Professional Time:
How to Accomplish Everything 145
Time thieves 145
How to avoid overloading and stress 150
The personal mission 154
Learning to ‘make a family’ 159
Activity and reflection 161
How to make our time at work more profitable 163
Notes 169
Index 176
List of Tables
1.1 Characteristics of three historical stages concerning
the organization of work 16
2.1 Four models of family policies 40
2.2 The current situation in Spain 41
4.1 Balance between family and professional life 94
5.1 Four different types of company and their
effect on human ecology 123
5.2 The family-responsible business model 125
6.1 Four types of people and life situations 141
7.1 The seven habits of highly effective people 157
ix
Foreword
In a world where both the nature of work and the character of the
work force are rapidly changing, points of tension are likely to arise.
Among the key ones are the tensions between work and family and
between men’s and women’s roles. These tensions are poignantly
described in this book. Their effects are exacerbated in Spain, where
temporal norms create overlong work days interrupted by long,
food-laden lunch breaks. They show up in low birth rates, failures of
children in school, a high divorce rate, and low productivity.
Though the descriptions in this book come from Spanish managers,
the issues discussed transcend nationality. Indeed, they occur, though
in somewhat different form, in the whole industrialized world. Business
is becoming more competitive, more global. Everywhere people are
being asked to do more; workloads, particularly of managers, are
increasing. And, for both psychological and economic reasons, more
and more women are entering the work force. We are left, therefore,
with significant deficits in care, and run the risk of not socializing
the youngest generation to the responsibilities they will have to
undertake as they reach maturity. It is this dilemma, this warning
about the future, that is detailed in this book.
The model being used is ‘female ambition’ – an ambition geared to
success in all facets of life, not just in the occupational world. It is
based on a notion of complementarities between men and women
and among work, family, community and self. It recognizes that
there are skills learned in the family that could significantly enhance
business in today’s world, that time for reflection is critical for
creativity and to prevent burnout, and that current work practices
make it difficult to enact these truths. Based on existing literature,
the words of scholars throughout the ages, as well as on the con-
crete experiences of a group of managers, this book paints a moving
picture of both the difficulties and the possibilities of leading
harmonious lives.
Government and community obviously play a role – in support of
care most immediately, but also in a more general assessment of
mismatches, such as reconciling school hours with work hours. Our
xi
xii Foreword
school calendar is still based on an agrarian model, even as the work
has moved to an industrial and post-industrial base.
Employers, too, must become aware of the advantages to them of
having employees whose lives encompass more than their employment –
who can bring interpersonal skills, reflective creativity and energy to
their employment. Female Ambition outlines a telling set of indicators
that should alert employers and employees to problems: for example,
talking only about work at company social events, having too many
meetings, expecting continuous accessibility, realizing that going to
the movies or the theatre is an exceptional event. Every company
and every worker could usefully inspect this list and ponder their
own situations.
All of this is important, but difficult for any individual to control.
So in the end the emphasis is on personal leadership. We need to
take control of our lives, develop interpersonal intelligence, and use
the freedoms we have to be proactive about our situations. We need
to remember that human needs span the material, the cognitive and
the affective worlds. We need to be mature in all and not emphasize
one to the neglect of the others. Only then can subjective success be
achieved, and that is what determines life satisfaction – more than
any external markers of fame. We all know stories of people seemingly
extremely successful who are never satisfied and deeply unhappy.
This is the message that comes through this book. It comes in
multiple forms: in the language of values and received thought, and
in very practical terms of how to deal with life on a day-to-day basis.
Keep a diary! But include in it not only personal affairs, and not only
work details, but both – in the same diary. It is this complement-
ariness that is the essence of female ambition, and it applies to
men as well as women. It provides the basis for a successful life and a
successful society.
LOTTE BAILYN
T. Wilson Professor of Management
Co-Director, MIT Workplace Center
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA
