Brave new Work : Professional Women With Families Negotiate Alternatives to Full-Time Grind

Gay Geiser-Sandoval thrived on her stimulating job as an attorney, but full-time work cut too deeply into her family time. She found a partner and they shared a job.

Pamela Penny, pregnant with her first child, quit her job as a social worker and looked for a way to fit work in around her family. She started her own business.

Wendy Malecki knew when she had her second child that she could not keep working full-time as a university staff photographer. She became a free-lancer.

Stephanie Smith was prepared to step off her law firm’s partnership track to have more time for her children. The firm made her a part-time partner.

One dilemma, four solutions.

These women are typical of a growing number of professional women who are carving out career niches to complement rather than conflict with their family priorities. They evince a change in career thinking that experts say could well become the work-force issue of the ‘90s.

Statistical Story

Last year, women made up about 45% of the “managerial and professional” work force, yet accounted for 71% of the part-time jobs in that sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But such statistics only tell part of the story. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many professional women individually negotiated their part-time arrangements with their employers, without benefit of formal company sanction, says Kathleen Christensen, an authority on the changing nature of the workplace.

Christensen, a professor of environmental psychology at The Graduate School, City University of New York, designed and directed a soon-to-be-released national study on flexible work alternatives for the Conference Board, a New York management research company, and New Ways to Work, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that studies the work force.

In the survey, large companies were asked what flexible work arrangements they offered. Christensen found that part-time work is being made available mostly to workers in clerical and administrative support jobs, “despite the interest of professionals.”

Of the professional women who have hammered out part-time work schedules, Christensen says: “These are women with a proven track record, who are valuable to their companies.”

Stephanie Smith is one of them.

An attorney and the wife of an attorney, Smith was an associate on the partnership track at Jackson, Tufts, Cole and Black in San Francisco. By the time her first son was 18 months old, it had become clear the couple’s full-time jobs were sapping too much of their family time.

It was rush to the sitter in the morning, rush through the demanding workday, rush home in time to pick up the baby.

“The pressures of meeting client demands and getting other things done in our lives meant life was exceedingly hectic,” says Smith, 36. She and husband Ted Radosevich proposed to their firms that each would work 80% time--a four-day week, with different days off--as an experiment for six months, and both firms agreed. At the end of that time, Smith and Radosevich went back full-time, but she remained ambivalent.

“I view myself as hard driven, I’m competitive, I want to do the best work,” she says. “Back in the days when I was in college, no one told you you couldn’t do that and have a family too.”

Eventually, with plans to have a second child, she told her firm she would be leaving. What, two of the partners asked, would be her ideal job if she were to stay?

Three days a week, she replied, working with management and policy issues. As it happened, that meshed with the firm’s needs, and the firm offered to create a part-time job for her, putting her in charge of hiring and training associates, traveling to recruit and working on management issues with the managing partner. She accepted.

Pleasing Results

“I guess they decided I was worth trying to retain,” she says.

“It is working out beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, largely due to the fact that Stephanie is truly an extraordinary individual,” confirms John Siamas, a partner in the firm who helped Smith develop her part-time arrangement. Several other attorneys have followed her lead and cut back their work hours to have more time to spend with their children, Siamas says.

As for Smith, while she was on maternity leave after the birth of her second son, the firm made her a partner.

What is prompting companies to accommodate the newly voiced emphasis on family needs is the “change in labor-force demographics,” says Barney Olmsted, founder of New Ways to Work. Olmsted has witnessed a growing recognition of workers’ needs to balance work and family, a recognition that the two-income household is the norm and that most women need to help support their families.

Ultimately, she says, the bottom line is the bottom line.

Where in the past “cost” meant wages and benefits, firms are increasingly counting in dollars the costs of turnover, absenteeism, recruitment and down time when employees are absent or over-stressed by family and work concerns, she says.

“They are finding that voluntary part-time work can be an attractive option,” and can help a company hold on to good employees and attract better applicants. Giving employees the option of voluntarily cutting back also can let a firm expand and contract the number of paid hours to cope with business peaks and valleys without laying off valuable trained workers, she says.

Flexitime Pioneer

Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto was among the first firms to do this, introducing in the mid-’70s “work sharing,” a cutback in paid hours for an entire division during lean times. Hewlett-Packard was also a pioneer of “flexitime,” and in January it set up a “flex force” that operates as an in-house temporary pool.

Two main obstacles, Christensen says, stand in the way of wide implementation of flexible work options: corporate culture and management philosophy, and some firms’ requirements for a given head count.

“American managers don’t know how to manage people being there part time, or being invisible in the office (if they work from home), or people sharing work,” she says.

Gay Geiser-Sandoval anticipated this when she and a partner proposed sharing a job as a deputy district attorney in Orange County.

Now 37 and a mother of two, Geiser-Sandoval had tried staying home full time for a year after her first daughter was born and found it was not for her. But being at work full time did not work either. Though she tried to snatch bits of “quality time” with her child at the end of each day, the quality never turned out to be very good: By the time they saw each other, both were tired and crabby. Geiser-Sandoval wanted time for her family, but she knew she needed the challenge, the fulfillment of her job in the district attorney’s office.

Persuasive Approach

Fortunately for her, she was not alone. She and another mother in the office decided to take a crack at job sharing in 1982.

Being lawyers, they were able to write a persuasive proposal that emphasized the benefits to the district attorney’s office. They worked out the details of splitting up the workload and the benefits, and they agreed to cover for each other when one had to take any time off.

“We tried to look at (job sharing) in ways that someone other than a mother could use it,” perhaps as an alternative to taking a sabbatical or a way to ease into retirement, she says.

They noted that they wouldn’t have to take extra days off for personal appointments. “We would be on the job site more than a full-time person. We also mentioned the ability to cover for each other on vacations.” They offered to fill in full time temporarily if the office needed them. They pointed to the reduced danger of burnout, and the strong commitment to family that many employees feel.

“Another thing we did that I would suggest is we proposed it as a pilot program,” Geiser-Sandoval says. “We said we’d try it for six months or a year.” They gathered endorsements from judges and got their immediate supervisor to agree to oversee a shared position in the consumer-fraud unit.

Supervisory Approval

“It works out outstandingly,” says Brent Romney, head of the office’s fraud division and Geiser-Sandoval’s supervisor. “I’m sure they put in more time than a full-time attorney.” One reason a job can be successfully shared in the consumer-fraud office, he says, is that the unit’s civil litigation involves less court time than criminal prosecutions would. “Our experience with it has been very good.”

Geiser-Sandoval’s original partner eventually had another child and left the district attorney’s office. But the arrangement had worked so well that Geiser-Sandoval is now sharing her job with another partner.

Linda Marks, a San Francisco career counselor who specializes in helping people negotiate flexible work arrangements, says Geiser-Sandoval made all the right moves. Spelling out the benefits to the employer is critical in gaining acceptance for a shared job, she says.

In addition, Marks suggests that women who want to turn a full-time job into a part-time one consider restructuring the job so that simple or routine tasks can be delegated to a lower-paid assistant.

She advises: “Don’t apologize for wanting to work part time. Be positive about your presentation. If you’re not positive about it, employers will already be looking for reasons to turn it down. Give them reasons to accept it.”

Some women must leave their jobs altogether to find family-compatible work. Consider Pamela Penny.

When Penny was casting about for a new way to work, she had different priorities than did Geiser-Sandoval and Smith. Where the two attorneys were willing to put in extra hours on the job even if it meant taking time away from their families, Penny was determined to put her own limits on her working hours. If that meant turning down jobs--and income--so be it.

She left her full-time job as a Los Angeles County social worker in 1979. She was expecting her first child, and she believed that she had advanced as far as she could in that office. Not sure what her professional future would be, she took a class in typesetting. The class led to a part-time job, which in turn led her to invest $30,000 in her own equipment and open a phototypesetting business in her home.

Four-Day Week

Penny, 41, now works four days a week, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Outside those hours, she flips on her phone answering machine.

“It’s just worked out great,” she says. “I choose to gear down my work, because there are those trade-offs. If I tried to work more, something would have to give, and that would be my family. But my family is my priority.”

Her hourly income now is about half again what she was paid by the county, Penny says. And though she could easily earn more by working more, she choses to turn down jobs.

“The money is nice,” she says, “but I can walk away from it. If I overwork myself, I’m no good to my family or to myself. . . . I go over my job list every six months or so and get rid of the clients who are more trouble than they are worth.”

Photographic Challenge

Photographer Wendy Rosin Malecki faces a different challenge: Now that she is free-lancing, jobs are not as plentiful or as interesting as she would like.

Before her second daughter--now 1 1/2--was born, Malecki worked full time at USC shooting photos for the faculty newspaper, for the alumni magazine and to accompany university press releases.

She ached for the special moments she had missed in her older daughter’s first years, and fretted at the thought of missing them with the younger girl.

“I felt pretty stressed out toward the end of my job at USC, trying to figure out how I could do that and raise children,” she says. “When Sarah (the older girl, who has asthma) would get sick, it was up to me to take care of her. Although my husband was willing to do that, he was not getting any support from his company.”

So Malecki made the break, confident that she could use her contacts at the university to get free-lance work--and it has worked out pretty much as she expected. She now works no more than 20 hours a week, “just enough” to supplement the household income without letting work eat up her family time.

But the decision was wrenching.

“I look in the paper every week, and you can’t find staff photographer jobs,” 39-year-old Malecki says. “I knew I was giving up a career, not just a job. I knew that I would either have to free-lance or (eventually) find a new career.”

Unacceptable Option

Dropping out of the work force altogether was never an option for Malecki. As it is, the family struggles to make ends meet.

“As a free-lancer, you do a lot of work and you sit and wait for people to pay their bills,” she says. “And it doesn’t come in fast enough.

“We do without a lot of things we used to have, like new clothing, going out to restaurants. . . . The last vacation we took was when I was six months pregnant; that was two summers ago. If I still had my job, I’d buy a new car. We’re just hoping the car will last another year. . . .

“I’d prefer to have a little more choice, but on the other hand, we would miss being with our children.”

Some big employers are starting to realize that valued employees like Penny and Malecki can vanish from their payrolls, says Christensen, the director of the Conference Board/New Ways to Work survey.

“There is a real groundswell of interest among companies,” and many are investigating flexible work alternatives, but “as of yet” few have implemented such options, she says.

Among those that have is Corning Inc. in Corning, New York.

That firm “developed a corporate culture that has recognized the needs of their employees, and that is responsive to the work/family needs of employees,” Christensen says. For example, the firm has begun a career development counseling program for women who are high performers to “ensure that their life cycle needs are met and that the firm doesn’t lose them.”

Options From IBM

And IBM Corp. last October announced a range of flexible work options aimed at holding on to employees, including extended unpaid leave for up to three years with full benefits and a job guarantee and home-based work for employees on personal leave who cannot come into the office (such as those who are caring for an ill parent).

“(Corporate executives) are resistant but cognizant of the fact that, given potential shortages of valuable skilled employees, it is in their interest to consider part-time options,” says Christensen. “Overall, their attitude is pragmatic.

“They are not doing this for altruistic reasons. They’re doing it for bottom line reasons.”

Along their different paths, Smith, Geiser-Sandoval, Penny and Malecki have grappled with different problems.

For Smith, the San Francisco lawyer, working part time has meant that work sometimes comes home with her from the office. Geiser-Sandoval occasionally worries that other attorneys view her as being less than committed to her work.

Penny has found that being her own boss means she cannot simply walk away from a project or let someone else handle the tedious paper work of running a business. Malecki misses the social and professional contacts she had at USC.

All are aware that, for the time being, their tracks are not particularly fast ones. All are looking ahead to a time when they will go back to a career full time. All say they have no regrets.

“I wondered,” recalls Smith, “how would I hold up my half of the mortgage payment? . . .

“But I decided you don’t plan the rest of your life. Things are going to be changing and you just can’t predict what will happen.”