WorkingMums.co.uk

Managers still putting in very long hours

Date: 12:55am, 20 Feb 2008

Managers work 40 extra days a year unpaid, according to new research.

But women managers are much less likely to work overtime than men, says a survey by the Chartered Management Institute.

It found that 16% of women managers worked over 48 hours a week, compared to 35% of men. And only 3% of women managers worked more than 60 hours a week compared to 7% of men. It is suggested that this is because women have greater family responsibilities and have to prioritise more.

The number of unpaid overtime hours worked by British managers has remained static over the past eight years despite an increasing emphasis on work/life balance.

The CMI said only one in three managers worked long hours by choice and most did it to keep up with work demands. It called for organisations to focus on the health impact of Britain’s long hours culture.

Conservatives outline policies to woo mothers

Mothers are being pressured to work by Government tax breaks for working mothers and the stripping away of tax breaks for those who choose to stay at home, according to the Conservatives.

Announcing a raft of plans designed to appeal to women voters, the Conservatives cited a report they commissioned, Women in the World Today, which said 41% of parents spent two hours or less with their children each day and only a third eat together regularly.

The Conservatives plan to help couples where one partner stays at home to look after children, for instance, by making childcare vouchers available to such couples. They say women who stay at home save the Government around £29,000 a year in services.

The Conservatives also plan to extend the right to request family friendly hours to parents of children under 18. The report by the Conservative Women’s Policy Group also proposes extending choice in childcare, saying that the Government has focused only on funding state-run nurseries. The Conservatives are also working on plans to recognise informal childcare provided by grandparents and others.Read more

Mothers should not be forced into work, says report

Mothers should not be forced back to work and should get more support from Government, says new research.Men should also be encouraged to take a greater role in childcare, according to the research by the Institute of Education. The report, by Dr Carol Vincent, says mothers are often pulled between being a good worker and a good mother. She also called for the Government to make it easier for women to take on part-time jobs.Read more

Career Comeback programme launched for working mums

Investment bank UBS is launching a new programme to lure high-flyers who have taken time out to have children back into the workplace.Next month it brings its Career Comeback programme to London. The course, run in conjunction with London School of Economics Executive Education, updates women on issues as finance, marketing and technology and is already being run in Australia, Hong Kong and the US. The company says it trains its managers to be able to manage flexible working requests and adds that 80% of participants who have already taken the course want flexible working. Read more

Government 'must promote more quality flexible work'

The Government must do more to promote quality part-time work in order to tackle the gender pay gap, according to a select committee.

The Business and Enterprise Select Committee wants to see mandatory pay audits of companies to tackle the gap which is around 17% for full time workers and 40% for part-time workers.

It also called on the Government to invest more in measures to tackle the lack of good quality part-time work and to extend flexible working rights to all employees.

The CBI, however, has recently said that proposals to extend the right to flexible working for all parents of children under 18 – which are currently out for consultation – were “out of the question for now”. It says it would consider the right being staged – at parents of children somewhere between the ages of 12 and 16 - to cope with demand.

Accept that women work differently, says book

Employers need to work with “female differences in terms of aspirations, vocabulary, attitudes and priorities”, according to a new book.

The book Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of our next Economic Revolution by management consultant and executive coach Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland, a former Financial Times journalist, argues that equal opportunities and diversity policies are very much 20^th century ideas and have not helped women climb the career ladder.

Instead companies need to let women decide how best to work.

It cites examples such as Vivienne Cox, BP’s head of gas, power and renewables, who refused a promotion because she didn’t want to work unsociable hours after she had her first child. Her refusal was rejected and she was promoted and told to do the job in a way that suited her priorities. She is now one of Europe’s leading businesswomen.

The authors say public policy on childcare, parental leave and pay equality are key areas which affect women’s career progression, but they add that women’s lack of assertion can also hold them back, for instance, they say that men work 80% of the time and spend the other 20% selling how well they are doing while women expect their work to speak for itself.