Why has women’s professional advancement stalled? A widely accepted
explanation is that women’s family obligations conflict with long hours
of jobs, hampering their advancement into senior organizational
positions. The commonly championed solution has been policies offering
flexible work arrangements designed to mitigate such conflict. Yet
research shows that men, too, experience work-family conflict. Moreover,
work-family policies do little to help women or men’s workplace
advancement, and in fact, often hurt them. In this presentation, Ely
draws from her in depth case study of a global professional service firm
to ask why the belief that work-family conflict lies at the heart of
women’s stalled advancement persists. She explores how this popular
narrative self-perpetuates despite evidence to the contrary, and how
organizations use this narrative as an explanation for women's blocked
mobility partly because it diverts attention from the broader problem of
a long-hours work culture among professionals. Speaker: Robin Ely, Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean, Harvard Business School