Pressure to achieve work-life "balance" has recently become a significant part of the cultural fabric of working life in United States. A very few privileged employees tout their ability to find balance between their careers and the rest of their lives, but most employees face considerable organizational and economic constraints which hamper their ability to maintain a reasonable "balance" between paid work and other life aspects—and it is not only women who struggle. Increasingly men find it difficult to "do it all." Women have long noted the near impossibility of balancing multiple roles, but it is only recently that men have been encouraged to see themselves beyond their breadwinner selves. Gender Equality and Work-Life Balance describes the work-life practices of men in the United States. The purpose is to increase gender equality at work for all employees. With a focus on leave policy inequalities, this book argues that men experience a phenomenon called "the glass handcuffs," which prevents them from leaving work to participate fully in their families, homes, and other life events, highlighting the cultural, institutional, organizational, and occupational conditions which make gender equality in work-life policy usage difficult. This social justice book ultimately draws conclusions about how to minimize inequalities at work. Gender Equality and Work-Life Balance is unique as it laces together some theoretical concepts which have little previous association, including entrepreneurialism; leave policy, occupational identity, and the economic necessities of families. This book will therefore be of particular interest to researches and academics alike in the disciplines of Gender studies, Human Resource Management, Employment Relations, Sociology and Cultural Studies.

This book portrays men’s experiences of home alone leave and how it affects their lives and family gender roles in different policy contexts and explores how this unique parental leave design is implemented in these contrasting policy regimes. The book brings together three major theoretical strands: social policy, in particular the literature on comparative leave policy developments; family and gender studies, in particular the analysis of gendered divisions of work and care and recent shifts in parenting and work-family balance; critical studies of men and masculinities, with a specific focus on fathers and fathering in contemporary western societies and life-courses. Drawing on empirical data from in-depth interviews with fathers across eleven countries, the book shows that the experiences and social processes associated with fathers’ home alone leave involve a diversity of trends, revealing both innovations and absence of change, including pluralization as well as the constraining influence of policy, gender, and social context. As a theoretical and empirical book it raises important issues on modernization of the life course and the family in contemporary societies. The book will be of particular interest to scholars in comparing western societies and welfare states as well as to scholars seeking to understand changing work-life policies and family life in societies with different social and historical pathways.

Written about lawyers, but relevant to people in various professions, this book shows how individuals can act according to their personal qualities and attributes, rather than according to expectations based on gender. It prescribes several models to help firms and individuals achieve a workplace free of gender bias for both men and women.

Classic analysis of gender relations and patriarchy under capitalism Close to Home is the classic study of family, patriarchal ideologies, and the politics and strategy of women’s liberation. On the table in this forceful and provocative debate are questions of whether men can be feminists, whether “bourgeois” and heterosexual women are retrogressive members of the women’s movement, and how best to struggle against the multiple oppressions women endure. Rachel Hills’s foreword to this new edition explores how Christine Delphy’s analysis of marriage as the institution behind the exploitation of unpaid women’s labor is as radical and relevant today as it ever was.

A compendium of research studies from some of the most prominent researchers studying the dynamics of workplace flexibility in organizational psychology, sociology, and law. They explore gender inequality in access to and rewards/punishments from flexible work schedules, paid leave, and telecommuting.

Offers a lens for viewing the real struggles that business professionals - particularly women - face in their daily battle to find ways of 'getting a life' and 'having it all' based on a pioneering study that surveyed more than 800 business professionals.

Looks at the three main components of work-family policy packages - childcare services, flexible working patterns and entitlements to leave from work in order to care - across EU15 Member States, with comparative reference to the US. This work also provides an examination of developments in the UK.