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Motherly love: 'Species regeneration. We all want that.'


Not all justice is blind: Advocates of a "family friendly" workplace envision a Mother's Day on which corporate America helps employees hit that perfect balance. But Francine Moccio and her Institute for Women and Work say the companies won't do it until the government makes them.

The search for how to have it all

By Porter Anderson
CNN Career

(CNN) -- Once upon a time, the debate was male-female. The country's young men were offshore, fighting. It was the middle of the last century. The war effort needed hands. American women, many of them moms, left their kitchens, rolled up their sleeves and bravely punched the time clocks of a nation.

But Francine Moccio believes that today, with some 70 percent of women in the United States working outside the home -- and the dual-earner family as common as the two-car garage -- a lot of companies haven't realized that things have changed.

"Women aren't going home again, you know." Moccio is director of Cornell University's Institute for Women and Work in New York City.

"Women aren't in the work force now as Rosie the Riveter was in World War II," she said. "That was a crisis situation. The conventional wisdom was that the women would go home after the war -- the firms didn't have to change to accommodate women workers long-term. Now they do."

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And Moccio's focus -- as she leads a four-year work-issues program funded by the Ford Foundation -- isn't just on working women.

"Family-friendly" is the adjective Moccio and her associates use to describe the career context they want to see brought about in the United States and abroad. Some components of that family-friendly workplace are:

• Child care

• Flexible scheduling for working parents

• Part-time work with prorated pay

• Telecommuting options

• At least partial payment for family leave (maternity, paternity)

• A "high trust" relationship between management and staff

What may surprise you is who's on the spot. Moccio and company are aiming less at the corporate community than at government.

Moccio, author and feminist Betty Friedan and others have set their sights on public policy. Their basic premise: There's a crucial need for more corporate social responsibility in supporting mothers, fathers, families -- and the way to bring that responsibility about is through labor-law initiatives, legislative advocacy. This could be the birth of a new lobby.

'Changing the mindset'

To study what various governments are doing now, Moccio and Friedan convened an international conference in Bellagio, Italy, in January.

"On returning from the conference," said Moccio, "we were confirmed in our observation that there's a tremendous cultural lag in the United States. It's as if companies are still waiting for those women to go back home."

"In Europe," explained Moccio, "what we see is EU governments trying to help the process. Institutions always lag behind advances in technology and even in the law.

"Even Australia -- which at one point was renowned for a lack of family-friendly policy -- has passed something called a 'workplace relations' act, trying to build in some kind of motivation. It's a little soft, not strictly enforceable, but they're signaling to firms that this is a societal issue."


Francine Moccio

Moccio's program is titled "The New Paradigm Project: Women, Men, Work, Family and Public Policy." By the end of June, the project is expected to have produced a "quality of life index" that can be used to evaluate the conditions of various workplaces in terms of family friendliness.

The index will rate various countries' work environments for family friendliness -- and the concentration of data brought into the index will help define what's been tried by various governments, with how much effect. In Europe, for example, a major issue is the aging work force. In the United States, we talk of the multi-aged employee base -- Baby Boomers and Gen-X and Gen-Y workers trying to be productive together.

The development of the index is to be followed by an effort to work with legislators on prototypic initiatives. Moccio said the project's initial efforts will be to affect public policy in New York state. But in terms of national political forces, she hopes Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer can be of help.

"We do want to start on the state level first. We want to develop some model legislative practices. We want to bring in the unions, for example, because we think that union participation probably increases the likelihood that family-friendly practices are in place.

"Unions have done part-time work with prorated full-time pay -- they've even been dealing now with telecommuting. Unions have been instrumental in instituting good practices before they were fashionable, through collective bargaining. So this is the kind of thing we're looking at.

"What would it cost," Moccio asked, "for companies to set up a counseling or referral service for employees in what's called the 'sandwich generation?' -- those are the people who are raising children and taking care of elderly parents. I mean, maybe there's a choice about having kids. But everybody has parents.

"This isn't just for women, either. We need to look at how we're going to convince employers that some aspects of hours-flexibility for employees are absolutely necessary. How do we persuade an employer that the investment in some kind of child-care provision will ultimately pay off in terms of retaining skilled workers, boosting employee loyalty and resulting in a non-stressed employee who really is more productive?"

'Satisfaction of life'

That productivity question may hold new interest for managers studying the Labor Department's Tuesday announcement that U.S. workers were less productive in the first quarter of this year -- for the first time since 1995.

"There needs to be bolder thinking," said Friedan in January, prior to the Bellagio conference, "bolder thinking on how to measure the quality of life of men and women in the work force. Currently, success is measured by material advancements. We need to readjust the definition of success to account for time outside of work and satisfaction of life, not just the dollars-and cents bottom line."


Betty Friedan

"Look," said Moccio, "what we want to do with this quality of life index is compare where we are in the States with where they are in Europe on these issues. In Europe, we see more governmental encouragement for women going into the work force -- despite a stronger tradition there of women's place being in the home.

"We know that in the United States, government can't dictate to private firms what they'll do -- but they can go a long way, as in Australia, toward putting a stamp of approval on private industry moving in this direction. Build in some rewards. Maybe some subsidies.

"Possibly we should look at the school cycle," she added, as another area of interest that might show up in results of the coming index's responses. "Why in 2001 are our schools still running on an agrarian society's timetable?

"And what about the rank-and-file worker? If we focus on the corner office, we miss getting an accurate picture of our concerns across income brackets and racial considerations."

So Moccio is coming for you, Mom.

This summer, she and the institute plan to float its quality-of-life index -- and will ask for input from everyone in the field.

"Not since the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 have we looked for ways to supplement people for reproducing the species," said Moccio. "We can rely on immigration, it has its merits -- but what we're really talking about is producing the next generation of workers.

"You'd think employers would be with us, wouldn't you? Species regeneration. We all want that."