Female bosses carry child care burden — survey

Hertz thinks that workplaces will develop more flexible policies for working parents only if men start taking on even more child care responsibilities.

Still, she notes that being more accommodating to working parents brings up other thorny issues, if single or childless workers then complain that they are being unfairly burdened with more difficult shifts or tasks.

Others say there is plenty of evidence that employers are becoming more understanding of the need to balance work duties with home responsibilities.

Patricia Lee Smith, executive director of strategic marketing for The Seattle Times’ new media group, counts herself among the lucky ones. The parent of a 4-year-old and 7-year-old, she says her employer understands when she needs to pick up a child early or take a child to a class.

“It’s not an embarrassment to say my son is sick and I need to go home,” she said.

Smith, who directly oversees about 15 employees, also relies on her husband for some child care duties, and has worked out some unusual solutions. During a recent snowstorm, for example, several employees were forced to bring their kids in to the office. Smith played videos in her office to entertain them.

Smith thinks her own experience balancing work and family has influenced how she manages her employees who have children. While she still has very high standards for parents, she said she’s not judging them by whether they are at their desk for exactly 40 hours each week.

“Before I had children, I had a different value system about work,” she said. “I didn’t see the world the way I see it now in terms of where work fits relative to family, and relative to life.”

Experts say employers are especially likely to accommodate working parents when they are in executive positions or work in industries where it is tough to recruit qualified workers.

Annie Stevens’ company, Boston-based ClearRock Inc., provides executive coaching to high-level executives, doctors and others. She said many of her clients find that their employers will, in fact, go out of their way to accommodate family schedules and unexpected emergencies in order to ensure that the employee will stay loyal to the organization.

She said more men are taking advantage of that, too. For example, an executive she works with at a large company recently canceled an important trip because his daughter had a dental problem and his wife was ill.

Still, Stevens concedes that she doesn’t know whether such accommodation is trickling down from the corner offices to the hourly workers.

And, she said, many of her most successful clients — both men and women — have found that the best way to balance high-pressure work environments with the unpredictable nature of parenting is to have one parent get out of the rat race all together.

“For most of the people I work with, it’s optimum for them to have at least one parent at home,” she said.

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