Stresses and Successes

Abstract

This chapter explores the events and outcomes after a year of combining motherhood and professional work using part-time and flexible work arrangements for the 30 women interviewed in this study. None of the women were unequivocal about the benefits or otherwise of using flexible work arrangements as a work–life reconciliation strategy. A near universal experience was that the working pattern the women had embarked upon when they were first interviewed was not the pattern they were working a year later. All but 4 of 30 women had made further adjustments to the time, timing, or location of their paid work. What women identify as the drivers of those further adjustments reveals much about the level of support for flexible work arrangements in important jobs at the pivotal stage in careers when women's progress to the top of large organisations slows down.