Companies Need to Adopt Family-Friendly Policies

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Companies Need to Adopt Family-Friendly Policies

For the past 30 years, women have been under the gun to prove that they can be just like men in the workplace. Mainstream feminist groups believed this was the way to gain equality at work. Thus began mainstream feminists' support of abortion - eliminating pregnancy made women more like men. At the outset, this tactic appeared to work. Women proceeded to break down barriers and close in on equality. Business Week's Nov. 27, 2000, issue said that 45% of all managerial posts in the United States are held by women, and the World Bank's Development Indicators for 2000 show an average of female participation in the workforce of over 40%.

Yet women are by no means equally represented at all levels of the workplace - Carleton "Carly" Fiorina of Hewlett Packard is the only female CEO in Forbes magazine's list of top 100 companies - and issues like sexual harassment and gender discrimination are still real barriers to too many women at work.

Those who have a family feel they can be penalized even further. In a survey conducted as part of a Wall Street Journal study, 36% of respondents with children at home feared missing out on advancement while on maternity leave.

Mainstream feminist organizations thought these problems would be solved by abortion, but abortion doesn't help women who choose to have children.

"The workplace is still arranged, to a great degree, for workers who have no child-care responsibilities," says Serrin Foster, president of FFL. "Now, nearly three decades after Roe v. Wade, women are challenging the idea of abortion as the solution to inequality in the workplace, and instead asking for workplace conditions that don't force them to choose between...

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...e assistance when working from home. But it can be well worth the investment to maintain career skills and contacts and avoid falling too far behind in the traditional career track.

Parents say they want affordable child care, flexible work schedules, family-friendly tax reform, more leave time for both mothers and fathers and more part-time job options.

It remains to be seen whether the shift toward a family-friendly workplace for both men and women will continue, or if it has stalled with abortion as the "answer."

Even a century ago struggling employees facing the challenge of work and family often succumbed to the pressure through abortion. Emma Goldman wrote in Mother Earth in 1911, "So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies." Certainly in the new millennium we can do better.

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