The Momforce

It's easy to forget that all of us who are lucky enough to take advantage of flex-time, part-time, job-share, and work-from-home might have not had that choice not very long ago.  I was at a little get-together last weekend with a bunch of my old friends from my TV news days and we were trying to remember who the working moms in the newsroom were in the early to mid-80's.  We could only come up with two, and one of them was actually a freelance reporter.  Fast forward to today, when one of those same friends manages an international television news network's operation right from home.  Have Blackberry - will stay put? Sure, sometimes her days can last extra long when she has to talk to people in Beijing, Paris, Dubai and New York, but she can also go pick up her daughter at school every day.

TV News is full of "on-scene" jobs from producing news shows, to dispatching reporters, to anchoring and reporting.  But the number of working families that are part of it now has really multiplied.  A lot of it is due to technology, but it's also a change in attitude.  When I think back to 1988, I had a job-share with another producer, I do remember feeling pretty revolutionary, and so was my male news director who came up with the idea. He changed stations in a couple of years, the new guy who came in in 1991 nixed the plan which eventually led to me quitting, going freelance and then about 5 years later eventually transitioning into Public Relations to get a little more control of my time (I also had 4 kids by this point).

So you can imagine how thrilled I was to read Sue Shallenbarger's column in the Wall Street Journal the other day about how agencies and companies are looking to stay-at-home-moms for temporary solutions for crisis and other short-term projects. I waited to write this post until the article was available without a WSJ subscription, as it is now in Career Journal. There's even a great name for it - S.W.A.T. which stands for Smart Women with Available Time. Check out The Juggle, the WSJ's career- family balance blog, where there was certainly a lively debate in the comments over this. It looks like a win-win to me, women who want to stay fresh in the work force can do it when the time is right without making the often tough choice about working outside the home.  And the corporate world stands to gain more respect for mom's brainpower and highly advanced multi-tasking and organizational skills.

That dinner discussion was very eye-opening. I know many of us had working parents, but I'll bet few  of them had anything other than full-time jobs unless they ran their own business (in which case, it was full time plus) I honestly didn't realize all of this is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Postscript: I also realize, especially after reading Rebecca's post on the Silicon Valley Mom's Blog on law firms (and the comments), that it's still not a bed of roses in many areas of the momforce.

Cross-posted at Silicon Valley Mom's Blog

Comments

[Cindy La Ferle]

Thanks for this reminder, Martha. I read Shallenbarger's column, too, and am so pleased to read that the "SWAT" trend is taking root. And thank God for the Internet, which has made it much easier for parents to work from home. Back in 1985 B.E. (Before E-mail), I started freelancing from home as a newspaper columnist. In those days I had to drop my columns off at the editor's desk, or in the drop box after midnight, and I had to do most of my research at the library or elsewhere. The Internet changed all that, and while it took me a while to navigate it, I'm forever grateful.