When her colleagues at Honeywell Inc. used to complain about their struggles to balance work and family, Bonita Horishnyk would look at them uncomprehendingly. How hard could it be? she wondered. A little organization, an efficient calendar and life would be workable. That, of course, was before she became a working mother herself. Now Horishnyk, 41, has two kids-Tony, 4, and Alexandra, 2-and a resume that’s a case study in shifting gears.
As project manager for Honeywell’s corporate information systems in Minneapolis, Horishnyk had been with the company for four years when Tony was born. After a six-month maternity leave, she came back full-time. It wasn’t easy, but she and her husband, a contractor, managed reasonably well until Alexandra was born a year and a half later. “I had been working full-time since Day One, and I had no time with them except weekends,” she says. “I decided I wanted to spend more time with my family.”
After a maternity leave of four months, Horishnyk started negotiating a new schedule with her manager. They agreed that she would work from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., five days a week. That turned out to be worse than her regular schedule. “It was still like a 40-hour week,” she says. “There were always meetings that started at 3, and that made it very difficult. And before I came to work, I had to take the kids to day care.”
Her solution: a four-day week. She’s happy with the new arrangement, and so, apparently, is Honeywell, a company with a family-friendly reputation. When her department recently underwent a restructuring, many of her colleagues lost their jobs or were transferred to other divisions. Horishnyk stayed. One reason: As a part-timer with a prorated salary, she was a cost-effective employee-a big advantage in hard times.
Welcome to a fairly revolutionary idea: Mommy-trackers can flourish in this era of corporate change. Or, if the job doesn’t fit anymore, they can use the track as a vehicle to create a more flexible, satisfying career path. Those possibilities seemed remote four years ago, when Catalyst founder Felice Schwartz was virtually branded a traitor by many working women for suggesting in a Harvard Business Review article that companies think of female employees in two categories: “career primary” woman, who put work first, and “career and family” women, who, for a prolonged period, would need extra consideration from employers to balance their lives.
Schwartz never used the phrase “mommy track,” but that’s the description that stuck for the second group. It was not flattering. The assumption was that those who choose some form of the mommy track were second-class workers who never would be able to get back on the main track.
In the last decade, however, tens of thousands of women like Bonita Horishnyk have chosen to change their work schedules to accommodate their children. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of professionals voluntarily working part-time increased 29 percent-to 2.2 million from 1.7 million-from 1983 to 1991, while the work force grew at roughly half that rate. Furthermore, more than a third of all women working part-time are now mothers of children 13 and under.
Mommy-trackers on the front lines, as well as veterans who’ve been back on track for a while, say they have found ways to keep moving forward in their careers while their children are young.
Rule 1: Define your objectives. The first question women should ask, say work and family experts, is, “What is my goal?” Many women want to slow down and make some kind of adjustment, but what are their alternatives? And what compromises, if any, are they willing to make?
Rule 2: Older is better. Many women also find that it’s easier, professionally and emotionally, to cut back if they already have reached at least some of their goals.
Women say that the further along you are in your career, the more likely it is that you will be in a position to negotiate the terms of a new job or of your cutback and eventual re-entry. For one thing, your current employer probably has invested years in training you and won’t want to lose that investment. A recent Catalyst study of more than 150 employees successfully using flexible work plans-the majority of them part-timers-found that most had been at their companies for more than five years, indicating that their employers had a vested interest in them. The 50 companies surveyed confirmed this; they said they had agreed to let workers go part-time to keep them. In addition, the women who took advantage of alternative work schedules did so for a relatively short time-most for not more than three years.
Rule 3: Find family-friendly supervisors and companies. A key factor in making flexible schedules work is the manager’s attitude.
Rule 4: Have a plan. Flexibility works best when the employee is highly organized. One strategy: Look for departments that are cutting back, where layoffs are likely to occur.
Also consider telecommuting, a compressed work week or job-sharing. Is there a lateral move you can make that offers more flexibility, or where you can better position yourself for the future?
Rule 5: Use the track as a career experiment. Many successful women look back and realize that their mommy-track years gave them a chance to take stock of long-held professional goals and then change direction. Helen Klein Ross, 38, spent 10 years in advertising, rising to senior copywriter at a major Madison Avenue agency, before she became a mother. When her daughter Margaret was born six years ago, she intended to return to work full-time after a few months’ leave, but decided to stay home. She free-lanced for various agencies for the next few years and gave birth to her second daughter, Katherine, now 4.
Then two years ago, Ross’ life turned around again. She and a former colleague started their own advertising firm.
Rule 6: Don’t stay away too long. Dropping out completely is the riskiest choice. It raises questions not only about the sharpness of your skills but often about your self-confidence.
A gap of two to five years is more difficult. Women who want to stay out that long-essentially until their children are in school full-time-need to keep up professional networks. Many squeeze in free-lance or consulting work, take courses or teach.
The high-profile examples of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick show how it can be done. O’Connor continued to be active in local politics and civic affairs during the first years she spent raising her sons, then became an assistant attorney general for Arizona. While she was raising her children, Kirkpatrick taught at Trinity College and Georgetown University, where she built a reputation as a foreign-affairs scholar.
