Off-Ramps and On-Ramps

6

Creating Arc-of-Career Flexibility

The flexible work arrangements and policies described in the previous chapter—flextime, telecommuting, job sharing, and so on—get us partway there. But they don’t go far enough. Flexible work arrangements are static: they’re all about carving out partial relief in the here and now, allowing employees to ratchet down the pressure and craft a “scenic route.” Valuable as they are, flexible work arrangements don’t deal with the longer-term, more recalcitrant problems. As we saw in chapter 3, high-impact extreme jobs don’t lend themselves to scenic routes and the spread of these jobs has forced many highly credentialed women off the career highway. For these complicated challenges, we need more thoroughgoing and ...