Failing to ask feeds the balance gap in much the same way that failing to ask feeds the pay gap. You know that women are actually pretty good at negotiating on behalf of their companies, their work projects and particularly, their families. It is ironic that when it comes to perks or pay for themselves, women tend to be negotiation-shy.

There is plenty in the media currently to describe the wholesale changes needed to narrow the balance gap for families. It certainly would help if lots of women asked for change. The combined voices of many women will do something really important -- make it normal to ask. There is a tactical approach you can use for yourself while you wait for the chorus to chime in. ASK. The reason this is not a scary thing to do is that in fact, most managers expect you to initiate requests for more pay, better commissions or restructuring your schedule. Of course, most employers have policies and cultures that discourage sharing of how other employees have changed the practices. Therefore it is up to you to dig up the instances of where flexibility has been permitted in your company and industry.

Ask and don't be quick to settle. While women may be both hard-wired and socialized to not be assertive and to be sensitive to the needs of others, they are equally well equipped to fight to maintain a relationship. According to Louann Brizendine, M.D. in her wonderful book, The Female Brain, "In women, conflict is more likely to set into motion a cascade of negative chemical reactions, creating feelings of stress, upset, and fear. Just the threat of conflict will be read by the female brain as threatening the relationship." Having a well researched plan and some backup support are key to overcoming the resistance you may meet when you first begin to ask for a change in your schedule.

Time is on your side if you have a successful career with a good network of clients and peers . For decades one of the most puzzling habits of American businesses has been to lay off workers and then soon after, complain that they just cannot find enough qualified employees. What is new, however, is the undeniable shortfall of up to 10 million workers as the boomers retire. Even though American companies are pathetically shortsighted on planning for this exodus, key industries are already looking a lot like the free for all recruiting of the 90's. Industries that cannot be offshored such as healthcare, accounting, and engineering are already struggling to fill job openings. The gap between companies seeing the value of retaining a seasoned employee and chasing a recent college recruit is your opportunity. Go ASK.

How long have you been working in your career 20 yrs? 25?
How long until you retire? 5 years? 10 years?
Would you like to ramp down to retirement?
How many leaves of absence have you taken of 3 months or more during your career? 5? 3? 1?

So let’s say you have a career span of about 30 yrs. You are 2/3 through it now and have managed to get married, give birth, raise a family, care for aging parents, maybe get single or repair a joint, be downsized (more than once?) and perhaps survive cancer. And you did all of this while maintaining your career at a full time pace. Who do you know who took a full quarter of a year off? And all of this doesn’t consider personal preferences you may have forgone during these years. Whether a philanthropic save the world endeavor or a personal improvement course of action, chances are you either wrote a check or devoted a few hours a month to stoke the embers of your personal passion.

Now, I am not judging this path. I would like you to consider however, that the path is not the same path you set out on when you began your career some 20 years ago. There are very few of us who want to repeat the first half of our lives during the second half -only older.

Although it may seem to you like you are managing with your career the way it is going at the moment, I invite you to imagine you are strategizing that time when you are ready to recalibrate your career, work fewer hours and turn some of your focus out to traveling, volunteering, and family. So often I find that women who entered the workforce in the 1980’s and configured themselves to fit the corporate world have adapted so well (isn’t that what women do after all, collaborate?) that it simply doesn’t occur to them to ask for something different. Certainly stress is evident. If you raised a family during your career you will remember feeling guilty for either not being at home or at work depending on where you were at that moment. When you cared for your parents too. You could see there was a deadline on the time you could spend with your parents even more clearly than with the kids.

Perhaps you did ask for an “accommodation” at work. If you did and were a respected contributor you probably got some slack and you were most likely stigmatized for it. And, you know what, you probably believed to some degree that the stigma was justified. You just weren’t as focused as usual during your chemo, for goodness sake!

Over the course of the next few postings, I will lay out a plan for you to RECALIBRATE your career. It turns out that you CAN have everything and you've already earned it!

A TIME TO LAUGH

Every time people are in a stressful situation and someone tells a joke, it instantly lightens everyone up. Amusement is key when releasing and working on making changes in your life. Being too serious and in effort, your mood becomes heavy and your outlook can become down or depressed. It may even feel like you are walking through quicksand and just getting stuck. When you are feeling down or depressed or stressed, it is key to focus on what you want and not on what you don't want.

Take the multitudes of observations on women in the executive suite. At one time, job equity totally consumed the way I worked. It was many years before it dawned on me that the way most jobs are structured, job equity is not so alluring afterall. Mounting frustration about the quality of my life brought me to the real issue: not more, as I had always thought but what form of more it could be. Now, granted, I became enlightened as it became clear that job equity was not happening in my career and as the demands of my personal life remained 80% mine to manage. The fact is that most women in the workforce are non-poster girls for the executive suite anyway. This was true when I began my career in the 1980's and it is even more true today as benefits are down, new jobs are in the low paying service sector and increasing independence from men means more dependence on uncertain job security. Women are not gaining access to executive positions in any proportion to their entry into the workforce.

What's so funny is that I realized that for me CAREER was a job that had gone on too long. What returned my focus in life to laughter was my family. No matter how tired I was or how stressed, I found a reason to smile every time I saw my kids or spoke to my folks. The more I smiled and laughed, the more energy I had to see things from a new perspective-- a clearer perspective too. I saw that the job market had been flexible enough to absorb me and all my cohorts while at the same time suppressing salaries and quashing labor demands across the board. Women in the workforce did not serve to upgrade social institutions with their new economic and political power. Equity, feminism -- both log jammed. And that provided me with enough comic relief to recalibrate my career. And with a smile on my face.