Women's Work: How Mothers Manage Flexible Working in Careers and Family Life

Drawing on over 100 hours of narrative interview data, this book goes inside women’s work and family lives in a year of working flexibly. It reveals why professional women under the glass ceiling make the work-life choices they do and what factors influence their opportunities for advancement. Every-day examples reveal what women do to make their lives work. The private labors involved in going part-time, job-sharing, and working from home are brought to life with vivid personal testimonies. Young detailed insight into the gains and the losses that women experience through their negotiations of time and responsibilities in workplaces and in the family. Taking a feminist sociological perspective, this timely book argues that there is an opportunity to make work, work better for professional women and their families and offers unique insights from women’s lived experiences about how to do it.