Praise for Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life
In this provocative book, economist and work/life expert Robert Drago constructs a unique vision of the meaning of balance, unmasking the real reasons most Americans lead unbalanced lives. Sifting through the vast body of relevant research from a range of academic disciplines, including new findings from the author’s own studies, Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life examines the deeply held but unexamined beliefs about work, womanhood, and society that are responsible for our out-of-balance lives. In his optimistic final chapter, Drago calls on us to challenge those beliefs and provides a roadmap for change. If we take this path, he argues, we will not only improve life balance but also address the nearly one-fifth of our population who require but do not receive adequate care, the “new gender gap” between women who care for others and women who succeed in high-powered careers, and even the rise in income inequality.
The Boston Globe says:
A book on systemic obstacles to better work-life balance is not a beach read. But labor economist Robert W. Drago’s clearly argued volume gives us something that’s in short supply: Perspective. “In Striking A Balance: Work, Family, Life,” (Dollars & Sense), this respected researcher explores three growing gaps in society related to income, care, and gender. The widening gap between rich and poor is a concern, as is the substandard care received by many of our elderly and children.
Midwest Book Review says:
Written by Robert W. Drago (Professor of Labor Studies and Women’s Studies, Penn State University), Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life is not a self-help book for the individual, but rather a scholarly examination of the modern societal problems of the care gap (too many children, elderly, and disabled, particularly among the poor, are not getting the care they need), the gender gap (women are forced to choose between success in their careers and providing adequate care to their children, or any other form of care work for low or no pay) and the income gap (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer). At the heart of these problems is not just cold hard economics, but also societal norms – the “motherhood norm” that insists women should provide care for little or no pay; the “ideal worker norm” that conditions employers to expect their workers to put in long hours up to an inhuman level; and the “individualism norm”, a society-infused belief that the government should not help those needing care. Striking a Balance prescribes society-wide remedies to these growing problems: paid family leave, early childhood education and child care financing, guaranteed health insurance, and a minimum wage increase indexed to inflation, and the simple importance of allowing men and women from all walks of life to have their voices heard. Extensively researched, Striking a Balance: Work Family Life is a persuasive academic treatise about the need for social change, and highly recommended for reading for not only college library shelves, but also anyone looking for a better understanding of why the government needs to pay more attention to minimum wage, health care, and paid family leave issues.
Bob Drago provides us with a powerful new framework to help solve the problem of imbalance in contemporary society— some people have too much work, many have too little income and not enough care-giving, and virtually everyone suffers from a lack of gender equality. To the work-life paradigm he adds the almost forgotten concept of leisure, with surprising results. His real-life solutions are inspiring, his policy prescriptions are simple, clear, and mercifully few. This book is an enjoyable, engaging read. Read it and change your life and the world.
—Heidi Hartmann, Ph.D., President, Institute for Women’s Policy Research
Framed in terms of the care gap, the new gender gap between mothers and others, and the widening income gap, this lively and accessible book makes it clear why so many of us find it difficult to strike a balance in our lives. It can be read with profit by students of labor economics, those concerned with women and work, or anyone who has ever had to juggle the demands of care and career.
— Eileen Appelbaum, Director, Center for Women and Work, and Professor, School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University
It is hard for American working parents to achieve balanced lives, but as Bob Drago argues in this important and timely book, we can change that. We know we have a crisis when, as his research shows, over half of the mothers who teach college chemistry and about 40 percent who teach English say that they returned to work sooner than they wanted after having a child because they wanted to be taken seriously as academics, and many of them felt forced to choose their work over their children. Rather than groaning about forced imbalance, however, Drago powerfully marshals the evidence and points to the models we need to create balance for both sexes. A must read for us all.
—Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Time Bind and The Commercialization of Intimate Life
This book is for anyone who feels that life is complicated and getting more so all the time. In clear language Drago gives data to show that Americans are working more and defines 3 important gaps Americans face: a care gap, a gender gap, and an income gap. These are interrelated, of course, as Drago makes clear. And he contributes to our understanding of the gender gap by expanding it to include the gap between women who are involved in actual care work (whether paid or not) and those successful in professional jobs and hence not directly involved in care. He anchors his discussion in three norms, all of which contribute to these gaps: motherhood, ideal worker, and individualism, and supports his discussion with both data and stories. A particularly interesting formulation is his definition of balance, by which he means involvement in all three of paid work, unpaid work, and leisure. He describes the kind of social infrastructure necessary to support such balance for all people in our society and ends with a work and family bill of rights. A great discussion of the challenges we all face.
—Lotte Bailyn, T Wilson Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management
Written by a true scholar in the work/family domain, this book captures twenty years of research, including the most current. Further, it is eminently readable for scholars, practitioners, and working parents. sensible and empathic.
—Patricia Raskin, Associate Professor of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Bob Drago has long been recognized as a leader in the work-life balance world through his work with Take Care Net and on the Work and Family Bill of Rights. After decades in the wilderness, many of us have reached a shared vision of what does and doesn’t help us to lead balanced lives. Drago captures this new consensus, explains why it has taken so long for us to reach this point, and provides a blueprint for change. Anyone stressed about their own lives, and what to do about it, should read this interesting, insightful, wise, and humorous work, and then join with Drago and others to change things.
—John de Graaf, Author of AFFLUENZA
This excellent analysis of the current state of working and trying to live at the same time in America is a great wakeup call from the overwork hypnosis reining for too long. Unlike in other advanced nations, we’ve never had a real national conversation about the impacts of large numbers of caregivers in the workplace and skyrocketing workweeks. Drago makes those repercussions of work without end very clear, in imploding families, skyrocketing health costs and absentee lives. Armed with a trove of research, he shows us not only the downside, but also a way out, when we can see the unconscious norms that skew our value system and sanity–the ideal worker norm, the motherhood norm, and the individualism norm. This much-needed book should should be required reading for every exec, congressperson, and presidential-candidate policy guru in the land.
—Joe Robinson, Author and founder of Work to Live (www.worktolive.info) in Santa Monica, Calif.
About the Author
Robert Drago is Professor of Labor Studies and Women’s Studies at Penn State University , is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, is a co-founder and co-chair of the Take Care Net , is past president of the College and University Work-Family Association, and moderates the Workfam newsgroup on the internet. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and was a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar.
The author of four books and over 70 articles, his most recent book is Striking a Balance, published by Dollars & Sense in 2007. His research, largely funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, concerns working time flexibility, biases against caregiving in the academic workplace, the decline of women in intercollegiate coaching, and public policies for working families. He is a frequent contributor to major media outlets, and has provided Congressional Briefings sponsored by Senators Clinton, Kennedy, and Obama, among others. He was the 2001 recipient of the R.I. Downing Fellowship from the University of Melbourne, serves on the board of the Berger Institute for Work, Family and Children, and is a member of the Council on Contemporary Families and the International Association for Feminist Economics.