Women's Career-Family Juggling Act: Corporations Are Taking Notice : Workplace: More U.S. firms are negotiating flexible work schedules, scaling back hours or encouraging telecommuting.

By FAYE FIORE

Dec. 13, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Impressions mattered the morning Demetra Lambros raced to meet one of her law firm’s newest clients. She put on mascara and rehearsed her presentation in the cab on the way to a stately Washington, D.C., office. She gave a firm handshake to all the gentlemen present, set her briefcase squarely on the table, opened the client’s file and watched blankly as a pacifier came flying out.

“Oops,” said Lambros, fast-track lawyer three days a week and full-time mommy the other four.

For professional women, the conflict between work and family dates at least from the emergence of feminism. But economic circumstances are finally beginning to imbue some women with the power to manage the conflict to their advantage. Perhaps for the first time since women broke into the corporate club, they are using their leverage to demand jobs that accommodate them.

They are negotiating flexible work schedules, scaling back to 20-hour weeks and working from computers at home. Companies downsizing amid the economy’s relentless squeeze are increasingly receptive to women’s offers to job share, sacrifice health benefits and forgo raises in exchange for a little more time with their children.

“I have a real job and I still see my baby,” said Lambros, a 33-year-old law firm associate. “He is the most important thing in the world to me. If this place had not helped me work out a part-time schedule, I would not have come back.”

With 45% of the American work force made up of women, experts say Corporate America is waking up to the idea that the rigid 9-to-5 day and 40-hour week are luxuries that it can no longer afford--not if it hopes to retain women workers who have become pillars in its ranks.

“Listen up guys: . . . You cannot cut out half the labor force and expect to be a successful corporation,” said Charles Boesel, spokesman for the Women’s Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor. “If you want to retain the best and the brightest, you have to hire women . . . and have programs in place that keep them happy.”

The American labor force is growing older. More men are retiring at one end and more women are entering at the other. Women will make up two-thirds of the net gain in workers by 2005; three-fourths will become pregnant during their working lives, according to Labor Department forecasts.

More men are taking greater roles in parenting and housekeeping. Still, the strides made by generations of women who broke sex barriers on the job have left today’s employed mothers with one foot in the ‘90s and the other in the ‘50s.

“The woman is the one who gets the call when the kid swallows the Ping-Pong ball. She is the one who goes to the Mommy and Me classes,” said Sheila Kuehl, managing director of California Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit women’s civil rights firm. “Most professional women start out thinking they can do both, and they do it by making appointments with their kids.”

The career-family juggling act appears to be taking its toll.

In a survey of 1,400 women conducted this year by the Ms. Foundation for Women and the Center for Policy Alternatives in New York, one-quarter said their greatest personal struggle was inflexible work hours.

Germany, France and Sweden have been helping parents balance career and family since the 1960s with flexible work hours. In America, though, only a sliver of the work force can opt for anything less than a rigid, full-time schedule.

Those who are cutting such deals tend to be college-educated professionals with career experience too valuable to lose; employers accommodate them because they like them.

Dr. Jamie Baker Knauss, a 39-year-old Pasadena pediatrician and mother of two boys, delayed starting her practice for two years until she found a group of doctors flexible enough to share her patient load so she could work three days a week.

Ellen McDonnell, a 37-year-old mother of two girls and senior producer of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, works one day a week out of her Maryland home, a diaper pail beside her desk.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Leslie Swain, the 39-year-old mother of two girls, was one of the first federal prosecutors in Los Angeles to work a three-day week--a schedule once considered impossible for a trial attorney.

“Being a lawyer is what I wanted to do as far back as I can remember,” she said. “But being a mother is what puts a bounce in my step.”

Despite studies showing that workplace flexibility leads to reduced turnover, absenteeism and tardiness and improved loyalty and morale, most corporations have resisted making it a policy.

Experts say the resistance stems in part from an age-old work ethic: Good employees are at their desks eight hours a day; those who are not must not be working.

“A major project is coming, something has to be done by Friday and all of a sudden it’s: ‘Whoops, this person has Friday off.’ That happens one or two times in the private sector and people go through the roof,” said Glenn Meister, a consultant in the in Los Angeles office of A. Foster Higgins & Co., a benefits firm.

But several employers who offer flexible schedules said most conflicts can be resolved--if both the employer and worker are willing to bend. Prosecutor Swain plans to abandon her part-time schedule whenever she has a case in trial. Pediatrician Knauss often uses her evenings to return patient phone calls.

In fact, several employers said they usually get more than three days’ work for three days’ pay because the part-time employee is focused on the job rather than tugged by a neglected family. The largest criminal fine ever levied in a defense contracting fraud case was won by Assistant U.S. Atty. Julie Fox Blackshaw, a part-time Los Angeles prosecutor and the mother of 22-month-old Jessica.

“We have no complaints, “ said U.S. Atty. Terree Bowers, Blackshaw’s boss.

If regard for the changing American family does not move corporations to accommodate working mothers, the bottom line might, experts say.

Employees who work shorter hours with reduced benefits fit into the needs of many companies forced to cut costs and downsize in these recessionary times, Meister said. Employers say flexible scheduling allows them to keep experienced workers and reduce costly turnover.

Alan Murray, deputy chief of the Wall Street Journal’s bureau in Washington, D.C.--where several reporters have shared beats and have worked part-time--said flexible scheduling has allowed the newspaper to hold onto experienced women journalists.

“It has been a big payoff for us,” Murray said. “This company has always believed the Wall Street Journal is as good as its people . . . and we have to do what’s necessary to keep them. If that means letting them work three days a week, we try to do it.”

A 1987 task force at Aetna Life & Casualty in Hartford, Conn., found that one-fourth of mothers who took a maternity leave never came back. By its own estimates, Aetna was losing more than $1 million annually in employee turnover; every worker saved was money in the company’s pocket.

Aetna instituted a family-leave policy and flextime, which required workers to be in the office between 9 and 3 and left to them when they put in the other 90 minutes of the workday. Within four years, only 9% of mothers were failing to return from maternity leave, said Michelle Carpenter, manager of Aetna’s work/family strategies unit.

But even women who have the option of scaling back say there is a stigma attached to working less. They believe that they are no longer considered serious players, that they fall out of the loop for promotions. Many describe a nagging ambivalence: Once they felt guilty about spending too much time at work; now they feel guilty about not spending enough.

“There was a time I would have killed to be on a big, important, fast-moving criminal case,” said one mother working part-time as an attorney. “Now I feel like I’m living in a world of young whippersnappers and I can’t compete.”

Maura Thorpe would tell her it is worth it.

It is almost noon, and Thorpe is positioned at her computer in an upstairs study of a white fixer-upper in the San Gabriel Valley. She is professionally dressed in a straight black skirt and low heels. Three little girls, all under age 5, are playing at her feet. At 30, she is eight months pregnant with her fourth child.

Thorpe works at home three days a week as an appellate attorney for the state of California while a baby-sitter watches the children. “I think about how I could jump in and be the best appellate lawyer, the best criminal lawyer, and then I think, what am I saying?” she muses, straightening 3-year-old Denny’s ponytail. “I love picking them up from school. They are always beaming about the project they did or the kid they played with. When they’re hurt, they want their mom and no one else. And that’s special to me.”