Work-Life Balance: It’s Not Just a Woman Thing
Chances are this business school graduate wants to be involved at home – and save the world to boot.
Anecdotally, we’ve been seeing a trend towards more men wanting to be involved at home, and research just bore that out in a big way. Bain and Company surveyed 1,500 MBA students and graduates about their career aspirations, and about half of women and men reported that they “plan to prioritize non-work commitments over career progression.” In fact, women and men were just about even on this measure, with 50 percent of women and 51 percent of men saying that the “life” part of “work-life balance” will win out when push comes to shove.
Additionally, 44 percent of men said that they “envision a career path that will allow [them] to take breaks,” and more men than women listed “family” among the top three factors that will define their success.
We’re stunned and pleased by the equality of attitudes reflected here—this is exactly what we need to move towards a world in which “women run half of our countries and companies and men run half our homes,” as Sheryl Sandberg put it in Lean In.
In other news from the same survey, it turns out many MBAs have big hearts (they aren’t all out to make as much money as quickly as possible!). For both men and women, the number one way they define success is through their “impact,” and a majority of respondents said they’d like to work in social impact at some point in their career.
If these are the people we’re graduating from our top business schools now, we can’t wait to see what happens in the next 10 to 20 years. The future is looking pretty darn bright.
About the Author
Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.