#IWD25: DEVRY’S BOOK REVIEW OF #WORKSCHOOLHOURS
In honor of International Women’s Day 2025 (#IWD2025) that took place on March 8th, I have selected Dr. Ellen Joan Ford’s book, #WORKSCHOOLHOURS for this month’s book review. I first met Ellen two years ago when I was visiting her beautiful country of New Zealand. Ellen and I were on the same program to speak with international Nuffield Scholars and the local Rural Farm network in New Zealand. Ellen’s presentation on stage of her personal story in the corporate world as well as in the New Zealand Army, coupled with her doctoral thesis research examining the leadership and social wellbeing of women in the workforce, hit home for me in an important way.
Click on the photo to learn more about Ellen and #WORKSCHOOLHOURS.
Ellen said out loud what I had been experiencing for the previous decade in the business world: Women are especially penalized at the office for requiring flexibility. Being required to fit in the rigid work hour construct impacts their leadership prospects. She rightly pegs it as a society-wide “gaslighting” of women.
Ellen shares that women need a sense of belonging, autonomy, and purpose to achieve their greatest productivity and best self in the workplace. Constraining them to be at their desks at the same time all the time works against the employees' and the company’s best interests.
As Ellen puts it, “The 9-5 construct assumes that workers do not have to tend to children.” Much maneuvering takes place to mitigate collateral damage in the office and at home when you’re a working mom. Too much unnecessary stress is placed on both parents of school-aged children when management does not acknowledge the rigidity of their rules. If you are reading this as a parent, you can relate.
In her book, Ellen asks, “Why on Earth would a society function in this archaic way?” She challenges business leaders and civic leaders that set hours for work and school to imagine a “socially and commercially smarter way to improve the working world” by throwing out old norms and reconfiguring the “when” we work, which also means restructuring “how” we work. Simply put, society must realign the schedules of adults with children's schedules. She uses the words “malleable boundaries” that work for the professional and the person while also placing some principles to guide those boundaries: (1) societal alignment of hours; (2) workplace adopts staff-centric, individualized approach to management; and (3) focus more on outputs (deliverables) rather than inputs (hours).
Side note about ROWE…
Ellen’s guidance on the need to “stop hero worshipping long hours of work” aligns nicely with a Results Only Work Environments (ROWE), which DevryBV utilizes for our people management. Read Becky Roehl’s recent article on ROWE here.
One of the grandest challenges to achieving a more flexible and productive work environment is the lack of women in leadership. In this environment where business and political leaders are demanding all employees return to the office and where there is a “diversity hushing” effort taking place, it’s difficult to point out that women are the very leaders that can fix this problem. As Eleanor Roosevelt states in her book from 1938, It’s Up to the Women, “Women, whether subtly or vociferously, have always been a tremendous power in the destiny of the world.”
In this less than supportive work environment for women worldwide, Ellen’s book is even more important to elevate to the top of reading lists for corporate, government, military, and organizational leaders. If the moral case doesn’t do it, maybe the profit case will. Ellen notes that researchers estimate that achieving gender parity in Australia would yield a whopping 11% increase in national GDP! So gender parity pays off for all society. Never the less, women worldwide earn approximately 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. At the current rate of progress, some estimates say it will take 134 years to achieve global gender parity. Why wait?
An important stand-out message in the book is that empathy is required to move the dial toward #workshoolhours. Sadly, empathy may be at a low in today’s corporate and government sphere, but it doesn’t mean we throw Ellen’s suggestion for making this a movement out the door. The more we engage our leaders and put them in positions to stare in the face of their own empathy (or lack thereof), the more we as enlightened workers and leaders shift the workplace in the direction of necessary change.
Your first step if you see the current construct of misaligned work-school hours as “absolutely bonkers,” is to read Ellen’s book. She has great bits of advice on how to rethink and reframe your own situation, and in doing so, on how to become part of the larger global movement to empower women (and men) in the work and personal sphere.
Pick up a copy here and get reading your way (and our collective daughters’ way) to more belonging, autonomy, and purpose. Women paved our way before us, and we must continue to pave the way for today’s and tomorrow’s generations of women, even if it means retracing our steps of the past to go forward together.