The office windows were open, and a hot summer breeze carried the distant noise of traffic up five stories and into the Environmental Media Services West (now Resource Media) office. It was the weekly staff meeting that happened every Monday at 10 A.M. Liz, northwest director of the non-profit communications firm for environmental and public health issues, had important news to share with her staff of four—news that had been hard to keep secret in the close quarters of their workplace.

Their office was set up newsroom style: A big open room with desks lining the walls, and a sleek, but somewhat faded, conference table situated in the center. An enlarged, framed comic hangs on one wall. This comic spoke to the work generated from the room: Two cowboys were sitting around a campfire with an old fashioned coffee pot warming in the flames. One cowboy said to the other, “Hank, rustle me up some of that fairly traded, songbird-friendly organic breakfast blend yer brewin’.”

The comic was hung in honor of the songbird-friendly coffee campaign they’d been working on for the Seattle Audubon Society. Liz recalls the feeling of, “Ah, now that we’ve made it into the comics, we’ve really made it!” The women who worked in the office were all widely respected for effectively generating media for their clients.

Liz had something out of the ordinary to say at this particular staff meeting. She’d been holding back her news for weeks now. That something had her plotting out exactly where the bathroom was in every place she entered, carrying a plastic bag on the metro bus “just in case,” and brought her a new understanding of just how far the bathroom was from her office door (fifteen feet straight out and ten feet to the left).

Liz was twelve weeks pregnant, and had been battling morning, noon, and evening sickness for the past month.

“I was so sick, but I didn’t want to tell anyone for ten or twelve weeks until I knew the pregnancy was going to ‘stick,’ and I remember thinking, ‘How am I going to hide this?’ ” recalls Liz. She also remembers feeling an enormous amount of relief when she dropped her bombshell during that Monday morning staff meeting, “By the time I told everyone, I was so relieved that I could finally say why I looked like I just stepped off a seventeen hour plane trip from Singapore every morning.”

During those weeks of waiting to tell her staff, Liz did her homework on the home front. She visited several childcare facilities, had discussions with other mothers about how to really balance work and family (Several recommend that six months was the ideal time off because it gives time to bond with the baby, yet is before separation anxiety starts full force. Many emphasized, “Three months is too short, it’s just too short.”); and finally chose the childcare center she eventually wanted to use.

This decision caused a cascade of other linked decisions to follow. Signing up for childcare required getting on a waiting list for a start date on a specific month and year. This requirement made it necessary for Liz to think long and hard about what she wanted to do after her baby was born. So by the time she shared her news with co-workers, Liz already had her unborn child on a childcare waiting list, had decided to take six months off, and also was sure she wanted to work part-time when she came back.

“The precedent was already set in our office that new moms were getting their jobs back part-time if they wanted. Precedents are key because the first person to break the precedent has it the hardest, and I wasn’t the first,” she shares. The precedent was buoyed by the fact that the general situation was tipped in “new moms’ favor because it’s hard to find replacements for this type of work where established relationships with reporters are highly prized. So allowing people to work part-time is a way to retain the talent,” says Liz.

In the back of her mind, Liz knew that after having children she wanted a balanced work schedule that didn’t include five or more sunset to sundown days at the office each week. She comments, “Being part-time after Aaron was born was always in the cards.” In fact, studies show that Liz was onto something, professionals who work part-time are less likely to report work and family conflicts than those choosing a full-time position.²⁵ Unfortunately, part-time positions in this country usually come with a pay cut and few, if any, benefits.

Liz, however, had a different experience. When Liz returned from her six months home with the baby to work a part-time schedule of twenty-six hours per week, her hourly wage equivalency stayed the same as when she left at full-time. In stark contrast to Liz’s experience, people taking part-time jobs commonly receive lower pay than if they were working a similar job fulltime. A 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce notes this trend, finding that even co-workers notice part-timers get a raw deal: 61 percent of employees who work with a mixture of full- and part-time co-workers say, “part-timers receive less than pro rata pay and benefits compared with full-time employees in the same positions just because they work part-time.”²⁶

Liz is also faring well in another area that is a common pitfall with part-time positions: She has full medical and dental coverage in her part-time position (the same as when she was working full-time). This full coverage is quite unusual. The vast majority of part-time workers don’t have any healthcare coverage (81 percent).²⁷ Most other benefits that full-time workers receive—such as vacation leave, sick leave, pensions, and life insurance—are also often absent, even in a pro-rated manner, from part-time work packages.²⁸

In fact, the rising cost of healthcare is one of the big hurdles to increasing access to part-time work. Ellen Galinsky, President and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, notes that in order for there to be more part-time work options, “As a country we have to solve the health issue. I don’t see solving the part-time issue without also addressing the issue of healthcare, but that said, when employers recognize that they get a lot more from part-time workers then that might change the way they think.”

Some companies actually “game” the system, purposefully using part-time labor so that they can avoid paying for benefits. For struggling families this may lead to parents having to work multiple part-time jobs in order to keep the telephone on, electricity running, and to pay medical bills. In this situation, there is little time to spare, not even for little family members. Quite obviously, this is not family-friendly part-time work.

Another common pitfall with part-time work is that employees often report being paid to work part-time, but then ending up working more hours per week than they are paid to do. One organization, the Center for WorkLife Law directed by Joan Williams, the same woman who inspired the owner of Johnson Moving and Storage, responded to this problem by working with employers and by sharing the benefits of familyfriendly policies, concentrating on one professional sector (attorneys). Through these efforts, the Center for WorkLife Law prompted changes in part-time work situations for lawyers with their Project for Attorney Retention (PAR) program.

The Center for WorkLife Law reports that “In Washington, D.C., where PAR began, law firms have virtually eliminated the ‘haircut’ (e.g. 60 percent salary for an 80 percent schedule). PAR has also been effective in discouraging the practice, formerly widespread in D.C., of taking part-timers off the partnership track, and has witnessed a marked increase in the number of male lawyers working part-time—a sure sign that part-time schedules are becoming less stigmatized.”²⁹ Many lawyers have used the PAR resources to institute similar changes in other parts of the country.

Part-time work options can benefit employers as well as employees. “Our research shows that if people are dual-focused, which means they prioritize work, as well as other things, then they are reenergized for work,” says Ellen Galinsky, President and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute. “People who work part-time often have more energy than others.”

Additional research backs up Galinsky’s assessment that part-time workers often excel in their positions: The authors of Beyond Work-Family Balance write, “Our research indicates that making this connection [between the ‘public sphere of paid work and the private sphere of personal life’], particularly at the level of work practices, can produce significant improvements in people’s lives and in workplace performance.”³⁰ And several real-world analysis of businesses as they institute flexible work policies, in particular at Deloitte and Dupont, have found that businesses benefit when they offer part-time and flexible work in a way that doesn’t bar career advancement because it significantly improves employee retention.³¹

Liz was able to keep the same pro-rated pay and benefits when she went back to work part-time, and the part-time attorneys in Washington, D.C., are in much better situations thanks to the Center for WorkLife Law efforts. Yet clearly, this is not the norm. In fact, equitably paid part-time work with any form of benefits is often very difficult to find, leaving this option open to few parents. In order to allow parents to work part-time so they can better balance work and family, not only do more part-time jobs need to be offered, but employers need to stop penalizing part-time workers and pay them the same hourly rate, including pro-rata benefits, as similar full-time jobs.

Some countries have already embraced making part-time work available to all who request it. The Netherlands, for example, which has the highest percentage of part-time workers (44 percent) of any country in the world,³² has passed laws to make sure part- and full-time workers are treated equally.³³

“We are in a transition between the twentieth century workplace with an industrial economy, and a twenty-first century workplace. The industrial economy required a one-size-fits-all workplace. In the transition we are in now, the nature of work, the economy, and the nature of the workforce are very different. In the past, part-time work was seen as a lesser kind of work, looking at the horizon we are going to think of new ways to work that work for both the employee and employer,” says Galinsky noting that increased access to flexible work options, including part-time work, is part of what’s on the horizon.

As Liz went back to work she found that she also had to make adjustments with her husband on the home front, since work done at home is part of the overall work equation. Early on, after spending her day at the office, Liz was up late one evening making her then eighteen-month-old son lunch for the next day as her husband relaxed on the couch in the living room with a book. “I was feeling a little bitter,” recalls Liz. “I said, ‘This work isn’t done yet, I need some help here, please get off the couch because I would like to be reading too.’ ” It was a breakthrough moment for her husband. “Something clicked in his brain. He realized it wasn’t a ‘Brian repairs things in the house and Liz does all the shopping, cleaning, and laundry’ situation; but that we both contribute what we can until all the work is done in a given night.”

Because of more equal treatment at home and a progressive and accommodating workplace, Liz has realized self-proclaimed “domestic bliss,” enjoying both of her jobs. “I’m totally satisfied with my work and home balance.”

Part-time work is an effective answer for many women who would find flexible full-time (or more) work like Dr. Stone’s too intensive. But while Liz is an example of what can go well with part-time work arrangements, it remains that the majority of part-time workers aren’t faring as well. In order to make parttime work a viable option for American workers with families, the following steps must be taken:

• Part-time workers should receive equitably pro-rated pay in relation to similar employees in full-time positions.
• Part-time positions need to be more widely available, as well as structured into a broad cross-section of jobs to alleviate tension between full- and part-time employees.
• Those who work part-time should not be held back from promotions.
• Part-time workers should be paid for all the hours they work and not be pushed to work past their scheduled hours without compensation.
• Part-time workers should receive some form of benefits.

With these changes, we can go a long way toward making part-time work equitably compensated and a viable reality for many American families.