This is a slightly altered version of an essay published under a pen name in Working Woman magazine

Women and Children First

I work at a Family Friendly corporation. We turn up on every magazine’s list of the best companies for women to work. My chain of command, on up to the E.V.P level, is all female. Women make up 60% of the workforce and 40% of management.  And in my particular  department, it’s the men who sometimes feel  short shrifted because of their gender. A decade ago, a company such as this, woman-friendly, with a stated policy supportive of family life, would have seemed to be a dream work environment. The reality is that it’s a decidedly mixed blessing – at least from the point of view of someone who doesn’t have children.

A little background: I had left a decidedly  un-woman friendly company on Wall Street  four years before joining this one, largely because of the annoying atmosphere of sexual harassment, the pay discrimination, and the lack of future prospects for women over thirty.  Because such conditions had existed to a greater or lesser degree at every company  I’d ever  worked for, I thought that striking out on my own as an independent consultant was the only  logical step for someone who wanted to stand or fall on the merits of her work, not on how she was perceived as a female by the men on top.

While as a consultant my professional skills flourished, the irregularity of my income stood in the way of the financial stability I needed to qualify for a mortgage. I also had been diagnosed with a chronic illness and needed comprehensive medical coverage unaffordable to a freelancer. The company at which I’d been consulting for over a year had about as livable a corporate culture as  I’d ever come across. At the previous several financial firms I’d worked for, the environments had ranged from back-stabbing to macho-aggressive to cut-throat to abusive. Here, on the other hand, was a company where the atmosphere, from my standpoint as a three-day a week outsider, could be best summed up by the word “benign.”

There was no sexual buzz in the air.  No flirting, no gossip or conjecture about affairs, no dirty jokes from the upper-level male managers, no women running around looking aggrieved.  No remarks like the one I’d heard at a meeting at my last job, emanating from a v.p. and directed at a female manager, “That’s something you would have understood before you were a mother, Karen.”

Here, women past the age of thirty continued to come in to work, without seeming to feel they were breaking some unwritten rule.  Several had children, some worked part-time.  That interested me as a worker with a health condition to manage, and also because I had creative projects, including a book under contract, that I wanted to continue devoting time to.

The floors were empty by five-thirty. None of that gratuitous stay-till-seven-thirty-every-night-for-appearance’s sake, whether there was really work to do or not. None of the atmosphere of hysteria and blame, the feeling that your job was on the line with every project or typo.

Here was a company I could live with, I thought.  Unfortunately, there were no permanent positions on offer in research, the area where I’d been consulting, but I was eagerly hired by a competing division, marketing. Sitting in a training room during my first morning’s orientation, I actually came across the phrase “Families First” while flipping through the welcome materials.

I assumed that a Families First work place offered benefits that would translate to all employees.  Little did I realize how literal this definition would prove to be.

I was in for a culture shock. On my first afternoon in my new job in my new division, my boss (mother of three) and a co-worker (mother of a six-month old) stood at the corner of my cube, in an ostensible show of bonhomie, and talked about formula.

Not the investment formula for our company’s well-performing variable annuities, but the infant kind. They stood there. And talked. And talked. For 20 minutes. About infant formula. I didn’t know what to say. I had nothing to add to the conversation. I didn’t have children.  They stood there, talking on, oblivious to my discomfort.  They seemed to be enjoying themselves. They probably thought they were being friendly.  I thought they were being more than a little rude.

My first assignment was to produce, with a co-worker, a short article. It was the kind of thing that, as a freelancer, I would have knocked off in under an hour. Being new and cautious, I let my co-worker, “Dawn”, take the lead. Her work method involved complaining about having been woken up by her baby son at 4 a.m., an event, she explained, which had rendered her unable to think or function that morning. We visited the office of the man for whom we were meant to produce the article.  Dawn proceeded to repeat to him the trials of trying to work on a broken night’s sleep.

To my amazement, the man was sympathetic. “The first year is the hardest …” he began. Another 20 minute discussion about the joys of parenthood ensued.

While I never thought I’d ever miss anything about the bad old days at my old firm, I soon found that when families come first, certain other quality of life issues at work suffer.

For example, I remember starting my first job on Wall Street twelve years before, being taken out, with the whole staff, to a seafood restaurant (wine served) at South Street Seaport. I got to know everyone, what they did, got some gossip-cum-company history, learned who to watch out for, and whom I could trust.

At my Family Friendly company, no superior has ever invited me out to lunch. No one has time to foster informal employee relations, when they’re cabbing it home to check up on some household emergency, or are on the phone constantly rejiggering their complicated domestic lives, or are out shopping at the local discount outlets, filling enormous shopping bags full of consumer goods for the little ones they constantly complain of not seeing enough of.