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Working women
Mothers' influence key to career success

By Nathan Hurst, Globe Correspondent, 10/30/05

Are you a successful working woman? Thank your mother.

A large number of successful businesswomen in Boston had mothers that encouraged them to work, and half had working mothers, according to a survey released last week by the Boston Club, a women's business organization.

Of those surveyed, 50 percent said they had working mothers, and two-thirds said their mothers' decisions influenced their own career choices. At the same time, the Boston Club's report cited statistics from the Census Bureau, which showed that only 38 percent of women worked between 1960 and 1970. While no statistics were taken then on how many of that group were working mothers, that number is believed to be much lower, the report said.

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''Many of our members' mothers worked in the 1950s through the 1970s, a period of time when it was not widely accepted for mothers to work,'' said Lou Richardson, president of the Boston Club and controller at Xerox Corp.

''Some of these women were pioneers in fields that did not traditionally accept women — engineering, law, medicine, and higher education.''

As part of the survey, women were asked to respond about their own experiences with their mothers and how they affected their work decisions later in life. For many, a stay-at-home mom was just as much an influence in their career as their colleagues' mothers who decided to break into the office world.

''My mother was a full-time housewife and stay-at-home mom. When I chose to be a full-time working mom, she was always 100 percent supportive, never judgmental,'' said Barbara Marx, co-chief executive of Legal Insight Media Inc.

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Workplace
Telecommuting loses some steam

Telecommuting may be the work option of the future, but for now, the trend has remained stagnant, and those who are making the kitchen table their home office aren't necessarily getting paid for it.

Despite the increased availability of high-speed Internet connections and a renewed push by many employees to work at home, only 15 percent of Americans are working from where they live at least once a week, according to research released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That figure represents no increase or decrease from the last Work at Home survey the bureau released in May 2001.

About one-third of Americans who worked at home were self-employed. Two-thirds of that group operated a home-based business. The remaining workers included in the survey worked for an autonomous company or partnership. While 15 percent of workers were conducting business at home, only 25 percent of that group had a formal arrangement with their employer that allowed them to get paid for hours while working away from the office. Of those workers, who totaled more than 3.3 million, about half worked eight or more hours per week at home, and one in seven worked full time, or over 35 hours per week.

The average amount of time worked at home for those with a formal pay arrangement was 19 hours.

For the rest of those workers included in the survey, who accounted for about 10.2 million members of the national labor force, none had a formal pay arrangement with their employers.

Of those employees, 22 percent worked eight or more hours per week at home. For those who brought projects home from the office who weren't getting paid for their extra efforts, job-related work at home took an average of seven hours a week out of their personal time.

While both men and women were equally likely to work from home, according to the survey, white workers were twice as likely as their black or Hispanic counterparts to utilize their home as both office and personal sanctuary.

Married workers were also more likely to bring work home than those who are single.

Workers cited a number of reasons for working at home, with over half — 56 percent — saying the practice was necessary to ''finish or catch up on work.'' Another 32 percent said it was just the ''nature of the job.''

Recruiting
More firms looking to Web for information

More employers are looking to the Web for information on future employees. What they find, or don't find, is having a greater effect on who gets hired and who gets their resume put ''on file.''

Zoom Information, a Waltham company that operates the people search engine ZoomInfo.com, recently released the results of a survey it conducted among job seekers about their feelings on their personal Internet presence.

According to the Society of Human Resource Management, 89 percent of hiring managers and human resource professionals use the Internet to recruit new employees and research their prior endeavors. For workers, this means an increased concern about what is or isn't written about them online. Many times, what is not out there bothers workers more than what is.

About 70 percent of job seekers surveyed said they were concerned that there wasn't enough information about them on the Web.

Russell Glass, vice president of products for ZoomInfo, said job seekers should also be concerned with what type of information appears about them throughout the Internet.

While personal online photo albums with party pictures and politically-charged weblogs may be a good way to connect with friends and family and establish a following, not all would be something the average worker would want a potential employer to see.

Many companies are also starting to implement policies as to what kinds of Web presence employees can maintain while employed.

Some companies have even gone as far as suspending or terminating workers who post objectionable content to the Web.

Nathan Hurst can be reached at nhurst@globe.com

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