Work-life leader is firm on need for flexibility

Here's someone you should know. Chances are, her work has touched your life.

As a director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Kathleen Christensen has given away $90 million in the past dozen years to scholars, nonprofits, and nonpartisan advocacy groups in the burgeoning field of work-life.

That means her questions about work and family -- what can we do to help parents juggling two jobs, plus the work of the home? How do our work-life needs change over time? -- have shaped the course of this field. And the fruits of her research agenda -- the headlines or company benefits inspired by Sloan studies -- directly influence our dinner-table talk and our lives.

Remember, it was only a couple of decades ago that work-family was a new idea. Academics studied work or family issues, not the interplay between the two. Most public debate centered on the ``problem" of working mothers, and what, if anything, companies could do. Offered a part-time job in 1994 at Sloan working on initiatives related to part-time careers, Christensen instead began tackling the big picture, eventually giving up her work as a psychology professor to do so.

From the start, she had a clear vision. First, Christensen tapped leading scholars, whether or not they studied families, to create multidisciplinary research centers at major universities, each with a different focus. (Full disclosure: I received a Sloan grant in 2001 to visit several centers to learn about their work.)

At a time when US anthropologists rarely studied Americana, Christensen persuaded South Pacific expert Bradd Shore to launch a center on family myth and ritual at Emory University, an opportunity he likens to ``winning the lottery."

Not all the centers have lasted, but their findings -- from couples' retirement dilemmas to parents' after-school stress -- are bringing us a detailed picture of the changing American family.

Within the field, Christensen is treated like a rock star, no surprise given the money she controls. There are also inevitable grumbles about her funding choices. Yet Christensen, who leads Sloan's Workplace, Workforce and Working Families program, wins wide praise for her leadership and vision. In a rare interview, she discussed her work so far and her latest initiative, a $6 million policy and research push to bring companies, unions, government and nonprofits together to make flexible work the standard of American workplaces.

What has been the major finding from the hundreds of studies Sloan has funded?

Prior to our starting this work, the issue of balancing work and family was really seen as the problem of an individual family and the solutions were seen as private and individual. This wasn't a compelling public issue. What we've been able to do is to show this is a profound social problem that we as a society have to face. The work that we've done has been able to give voice to a lot of concerns that people have.

How did you decide to shift your focus to flexibility?

By 1999, I looked at the results of our basic research and realized, what we have here is a profound mismatch between the need of workers and the way work is organized into full-time, full-year arrangements. What we've had is a one-size-fits-all workplace and what we're saying is that there needs to be a multisized workplace. Although there can be many ways to realign work, one way that kept coming up was flexibility. The demand for flexibility is very raw and very real. Based on the research, we felt we needed to try to find a way to meet that demand.

How would you like to see the world changed for your two daughters, 15 and 18?

The ``3-2" family of two parents shouldering three jobs -- two paid and one homemaking -- is a fundamental problem. That would be the change I'd like to see in the next 10 years. Most people will continue to have to work full-time, but within that, there could be much greater opportunity to restructure work.

How do you juggle job, travel, marriage, and kids? In particular, how have you managed to take most of August off in recent years?

I set a finite time on the weekends to do work, Saturday mornings or Sunday afternoons. I've also realized that being completely out of contact for a solid amount of time each summer is really important. I try to front-end a lot of the work for the fall in July, then [during August], there are two or three days I am available. I come back not just refreshed, but with new insights.

Do you have any one suggestion for working families?

One of the interesting areas of research Sloan has funded is the work of Robyn Fivush and Marshall Duke at Emory. When children have a rich and deep understanding of their family history, they are more resilient. The message would be that parents have to take time in the midst of everything else going on and the pressure of their lives, to share their family histories. Not only is it fun in the moment, but it has potential consequences for their children's resilience and well-being.

Balancing Acts appears every other week. Maggie Jackson can be reached at maggie.jackson@att.net.