Implementing flexibility is a challenge and may require some "hand-holding", especially for managers who have not gone through their own flexibility experience.

Flexibility - just do it! That's the message I hear from the "converted".  As though managing a flexible workforce were the easiest thing to do, and not the challenge that it is. 

A little acknowledgement that flexible work practices require a new way of thinking about work, and some assistance with making practical changes, would go a long way. 

Yesterday I heard a senior leader express his commitment to embedding flexibility into his business (it was one of Australia's leading banks), his acknowledgement of the demographically driven economic imperatives of flexibility (read here: the increased number of women in the workforce and ageing population) AND an acknowledgement that managers may need some hand-holding when entering this brave new world. What a relief. Now managers in his business can ask for a helping hand. 

When we acknowledge that implementing flexibility is a challenge, especially for managers who have not gone through their own flexibility experience (eg working in a job-share - and frankly, how many people have done that?), we can create a space for a more open conversation about what managers need to implement flexible work practices. 

Women can balance challenging interesting careers with motherhood so long as their employers are willing to look at different arrangements in terms of work practices.

Since joining then workforce in the mid 1980's, I have often experienced the mindsets and assumptions that are barriers to combining work, family and flexibility - often through recruitment processes.

In 1988, I was shocked when in an interview for my first role in HR and I was asked if I planned to have children and what did my husband think of my working if I had a family.

I was saddened when 15 years later in 2003, these questions were asked again. I was being reference checked for my role at Mallesons and a referee was asked if having a young child (Ben) had hindered my efforts or quality of work.  My referee explained that I had  volunteered to go on secondment to London for five months with Ben (who was 2.5 yrs at the time) to work on that major project.

I think they got the message.

And I was really furious (which of course I didn't show at the time) when again this year, yes 2008, I was approached by a search firm about a role and in the first meeting I was asked if was I married, did I have children and ‘How did I make that work in a senior role?"  Why does this still happen? It can only aid as a barrier to working mothers advancing their careers!

Sexual assaults remain disturbingly prevalent, seem to be increasing and the rates of successful prosecution for these offences is declining.

Sexual harassment in the work place is a challenge to which we all must rise if women at going to gain access to any kind of economic equality with men. However, the last decade has seen our basic rights to a safe workplace free from harassment seriously challenged politically, legally and culturally. And as a result the incidence of abuse has skyrocketed.

We know that women still endure constant sexual harassment at work and elsewhere. The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission reported in 2001/02 that there had been a 700 per cent increase in complaints about sexual harassment over the previous ten years.

Sexual assaults remain disturbingly prevalent, seem to be increasing and the rates of successful prosecution for these offences is declining. The same is true of domestic violence, a difficult area in which to obtain precise statistics, but we do know that services such as women's refuges that cater to victims report they have never been busier.

We know women are still fired for being pregnant and they continue to be sacked while on maternity leave. This is a blatant breach of both state and federal anti-discrimination laws yet employers calculate that the risk of being prosecuted is so small that they do it anyway.