Balancing Act

It's fascinating how sometimes a theme seems to emerge between random things that cross your path.

This past week seems to be a lot about balance....

Suppose with the start of a new year there's a lot of people thinking about how to improve, how to get more balance: my twitter feed seems to be dominated by people seeking balance or "helpful" articles on how to get organised, stress less, drink less, eat less.

Then last week up popped the storm surrounding the disparity between the pay of male and female graduates - my legal industry being amongst the culprits.  That seems to be a lot about balance as well, a different type of balance.

Many jumped straight on the bandwagon of presuming it meant that a firm taking on male and female graduates were paying lining the two of them up and employing the male for more.  However, the study, which does have some questions around it, was looking at the median gap.  Now Pete will be horrified at the thought that I am analysing something so mathematical, but to me a difference in the median is demonstrating more that women are being employed in the lower paying graduate positions.  Now being someone who obtained my graduate position in the country (and was employed at the then award rate of $12,500) I can see how that might be happening.  I also know that there graduate wages in the law are now paid more realistically and that there is less of a gap between city and country on graduate wages but I suspect seeing less women in the higher paid areas might still be happening.

If my theory is even partly correct, why are women graduates pushed to that end?  Commentators were suggesting it has nothing to do with family issues as graduates are only 25.  Is it though that employers are cherry picking against those likely to be balancing family demands in the future?  For lawyers, is it because there are many mature-aged female graduates who have other demands competing with what jobs they can accept?

If that wasn't enough to make me feel a little unbalanced, I then got to an item on my to-do-list at work which put me right into the balance zone - been meaning to do it for a while but actually got around to having a go at drafting some family-friendly flexible work guidelines and practices for my own firm (yeah, shoe makers children not shod).  We have a number of support staff working a variety of arrangements and have that area done well.  But for our lawyers?  In drafting (ironcially occurying while Pete took the boys to the pool) I could draw on many, many experiences I have had over the last 7 and a bit years of combining full time work and being a mother to some very little people (including one very sick little girl).  But what is balance?  How do you help someone in that position? Isn't there a lot more we can do?

Load on top of that then the balance of the school holidays.  Having had 6 weeks away from the office this year at RCH (note I said away from the office, wasn't all not working) and so on I ditched my earlier idea of being able to take all of January off and came up with this complicated spreadsheet of sharing the holiday load.  It includes a week of me and Pete working what could only be described as one doing the early shift, one doing the late shift.  Then there was the working from home morning where I discovered our servers remote connection had shut off during Christmas - and it is not back yet!  

Balance, it was getting there.

Despite those hitches I thought we might be right, I even had a chart of all our dinners for January organised, including nominating nights for new recipes.  However this grand plan was depedent upon Raff having some creche time and Remus having some office time .......then the balance was upended by a dose of the chicken pox.

Mentioning this to others, seems there's lots of parents out there doing the holiday shuffle.  I was amazed the other night to hear a talkback radio topic was how are you managing if you are a holiday bachelor/bachelorette - in the city home alone having left the rest of the family down the coast.  Does that actually happen these days?  That seems a world away from most experiences I know

So balance, it is popping up everywhere but I haven't seen too many solutions.  Sometimes I feel like there are a lot of hungry hippos around............. (and I must clean the top of that game, look how smudgy it is)