When your man asks you to resign, else...

Earlier this month a high school principal in Marakwet turned down a senior job offer in the county government because her husband had asked her to choose between her job and family.

After beating other candidates in a rigorous interview, the woman informed the county officials that she would not be in a position to accept the offer because it would compromise her marriage, so could they please give the position to someone else?

The news item, buried deep inside the papers, rattled human resource managers and women as many wondered whether a spouse, or family in general, could be a hindrance to career progression.

Comments on social media harped on the rather undefined idea of women’s “glass ceiling” — the invisible wall separating them from reaching their peak in careers — while others debated the issue of work-life balance.

What came out clearly, though, is that women are still torn between being communal beings and single-minded careerists. Some women, who admitted that they had been in the same shoes as the Marakwet teacher, said they had gone as far as opting out of formal employment to look after their children and “save their marriages”, or delay matrimony and parenting.

Human resource consultant Amos Otieno says family duties cannot be explicitly blamed for career stagnation — using the word “career” instead of “work” because the former, unlike work, demands dedication — but either informs decisions that affect the other.

Women experience leadership and positions at the top of the pecking order differently; men’s experiences are linear while women’s are characterised by perpetual interruption and exits.

“Work-life balance is a discussion that everyone pursuing a career must think about, particularly for women because, unlike men, they have a ‘shelf life’”, Mr Otieno told Jobs, explaining further that “occupational choice at one point will be influenced by family concerns, both present and anticipated”.

The shelf life Mr Otieno is talking about is founded on the assumption that foundational career building years coincide with women’s fertility, and, true to that statement, several studies on marriage and career advancement have placed women at a disadvantage.

One such study resulted in the report Scaling Back: Dual Career Couple’s Work Family Strategies by sociology professors Penny Becker and Phyllis Moen from Cornell University.

The report, published in the Journal of Marriage and The Family in 1999, highlights three theories in economics and human resource that explain how intimately women experience the work-family conflict.

The human capital theory, for instance, states that marriage is a proxy for stability by which organisation’s allocate wages and status. Therefore, if inferred from this theory, men who are married advance more than single people, but women who are married take lesser demanding jobs that are equally lower paying so as to combine their careers and their families.

That option by women to take lesser paying jobs when there is a promotion, for instance, “is an adaptive strategy”, says Mr Otieno, a modification of roles, resources and relationships by women in a bid to “have it all”. This may explain why there are more women in social sciences and self-employment than men.

Ms Janet Wainaina quit her job as a teacher and went into self-employment in media production, a decision, she says, that was not completely persuaded by her family values, but which allowed her to grow her career and spend time with her family.

Another theory on spousal support states that married men are able to give more resources to their jobs than single men because their wives provide additional support that may not be monetary. The same could not be further from the truth in the case of married women.

This conflict, Mr Otieno says, is brought up by failure of career women to make the right choices for a spouse.

“You choose a life partner whose values on family and gendered roles match up with yours. Otherwise, a spouse can be a hindrance to your growth at work because of lack of support and emotional blackmail, where they ask you to choose between them and your work.”

The final theory, conformance to social expectations, explains how women find themselves being crucified for displaying commonly held traits of executive leaders such as being assertive, confident and independent.

Former Chief Registrar of the Judiciary, Ms Gladys Boss Shollei, comes to mind. Regarded by some of those who have interacted with her as hardworking, focused and sharp-shooting, Ms Shollei’s popularity at the Judiciary is said to have started dipping when fellow women publicly accused her of being rude and arrogant after she asked them to upgrade their studies for the positions they held in the Judiciary.

While it is a commonly held notion that a management position requires these traits, when a woman portrays them they become a sign of gender non-conformity.

Being aware of the challenge, Bilha Mudiri, a senior marketing executive at Vipingo Ridge Real Estate Company, has developed an androgynous interpersonal style with which both male and female colleagues are at peace.

While she is not explicitly aggressive, Ms Mudiri is a biker — considered a very dangerous sport — in an all-men biking group that puts her at ease with men.

“They don’t see me as a vulnerable person who needs protection… some of them are terrified of bikes and they wonder how I am able to do it yet I am a woman,” she says.

In her 2009 report titled Career Advancement and Family Balance Strategies of Executive Women, Ms Souha Ezzedeen, a human resource expert at York University, Canada, examined studies that showed that women with other roles outside motherhood or being wives had higher self-esteem, therefore making them better parents.

Even with the stress that comes with both responsibilities, women with families are also dependable at work and easy to relate to.