explanation is that women’s family obligations conflict with long hours

of jobs, hampering their advancement into senior organizational

positions. The commonly championed solution has been policies offering

flexible work arrangements designed to mitigate such conflict. Yet

research shows that men, too, experience work-family conflict. Moreover,

work-family policies do little to help women or men’s workplace

advancement, and in fact, often hurt them. In this presentation, Ely

draws from her in depth case study of a global professional service firm

to ask why the belief that work-family conflict lies at the heart of

women’s stalled advancement persists. She explores how this popular

narrative self-perpetuates despite evidence to the contrary, and how

organizations use this narrative as an explanation for women's blocked

mobility partly because it diverts attention from the broader problem of

a long-hours work culture among professionals. Speaker: Robin Ely, Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean, Harvard Business School