ABSTRACT
Brad Harrington, the executive director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family, cautions that some women have simply grown accustomed to making imperfect trade-offs between work and their personal lives adding to the dissonance, stress, and anxiety involving the need to face a constant dilemma or make tough choices. Women seem to prefer intrinsic rewards such as self-development and quality of work-life whereas men value more extrinsic rewards and opportunities to advance up the corporate ladder. In this chapter, the authors use the term Work/Life Integration instead of Work/Life Balance because the latter evokes a binary opposition between work and life. Gendered career paths and gendered workplaces make it difficult for working women to find their paths and ways to success. Historically, the categorization of jobs, the operating model of businesses, and the communication patterns within the workplace were initially reflective of men's lives and situations rather than women's.
