An Ethic of Care

The authors' highlights parallels between their private experiences of care and their public experiences of leadership. The authors' then relates the notion of leading with integrity to a desire for greater wholeness, by reconnecting some of their experiences across the so-called work-life boundary. Using examples from their own family and professional lives, they create a virtuous circle in which the emotional and decision-making dynamics of both care and leadership can be mutually illuminating. In contemporary society, care has strong, often unconscious, associations with gender. Feminist scholars have elaborated an ethic of care to differentiate between feminine moral development, which is grounded in relational attachments, and masculine moral development, which draws on rules-based, abstract justice. The enduring popularity of the notion of work-life balance sustains the idea that human lives are divided into two spheres—the public and the private. The public is the space for social identity, performance and achievement, whereas the private is space for personal identity, relationship and belonging.