Fresh answers to old questions: two views

How can women reach the top in their careers?

Prof Nuria Chinchilla(Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empressa Business School, University of Navarra): "Have your children in your 20s. Why does being a mother hold you back? Because women have tried too hard to act like men, instead of doing what comes naturally. I don't believe in the glass ceiling; it's a concrete ceiling.

"It's nonsense to attempt to climb the ladder when women have this concrete ceiling on their shoulders. Climb one more step and you can't be a good mother any more, because women allow their motherhood to be defined by what men think it should be. This is a mechanistic society that sees people as machines, and you can't integrate parenthood with that.

"Juggling and balancing is yesterday. Women are not helping their situation to improve by attempting to balance work and personal life. The only way to have the time is to have the child. Everything will change once you have the child. We have been mismanaged as women. We have been taught to act as men.

"The role model in the workplace is the man having a 'mother' at home, and it's a lie. If you wait until your 30s to have a child, you are already acting like a man and it is too late. You are already workaholic - an addict to work, a working machine. You are stressed, always running, comparing yourself to others and full of anxiety."

Why don't mothers progress as far as fathers in their careers?

Prof Michael Kimmel(State University of New York, Stony Brook, and author of several books on masculinity, including The Gendered Society, Oxford University Press, 2000): "Men and women are allies, we're not Venus v Mars. We assume that women will have to act just like us, when it's the workplace that has to change. The inflexibility of the working life has resulted in a major conflict for women between family and education and career, but what's interesting is that men are feeling it too. Men have changed in significant ways in the past 40 years. They want to spend time with their families.

"The only way to balance work and family won't be for individuals to change, but to change the way we are working - and technology is on our side. Companies that have responded with off-site working, home-based work and job-sharing are the very thing that has boosted the Irish economy for the past 10 to 15 years.

"At the leading edge are individuals whose houses are coming to look like workplaces - with a study for mom and a study for dad - and workplaces that look like houses, with on-site childcare, restaurants and gyms. Microsoft, IBM and Apple look like summer camps. Mom and dad can go to work, then meet their kids in the middle of the day for a meal and a swim. This is the way of the future. It's not a gender issue, it's a quality-of-life issue."