Love can drive women back into the home

It is hard to decide whether Prof Ciaran O'Boyle's findings on the quality of life experienced by senior managers are genuinely shocking, or just what we all suspected.

Using a measure designed to assess the quality of life of hospital patients, he looked at 23 senior and 110 newly-appointed managers. The senior managers have a lower quality of life than those who are terminally ill, and those with motor neurone disease (MND). The newly appointed managers have a lower quality of life than those with osteo-arthritis and peptic ulcers.

MND is a progressive neurodegenerative disease. It involves weakness and wasting of muscles, causes increasing loss of mobility and difficulties with speech, swallowing and breathing. To date no cure has been found, though a great deal can be done to make a patient more comfortable.

Prof O'Boyle's sample is admittedly small, but for anyone familiar with the world of business it has a horrible ring of truth. For some people business is like engaging in warfare without the inconvenience of mopping up blood.

On Thursday Robert Green's book, 33 Strategies of War, was published. He uses historical events to illustrate principles that he alleges will also work well today, especially in business. Brian Boyd, who interviewed Robert Green for this newspaper, reported that the 33 strategies include: sow uncertainty and panic; dominate while seeming to submit; expose and attack your opponent's soft flank; hit them where it hurts; avoid the snares of group-think; and destroy and crush your enemy.

International Women's Day also fell this week, the day before Green's opus was delivered to the world. This annual event unleashed the usual weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth that women are not represented adequately in politics or senior management.

Might I offer a tentative explanation? Perhaps the fact that women are not as well represented in the ranks of senior managers as they might be is final proof that they are definitely smarter than men.

Somehow, they manage to resist the temptation to achieve a quality of life inferior to someone with MND.

Note, I said smarter, not morally superior to men. Let's have none of this codswallop that, left to themselves, women would work by consensus, restore work-life balance and overcome all that male-generated nastiness. That thesis requires all the tough women like Maggie Thatcher to be explained away as aberrations. Rarely do you hear the more accurate explanation: that, given power, women are just as likely to exploit it as men.

Equally frowned upon, though, is the idea that, given a choice between work that is thinly disguised battle and doing other things, women are likely to choose voluntarily to step back from seeking success in that kind of world.

Naturally, that suggestion drives older feminists wild. Remember Mary Robinson's scolding of women who choose to stay at home? There is an American member of the sisterhood who makes our Mary look positively conservative. At least Mary spoke, however reluctantly, of honouring women's choice to stay at home.

Linda Hirshman, described by that bastion of intellectualism, Good Morning America, as an influential feminist thinker, wants to go much, much further. She wants to ban "choice feminism", that is, honouring women's right to choose where they want to work.

Ms Hirshman, in a long article in American Prospect, is only too willing to boldly go where feminists previously feared to tread.

She writes: "Here's the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided. The family, with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks, is a necessary part of life, but allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government."

Later, in case we still don't get it, she says women who toilet-train their children are no better than the castes who sweep and clean bodily waste in India. Such women have "voluntarily rendered themselves untouchables".

Just a stray thought: who toilet-trained Ms Hirshman? And is she really happy categorising all women who change nappies, including women paid to do so, as untouchables? That should really increase the supply of childcare workers.

What caused Ms Hirshman's rant? She decided to track women whose weddings were recorded in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times in 1996.

At the time of marriage, they included a vice-president of client communication, a gastroenterologist, a lawyer, an editor and a marketing executive. When she interviewed 32 of them in 2004, 90 per cent had had babies, half were not working in the paid workforce and those who were still in paid employment were working part-time in jobs far from their projected career trajectory.

Anecdotal evidence, sure, but borne out by a later survey of 2,000 American mothers, where only 16 per cent wanted to work full-time.

Poor Linda. What galled her the most was that the women were happy. Given that nowadays it is only a small section of society who can afford to make such choices, surely they should not come between Ms Hirshman and her sleep? Ah, but they do, because even women who cannot afford to follow this example are affected by what she calls "regime effect". They aspire to what more privileged women have.

No doubt it would cause Ms Hirshman a cardiac arrest if it were suggested that the women are not so much affected by "regime effect" as by love, mushy as that may sound. Many women today aspire to work outside the home, but not at the expense of losing the unique experience of loving, cherishing and - yes - even cleaning their own children. They are having a regime effect of their own.

More and more men are beginning to look at the office with new eyes, and wondering whether they really want to spend their days engaging in running battles and the rest of the time waiting for the scars to heal.

The real struggle for women today lies in finding ways to contribute to the wider world, while not depriving themselves or their children of the swift-passing, never-to-be-repeated moments of pure joy that make all the frustrations of parenting worthwhile.