The Great Debate UK

Innovation key to workplace progress for women

-Dimitra Manis is senior vice president of talent at Thomson Reuters. The opinions expressed are her own. Reuters is hosting a “follow-the-sun” live blog on Monday, March 8, 2010, International Women’s Day. Please tune in.-

As part of this International Women’s Day celebration, we have been asked to look back over the last ten years and identify what has really changed.

From a personal perspective, the last ten years have been both challenging but fulfilling, with a growing family (two gorgeous daughters), and then changes in my professional life involving moving from Australia to France and then moving to the United States.

I consider myself blessed to have been able to build a life that worked for me both professionally and personally, with real flexibility required both at home and at work.   It is clear that the dialogue over the last ten years has shifted from a notion of “work-life balance” which is fleeting, and always challenging to achieve, to one of ‘work-life integration’, meaning ways to blend your work and life and to create a meaningful experience with both.

It is no surprise that the statistics for women starting their own businesses have taken off in the last 10 years. I also considered starting a business myself with my pastry chef skills. According to Entrepreneur.com, women own 10.6 million businesses in the U.S. alone, and employ 19.1 million workers– that is one in every seven employees.

What I’ve noticed in the last decade is that women are looking for ways to be in control of their diaries and their lives, and progressive employers are those who support them doing so.   I feel fortunate that I have landed somewhere where I can achieve this.

If you look at the definition for “career” in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is defined as:  the course or progress through life.  Fascinating then that the majority of professionals think about careers as work-related, and forget it is life-related as well.