Google Docs is great, but not for everything

I just watched this on the Google Docs login page and it made me laugh.

Fathers and the work life balance

One for the dads:

Studies on work-life balance have usually focused on women, helping to create a stereotype of the guilt-ridden mother, who professes to be cutting corners in every segment of her life. The Fathers, Family and Work report published tomorrow attempts to redress this emphasis on women, looking at men's attitudes to work and family life, and finding fathers equally under pressure.

More in The Guardian.

Useful how-to on using wikis in business

One of the best web tools available to businesses for enabling teamwork and collaboration is the wiki. Few things speak more to staying in the flow of one’s work than just clicking “Edit This Page” where you see something that needs to be written or re-written. Though Wikis have been around since the 90s, their potential for business collaboration has made them more popular in the business world over the past few years.

Read more at Mashable.

Where I lay my laptop, that's my office

Here is an idea we did have first. Desksurfer.com, an initiative that offers laptop-pounding entrepreneurs a quiet place to drop in for a couple of hour's worth of work between meetings. They have access to a comfortable desk, Internet, printers, scanners and, hopefully, coffee for just £5 an hour. Interestingly, the company appears to act primarily as an online intermediary between offices with a few desks to space and nomadic workers, rather than entire offices for rent by the hour. My personal concept would be slightly different, to offer space for drop-in workers, but combine this with added-value services, such as lawyers, translators, editors, graphic designers and coaches offering personalised services on an ad-hoc basis.

Any takers?

Oh, and here is one blog on the similar topic of co-working in Ireland, which links to another.

Women left exhausted by war for equality

"Feminist icon" Erin Pizzey claims that women have lost more than they have gained in their battle for equality. From the Daily Mail:

"There's been a subterranean war between men and women which has been won by women and they don't actually understand what they've lost. I don't think anybody foresaw that what a freedom of choice would do is imprison many. Many women, they don't have a choice now, they have to work, they have to work hard, and I just see an exhausted generation of women trying to do it all."

This might be a recurring theme in the years to come, particularly post recession, when more women may step back from the workplace and/or become involved in Internet driven community projects.

Two-thirds of wives raising a toddler also go to work

Nearly two-thirds of married women hold down a job while bringing up a toddler, official figures revealed yesterday.

It means the proportion of working mothers with children under the age of five has doubled in the past 25 years.

Critics of the Government said state benefits lavished on single parents at the expense of married and co-habiting couples are to blame for the trend.

The figures were published by the Office for National Statistics, based on findings from a detailed survey of 160,000 homes.

They showed that 62 per cent of married or co-habiting mothers with a child under five had either a full or part-time job in 2007.

Earlier estimates have suggested the proportion of mothers with young children who go out to work was around 31 per cent in the early 1980s.

This figure passed the 50 per cent mark in the late 1990s and hit 55 per cent in 2003.

The latest figures also show that around three-quarters of married mothers with one or two children under 16 go out to work - 76.8 per cent of those with one child and 73 per cent of those with two.

Mothers with larger families are less likely to have a job.

Fifty-eight per cent of mothers with three children and 40 per cent of those with four are in employment.

Surveys have repeatedly shown that many working mothers with young children would prefer to stay at home.

But economic pressures, they say, mean they have little choice but to take a job.

The extent of the need for mothers to work was underlined by Government poverty figures last week.

They showed that more than half of children living below the poverty line come from two-parent families in which only one parent is in work.

Typically, these are families in which the mother has chosen to stay at home to bring up her children.

Daily Mail Wednesday May 13th 2009

What mothers really think about work

Some rather scary statistics from the Daily Mail:

• Survey of 5,000 women,
• 93% mothers feel stressed by demands made on their lives.
• Nine out of ten mothers who work full-time say life is much harder than they imaged.
• Two-thirds felt their stress transferred to their family.
• 4% of women with a baby or young child would choose to work full-time.
• 31% would rather have a part-time career or job share, 22% would prefer to work from home and 43% would like to be a 'full time mum' .
• 37% of working couples share jobs equally around the home, 3% of men do more ironing and washing than their partners.
• 78% would 'quit their current job tomorrow given the chance'. 10% more of British women are working compared to a generation ago = 8% rise in the use of nurseries last year.
• Mums between ages of 30 and 34 make up the highest proportion of mothers, the number of women over 35 giving birth has tripled since the 80's.