The Atlantic - Why Women Can't Have it All

This is an interesting article from The Atlantic, which has "gone viral" amongst working professionals.  It talks about the on-going struggle of achieving work/life balance for women in professional careers who want to have children.  There are obviously common points for men trying to maintain a similar balance, and the challenges are even greater for those in other types of careers who may not have the same level of household financial stability where working/not working is a "choice".  The article also does not discuss women who do not pursue traditional roles (get married, have children, etc).  The overriding theme is that the lack of women in leadership positions (in the public and private sector) leads to policies that make it challenging to balance work and family commitments, so we continue to live in a world with "Old World" gender roles and responsibilities but "New World" demands.

Harvard Business Review - Stop Working All Those Hours

An interesting blog post from the Harvard Business Review that discusses the trade-offs between these two metrics.

Going digital!

In order to be more accessible to our membership and to more effectively communicate with other professional sections, college sections, SWE National, and the public in general, we have decided to go digital with our first blog.  Our section was chartered in 1952, sixty years ago this year.  We have evolved from a newsletter that was sent via mail monthly, to a newsletter that was emailed on a monthly basis, to this "real time" blog. 

We know that topics of interest will include:

• Advertising for upcoming events, either SWE-D or other related organizations / post-event write-ups
• Professional development
• Leadership
• Work / life balance
• Engineering & academia
• Diversity
• Book club book reviews
• SWE business (regarding your membership, regional or national news)
• In the news (posting links to articles of interest)

We'll label the blog posts accordingly to make it easier to find what is of interest to you.  One way this format will differ from our newsletter is that we will save information relating to "life events" of our members for the SWE-D Facebook page, in order to respect the privacy of the individuals involved.

If you have an event that you want to post on here, or an article that would be of interest to our membership, please send it to Publicityswe-d@hotmail.com and include in the subject line "Blog worthy".