I ran into an old college friend at a barbecue the other day.  He has done well for himself in life: a great job in the financial sector, an amazing wife who works for a high end law firm, and three beautiful young children.  Naturally, our conversation gravitated toward fatherhood.  I asked him if he’d taken any time off for the birth of his kids.

“I took three months of parental leave for the first one,” he said.*

Another indicative essay over at FORBES by Dr. Taniv Gautam from Global People Tree.  She talks of speaking at a conference on worklife balance when a man got up and shouted:

“To all you women you think you don’t have a choice, it is really us men who don’t have a choice. I have to go out and make sure I earn a living and provide the security for my family. There is no flexibility!!”

 I’ve spent the past few months interviewing working fathers and surveying both working fathers and mothers at two of Vancouver’s most forward thinking companies. I think most of us would agree that there are some dinosaurs out there who still feel that having staff work 70 hours a week is better than 40 hours, and that it stands to reason that no one will have a happy work life balance for such an employer.  But I wanted to see if the pressures that men feel and the attitudes they have are any different when they work for truly progressive employers. 

Both Vancity and Clearly Contacts are Top 100 employers.  Vancity, for example, offers a wage top up to 85% for all new parents for the duration of their parental leave (which is one year in Canada.)  Clearly Contacts, though the world’s largest on-line distributor of glasses and contact lenses, still considers itself a young start up with progressive ideas.  So what would I find at these two places of employment? 

Next week I’ll be releasing the findings of my working fathers report.  For the past few months, I’ve been interviewing and surveying working fathers at two of Canada’s most famously progressive companies to find out how working dads are faring.   One is Vancity, Canada’s largest credit union, who gives millions annually to amazing community projects. They also have some great policies, like topping up the salaries of all parents (moms, dads, adoptive) to 85% of their wage for the duration of their parental leave (up to a year in Canada).  The other is Clearly Contacts.  They are the world’s largest on line distributor of contacts and glasses and they are constantly a “Top 100 Employer” in Canada.  I purposely wanted to target these companies because:

 1. They were progressive enough to recognize that overlooking men’s work life balance is a bad move for business.

Here's another indicator of the work life balance state of men.    According to a British Organization called “Working Families,” men may be less inclined to ask their employers to work flexibly.