Introduction

Women's work takes place within both the public sphere of the workplace and the private sphere of the family home. From the 1960s and into the 1980s the focus was on achieving equitable occupational opportunities, and hard-won battles in these years opened up more and more workplaces and occupations to women. For many women, however, these victories brought new burdens as workplaces did little to accommodate the day-to-day domestic and family responsibilities women carry to a greater degree than their male colleagues. Many organisations also did little in practical terms to address the often hostile, whether subtle or overt, organisational cultures that made many women's work lives difficult. Through the last decades of the twentieth century and in the opening decade of the twenty-first, not only women, individually and collectively, but also governments, organisations and industries and the community generally have come to accept as both fair and necessary women's paid employment. What has remained more problematic is how women are to access equitable employment and career opportunities when governments, organisations and the community still struggle to develop policies and programs to address the complexities that arise when the public and private spheres are no longer separated along strict gender lines. The situation is further complicated when the diversity of family structures is ignored and the punitive nature of many organisational cultures for women is not addressed in meaningful ways. The research presented in this monograph deals with a range of current research issues that explore in various ways the difficulties and dilemmas confronting women---and governments, organisations and the community---as they attempt to address the complexities arising from women's increasingly significant and ongoing presence in the paid workforce: work-life balance, including the benefits and limitations of technology; child care; the impact of children on careers; bullying and harassment; the factors that support and encourage, and those that hamper, organisational change towards more women-friendly/family-friendly workplace practices. Underlying all these issues is the way women are perceived in our society, particularly by those who develop and implement public and organisational policies and programs.