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Brown bag panelists discuss balancing career, family
Posted 9/26/2012 Updated 9/26/2012
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by Lt. Col. Sarah Russ
Air Force Academy Chief Diversity Office
9/26/2012 - U.S. AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. -- The Chief Diversity Office held a brown bag lunch Sept. 21 on a topic of barriers: challenges we face today from balancing career and family lives.
The event, part of an Academy women's initiative, included a five-person panel with Chief Diversity Officer Adis Vila serving as moderator.
The panelists included an Airman who as a single mother had to deploy to Iraq, a firefighter married to another firefighter and taking care of young twin boys, and a U.S. Air Force officer who's married to a Royal Canadian Air Force officer and had to balance her family life and career.
The audience related to the panelists and their personal and professional challenges, as some of them have experienced similar challenges. Some of the questions that arose from the Brown Bag were the following:
How does the panel think women in the military compare to their male colleagues?
Are there glass ceilings?
How have the panel members balanced home and work lives?
How have they seen others do so?
What can leaders do to prepare cadets and balance within our organizations?
What will it take to change Air Force culture?
The idea of the brown bag originated from Lt. Cols. Kristine Swain and Kristi Lowenthal, two instructors with the History Department. They had read two articles, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" by Anne-Marie Slaughter, originally published in The Atlantic, and "The Mommy Track" from The Economist. Both said they were surprised by the candor of the two authors as they publicly acknowledged women's frustration with work and family balance.
Outside their private discussions with working mothers, neither Swain nor Lowenthal had heard high-powered women discuss their yearning for more family time at the expense of work. In fact, the topic is nearly taboo.
The goal of the Chief Diversity Office through the brown bag was to identify the issues most of us face today and share and learn coping skills whether through a network of family, friends and Academy and Air Force resources. The Chief Diversity Office plans to host two brown bags each quarter to enhance Academy personnel's personal and professional development.
The next brown bag, scheduled for October, will focus on training with a panel from the Office of Personnel Management and how employees may take the lead on their own professional development to ensure career progression.
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