From This Weekend's Boston Globe Magazine

"When the Yahoo CEO banned working from home in February, outrage followed. Yet when a middle-aged male CEO made a similar decision in March, there was barely a whimper."

"Yet because so few people from historically underrepresented groups are in positions of power, Liswood says, we throw our hopes behind the few who rise to the top. There are just 21 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, according to 2012 statistics from DiversityInc., as well as six black CEOs, seven Asian, and six Latino. When one member of an underrepresented group succeeds, her recipe for it becomes one-size-fits-all.

So how do we stop overloading these leaders with our hopes? By making more of them. Says Liswood: “Once we get the critical mass of O’s in a room full of X’s, not every O has to represent all O’s.” Only then will we stop pushing heroic expectations — feminist and otherwise — on people who never asked to be heroes for the cause in the first place.

Substantial changes to the American workplace will never come because one CEO, male or female, issues some sweeping edict. Instead, they’ll come office by office, with the rank and file pushing for greater workers’ rights (for both genders). They’ll come from challenging companies to accept that work-life balance has tangible benefits for the bottom line."

Read the full article here.